I thought you could only fit four drives total in a Mac Pro? Not anymore.Dual Xeon Hackintosh CPU Upgrade(Dell T7600)Dell Precision 5750 u0026 XPS17 Rare Case of Laptop. Wait a minute — that adds up to five drives. The eSATA port will allow us to quickly backup our media on external drives when we need to. Plus, we are installing an eSATA port. RAM usage shows that while rendering, Resolve uses 3GBs more RAM on the 16GB model, which would be expected but still doesn’t really improve performance.We are building a Mac Pro with one very fast system drive and an internal RAID system with four SATA drives. Rendering in the background shows just a slight advantage for the 16GB version with it finishing just a few seconds ahead of the 8GB model, but that is even almost too close to even tell.A standard 500GB 7,200-rpm hard drive in bay 1, a 23-inch Apple Cinema HD Display. You're a photographer, graphic designer, video editor. The smaller 13-inch screen doesn't give you quite the amount of workspace as the 16-inch model above, but it's still gorgeous, with support for the P3 color gamut - essential for most professional filmmakers.PRO.The only downside is that eSATA is not hot swappable. ESATA is one of the latest external interfaces and is about three times faster than USB 2.0 and Firewire 800. Great, we will use one of these to connect the fifth drive.Did you think I was going to let the second internal SATA connector go to waste? I’ve always wanted an eSATA plug on my Mac. Luckily there are two internal SATA connectors just below the optical drives on the logic board, and they are not being used. This is where we will install the fifth drive. Unless you ordered two DVD recorders with your Mac Pro the bottom bay is empty.
With a name like VelociRaptor it has got to be a screamer. This 300GB drive spins at a whopping 10,000 RPM and is said to be one of the fastest around. You can decide to get faster drives and will surely exceed my RAID speeds if you do.For the system drive (Macintosh HD) I decided on the 3.5” Western Digital VelociRaptor. They are not the fastest terabyte drives out there but they are less than $90 each. Edit a pdf file for free on a macCheck with Apple and or do your research before commencing. I would think that installing the fifth drive in the optical bay might void your warranty with Apple. This allows you to use the much faster eSATA external drives available today.Before we go on, remember I cannot be responsible if you damage your computer while attempting to modify it. This cable connects to the internal SATA connector on the logic board and gives you an eSATA in the back of your Mac Pro, which fits in one of the PCI card slots. A 10” internal 7-pin to 7-pin SATA cable and a SATA power adapter cable, which has a 4-pin male power connector on one end and a 15-pin SATA power connector on the other.Newer Technologies makes the eSATA extender cable. Open the latch and remove side access panel. You might get away with formatting them after you install them into the slots, but I’ve never had four drives simultaneously need initializing.Disconnect all cables and power cord on your Mac Pro. They usually have Windows formatting from the factory. You can also format the 4 drives that are going into the internal slots. Use “Macintosh HD” as the source and the 300GB VelociRaptor as the target disk. Continue at your own risk.First you must clone your system drive. If you were able to clone the VelociRaptor successfully you should get a good start-up.The four drives should come up as separate drives and if you formatted them before installing them they should be ready to RAID.Open Apple’s Disk Utility and set-up your RAID. I happened to use the top SATA connector.Route it all the way to the rear and insert into the PCI slot.Connect the 10” SATA/SATA cable to the remaining SATA connector and route it up through the front of the optical bay – follow the other cables that are there.Also connect the 4 pin power cable to the piggybacked IDE power cord that connects to your DVD recorder.Follow the instructions that came with the Noiseblocker bracket and install the VelociRaptor in the bottom optical bay.Now it’s time to connect everything back and install the fans and all else.Hold your breath. Slide them out, attach a SATA drive slide them back in, genius!Don’t slide them back in yet, just install them in their brackets for know and leave them on you workspace.Carefully remove and disconnect the optical bay.After removing the processor cover (it’s held by magnets) and the fan, install the eSata extender as shown in the instruction that came with it. I love Apple for this one these brackets are great. Please follow it carefully.Pull out the four drive brackets. Hard Drive For Video Editing Pro Software RAID RunningRun it and your done.Lets see what kind of speeds we’re getting now:The AJA system test shows some screaming badass results for a software RAID running average speed SATA drives. Click on Options, I used 256K. Make sure you select Mac OS Extended, and under type, select striped RAID set. Select RAID and drag all four into the window. ![]()
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