MacPro (Cheese Grater) HDDs

Mac
#1

G’day,

Just a curiosity at this point…

I have plans to put 1 or 2 SSD HDDs in my MacPro 5,1 via PCIe card hopefully before the year is out.

But what about the 4 SATA II bays? At the minute I just have whatever drives were laying around when I bought the machine (1TB - 4TB, all 5400rpm), but I rather like the idea of finding some 7200’s to pop in instead.

Then I was reading about the limitations of SATA II… and got terribly confused as to what actually is the “best” option, without going for something that sounds better but wont actually perform as expected due to the hardware’s limitations…???

Anyone have some pointers on this?

Thanks

cosmic

#2

I ordered two SATA III pcie cards for my 2 RAID 0 SSDs (250GB Samsung 850 Evos). Not only can I not tell the difference versus the bays (or the onboard SATA connector you can run up to the optical bay), when I ran the black magic’s disk speed test, it turned out using the bay connectors was actually faster. I don’t know if I bought crappy cards because they are only 1x and they needed to be 4, 8, or 16 or something to get true speed, or if the limitations of the 3,1 just don’t let me get any real benefit besides being able to cram even more harddrives into the case. And at this point I’m wondering if my power problems have been because I’ve been shoving too much in there already.

#3

No issue using any SATA drive in the bays. They all down clock SATA if needed. Only catch can be the bigger drives have different screw mounts! (i.e. 6TB & 8TB WD Reds). I ordered these to use them and they are awesome (and support old and new drives).

BTW, unless you already have the SSDs, you should make sure you go for NVMe drives given they just got boot support in 10.14.1 DP3!!! I’m booting my 5,1 off a 2TB Samsung 960 Pro and it’s glorious. :tada: We’re talking like 1400MB/s!!!

#4

I have a 1Tb Samsung NvME drive on HS off a dual core 4.1. It’s pretty awesome but even better news its natively supported in Majove now

1 Like
#5

I just don’t want to pay for the latest n greatest if the 5,1 can’t actually appreciate it. I figured a bare 7200 drive shouldn’t cost “too” much these days, but judging by eBay, they still aren’t exactly “cheap”.

#6

Well, if you’re interested in cheap quality 7200 RPM hard drives, I’ve replaced 4 x 4TB Toshiba X300 hard drives with some 12TB enterprise drives… They’re 2 years 8 months old and have only been used to backup data, not as workhorses.

$80 each + postage

#7

Hi, if cosmichobo doesn’t take up the offer, I will, to upgrade my RAID5.