[chefpastry]

How many people have installed PATA drives in your Mac Pros? Are there any ill effects? I'm considering installing one and just want to know if there are any caveats. TIA

[phantomdragonz]

I have done it a lot, just to transfer files... but it works, make sure the drive is on "cable select" and go for it... if you want to mount it permanently then you want a adapter to go from 5.25? to 3.5" or something...


Zach

[chefpastry]

Do you know if a drive in the second optical bay is bootable? Can it be used for Bootcamp? If so, this can be an easy way to resolve the slow SATA performance problems Mac Pro users face when using Bootcamp. Thanks for the info.

[Xyrrus]

Originally Posted by chefpastry

Do you know if a drive in the second optical bay is bootable? Can it be used for Bootcamp? If so, this can be an easy way to resolve the slow SATA performance problems Mac Pro users face when using Bootcamp. Thanks for the info.

I have an 80gig PATA drive in the optical bay that I'm using for Boot Camp with no issues. In theory, putting both the optical drive and a HDD on the same channel will reduce performance, but IMO 7200 RPM drives can't push out data fast enough for it to really matter.

I haven't tried booting OS X off it or anything, but (before I formatted it NTFS) OS X saw it with no problem.

I would at this point recommend against adding an SATA drive to the optical bay if you're going to use it for boot camp - I haven't been able to get windows to see any drive off the 5/6th SATA ports on the motherboard (OS X sees them just fine)

-Xy

[chefpastry]

Thanks for the info. I'll give Bootcamp a shot this weekend.