Just found 2 additional SATA ports in my Mac Pro!

[leggy]

So anyway, poking around with a torch (as you do) inside my Mac Pro, I just found 2 additional SATA connectors on the motherboard! They're tucked away and not easy to get to but it's definitely possible to hook up a couple of cables to them and after doing a bit of reading it seems that other people have done this successfully. I already have 4 internal drives in the machine so I need to put two additional drives in some kind of external housing. Looking around most of the 2xsata external cases have esata connectors so I'm wondering if I can just buy a couple of 1m sata to esata connector cables, run these from the motherboard to the external enclosure and hook up the drives running at their full 3.0Gb/s speed? Any thoughts on good, quiet 2x sata enclosures?

If anybody is interested there's a ton of info here:
http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/Mac_Pro_Ext_SATA_Case_Kit.html

Cheers,

Rob

[leggy]

Just remembered that I have a couple of these drive enclosures in the cupboard from a previous DAW build http://www.techtastic.ca/reviews3/smartdrive.html so I suppose I can just run standard SATA cables out to them? No room in the Mac to mount them but they should be fine externally somewhere and presumably cooler too. Just depends on how noisy the drives are in them.

[leggy]

Ah but how to power them? Might have to use esata enclosures after all.

[leggy]

More info here: http://www.newertech.com/Static/articles/article_macenstein_eSATA.html

[TAFKAT]

Rob,

I lot of 3rd party external HD enclosures come with an eSATA header plate, which you simply connect to the internal SATA ports , and then connect the external enclosure to.

You should also be able to buy the headers seperately if need be.

Safer than having an open unmounted SATA HD spinning outside of the case

:009:

Quick edit, Doh, just read you last post... , yep, thats the header plate..:wink:

[leggy]

Hey Vin,

Thanks. Not quite sure how to tackle it yet. There are so few pci slots on these bloody machines that I'd prefer to reserve the remaining slot for either a proper esata card for more drives (!) or possibly a uad2 so I'm going to try and mount these 2 drives internally where the second optical drive goes. I might be able to knock something together from bits that I have lying around or I've found a mounting bracket for about $60 if I can't manage it myself. Then I just need a power splitter cable. Absolutely no room at all to do anything inside which should be fun :) Of course I'll probably go back to a pc in the not too distant future so no point in shelling out a fortune but the size of my sample libraries is just getting out of hand and I have quite a bit of stuff waiting to be installed due to lack of drive space!

Hope you're well mate,

Rob