Here is the TeraTrio Tray, a 3D printable object for enthusiasts who want to solve the problem of large SATA storage in the Mac Pro 2019-2023 in the most economical way. It's free and if you don't have access to a 3D printer yourself, you can easily print it at your local 3D print shop or the library.
You will notice that the more expensive commercial solutions have an "L" profile on the top that fixes the entire tray to the case in case of transport. It would be quite inconvenient, if not impossible, to solve it well in 3D printing with plastic, but in practice it turned out to be unnecessary. For this reason, I made slightly deeper grooves and when the tray is fixed on the back side, it will be strong enough that there will be no movement.
In any case, before mounting the discs in the tray, try to position it while it is empty and make sure that all 6 mounting points have entered their slots. The studs must go all the way in. It may take some force, but be careful, our Mac Pros are precious machines!
And of course, anyone with common sense will now ask the question of cooling all of this. The pleasant surprise is that the Mac Pro has a really good cooling solution and the drives are even within factory specifications at default settings. If you live in a really hot place, you can always boost the cooling a bit via the excellent Macs Fan Control program which I highly recommend.
The gap between the disks is enough to leave the cooling at factory settings.
The next extremely important thing for the longevity of the drives is that they are positioned straight on all axes. There is an allowable factory deviation, but try to be as precise as possible about this. It is important to know that the three top studs on the Mac are adjustable!
The tilt occurs because all the materials from which the 3D print is made have different elasticity. When the tray is loaded with more than 2 kg of hard disks, certain deformation will normally occur. So first roughly adjust the top three studs on an empty tray, and then through some trial and error make the adjustment when the tray is loaded with discs.
It takes a little time and patience, but I can tell you from experience that it is possible to adjust them almost perfectly.
There is one more detail that is not absolutely necessary, but is welcome - these are small rubber shock absorbers that are normally used to mount mechanical hard drives. They will reduce vibrations and possible noise. I personally had them in stock from various old computers, but I believe they can be easily obtained online.
The Mac Pro only has two SATA channels on the motherboard. Some people solve this bottleneck by getting a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter that connects to the internal USB port, but that doesn't seem like an elegant solution to me.
A true geek will always connect a SATA drive directly to the SATA bus without a converter. I had two solutions ready that I bought for my old Mac Pro (5,1). The first is the Debroglie SATA 3 PCI card (€20 on AliExpress), which brings two SATA channels, but also space for two 2.5" disks. The second solution is a separate Tishric SATA controller with as many as 6 channels (€25 also on AliExpress). As I don't need more than 50 TB at the moment, I chose Debroglie because I could add an existing SATA SSD to that card, which I use for less important stuff. In this scenario you will need a SATA extension cable.
But the connection task doesn't end there! All these disks also require power. Of course, you guessed it, Apple would have done better if they had used industry standard power connectors. However, they use the "mini" form of the connector (probably for the sake of aesthetics) which, along with them, is still only used by HP on its workstations. A set of such cables is sold by specialized Apple dealers for $200! Be economical, order the same for Hewlett-Packard workstations from AliExpress for just a couple of euros.
And another hint for those who want to go to extremes: if you put 4 rubber feet on the bottom of the TeraTrio Tray and two on the back to provide distance from the motherboard, the whole thing fits on the bottom of a Mac Pro machine, on top of MPX module, provided you don't have a full-length PCI card! With the aforementioned Tishric SATA controller with 6 channels, you can instantly have 132 TB if you choose popular Toshiba's 22 TB drives.
With the new generation of Seagate Exos M 36 TB drives, we can reach 216 TB in just 3.5" hard drives. They announced that a 60 TB model will be released soon. That means 360 TB in cheap drives inside the Mac itself! However, if price is not an issue, you can buy 3.5" SATA SSDs designed for server farms. Currently, the largest is the Nimbus Data ExaDrive DC with a capacity of 100 TB, but the price is such that I don't want to write it here.
Now that we've come this far, let's go all the way! In the spirit of "Hold my beer..." we can theorize that if we stick to cheap solutions with classic hard drives and add the theoretically possible 136 GB of SSD capacity, both internally and via PCI slots, we arrive at 0.5 PB (yes, petabyte!) of internal capacity for this Mac. Not bad for a desktop workstation that is now affordable even for enthusiasts.
If someone had told me back when I had my first Macintosh (Centris 610) that one day I would be able to have a Mac at home with two terabytes of RAM and half a petabyte of storage, I would have thought it was some crazy science fiction story!
I wish other DIY enthusiasts good luck and I will be available here for any questions and doubts!
