Mac Pro SCSI, SAS and SATA Question
Hey Guys-
[Tell me if you think I should post this on a forum elsewhere]
I'm thinking of buying a new Mac Pro and I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice on non-apple-sanctioned hard drive installations.
Up until now, every main machine i've had has been a Dual Xeon custom PC. Don't ask why, I don't know. I'm considering a Mac Pro b/c after an EDU discount they are cheaper than one would cost to build!
My main question is here: I currently have a 15K RPM SCSI-320 73GB hard disk as my OS disk. I'm addicted and I love it... its fast and reliable, everything I could ask for. I want a similar setup in my new computer: a 15K RPM drive with cheap SATA and External drives for upgrades.
The SAS setup is too expensive, mainly because of the $800 RAID card and the $800 drive.
Here are my questions:
1) Assuming I find somewhere to mount it (2nd 5.25" drive?), could I put a Ultra-320 card in and use my current 15K RPM drive? What card would you use?
2) Is it possible to install 3rd party SAS drives in the Mac Pro?
3) Is there any way to modify the computer to use the hard drive caddies for both SAS and SATA? This is possible with PCs, Apple says no, has anyone fooled around with it?
Any advice is much appreciated!
[Tell me if you think I should post this on a forum elsewhere]
I'm thinking of buying a new Mac Pro and I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice on non-apple-sanctioned hard drive installations.
Up until now, every main machine i've had has been a Dual Xeon custom PC. Don't ask why, I don't know. I'm considering a Mac Pro b/c after an EDU discount they are cheaper than one would cost to build!
My main question is here: I currently have a 15K RPM SCSI-320 73GB hard disk as my OS disk. I'm addicted and I love it... its fast and reliable, everything I could ask for. I want a similar setup in my new computer: a 15K RPM drive with cheap SATA and External drives for upgrades.
The SAS setup is too expensive, mainly because of the $800 RAID card and the $800 drive.
Here are my questions:
1) Assuming I find somewhere to mount it (2nd 5.25" drive?), could I put a Ultra-320 card in and use my current 15K RPM drive? What card would you use?
2) Is it possible to install 3rd party SAS drives in the Mac Pro?
3) Is there any way to modify the computer to use the hard drive caddies for both SAS and SATA? This is possible with PCs, Apple says no, has anyone fooled around with it?
Any advice is much appreciated!
Comments
Hey Guys-
[Tell me if you think I should post this on a forum elsewhere]
I'm thinking of buying a new Mac Pro and I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice on non-apple-sanctioned hard drive installations.
Up until now, every main machine i've had has been a Dual Xeon custom PC. Don't ask why, I don't know. I'm considering a Mac Pro b/c after an EDU discount they are cheaper than one would cost to build!
My main question is here: I currently have a 15K RPM SCSI-320 73GB hard disk as my OS disk. I'm addicted and I love it... its fast and reliable, everything I could ask for. I want a similar setup in my new computer: a 15K RPM drive with cheap SATA and External drives for upgrades.
The SAS setup is too expensive, mainly because of the $800 RAID card and the $800 drive.
Here are my questions:
1) Assuming I find somewhere to mount it (2nd 5.25" drive?), could I put a Ultra-320 card in and use my current 15K RPM drive? What card would you use?
2) Is it possible to install 3rd party SAS drives in the Mac Pro?
3) Is there any way to modify the computer to use the hard drive caddies for both SAS and SATA? This is possible with PCs, Apple says no, has anyone fooled around with it?
Any advice is much appreciated!
Out of order :-p :
SAS uses keying to make sure that while you can connect sata drives to a sas cable/plug, it doesn't work the other way around, so you'd have to modify/replace the existing connectors.
A newer 10k or even 7200k SATA drive on the SATA2 bus is most likely going to be faster than using your old U320 drive and controller (higher HD platter densities, particularly recently, SATA2 being as fast as 320 for most uses, etc).
You *can* mount a drive in the lower optical bay (I have one in there right now, hooked up to one of the spare SATA ports on the motherboard), but I doubt the machine would boot from your 320 controller anyway, or if there is a 320 controller out there that would work booting osx on the mac pro (though on that score I could be wrong).
As for my overall take on it... 2 7200.10 seagates (soon to be 2 es.2s) in RAID0 is pretty damn fast, and it works well for me (I have my home directory on another pair of drives in raid1 for redundancy for my data). I imagine it would most likely for you too. upgrading to 10k rpm drives would *probably* be faster, but most of them have smaller caches and less platter density, so maybe not. I imagine you might be pleasantly surprised with the speed of a pair of decent drives in raid0, or even a single, perp recording drive with a big cache on sata2.
The other concern to *me* (maybe not you) there is sound. One of the reasons other than price that I liked the mac pro over building my own was the noise level. It's a very quiet machine, and my 7200.10s are rather quiet drives. Drop a much louder drive in there and you lose that advantage of the machine. OTOH, if this machine were sitting at the machine room at work I wouldnt give a damn, but in my room at home it makes a difference.