Desire to upgrade MP 5,1 - advice?

[zayaso]

Sorry - I should have explained further.
I will use my existing 6pin to the 6pin on the card, and use the second 6pin with a 6pin to 8pin converter cable for the 8pin on the card.

My question is if it needs to be direct ends or in the case of a 6pin to 8pin splitter cable is it ok to use as long as I only use 2 of the 3 connections on the splitter cable?

 

[MacVidCards]

Sorry - I should have explained further.
I will use my existing 6pin to the 6pin on the card, and use the second 6pin with a 6pin to 8pin converter cable for the 8pin on the card.

My question is if it needs to be direct ends or in the case of a 6pin to 8pin splitter cable is it ok to use as long as I only use 2 of the 3 connections on the splitter cable?

the one with card will work but you need to use the end WITHOUT the brown wire.

 

[zayaso]

MVC- I "see" now what you meant with "real Apple end". I went to Micro center and they had a 6 pin to 8 pin PCI E power cable, but the ends were fatter. I removed my existing 6-6 pin cable from my MP and took it with me to compare ends. Drats. Order from internet time.

 

[MacVidCards]

MVC- I "see" now what you meant with "real Apple end". I went to Micro center and they had a 6 pin to 8 pin PCI E power cable, but the ends were fatter. I removed my existing 6-6 pin cable from my MP and took it with me to compare ends. Drats. Order from internet time.

Flowrider gave you the answer a few posts back, you just didn't understand what he was telling you.

 

[zayaso]

Not being experienced with the inner cable workings of the MP- yep, I missed the obvious size difference of the connectors on the links Lou provided(Apple mini PCI-E), to the connectors sold at computer parts store (PC standard size), until I went in person with my cable in hand.
I ended up purchasing an external power supply unit- a Thermaltake 500 W PSU to power up the card and test it works in my system. Power works, I cannot get my card to be recognized by my system- I will start a thread to address that aspect.
Thank you all.

 

[zayaso]

...

Make sure you get:

http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_ID=189&ParentCat=420

This cable will allow you to use your existing drive bays running at 6G speeds.
...

Stjames70-
I might not be able to use the Velocity Solo X2 PCI-E as I had intended... I have a non-flashed GTX 780 and when rebooting from my Win 7 bootcamp, I cannot use the option-boot sequence to interrupt startup and select my OS X due to no screen.
I don't know how this card works, could you educate me? Does it provide 6gbs of throughput to the HDD drive bays?

 

[stjames70]

Areca Cards

So my set up with the previous generation 1882ix was:

Four 1TB Crucial M500s on each of the MPs original bays, four 1TB Crucial M500s on a DX4 carrier (http://www.transintl.com/dx4-for-mac-pro-2009-2010-no-drives.html) and two 1TB M500s on the 2nd empty optical bay.
The drives on the optical bay are actually my boot drive and VM drives -- I don't use bootcamp, but I assume you could set up one of your drives to boot OSX and the other your bootcamp partition. The eight 1TB drives on the standard bays and DX4 are all set up as a RAID 1+0. I am slightly paranoid about data loss, and my Areca 1882ix card also has one external port to which I have hooked up an external RAID 1+0 hard drive array. This external RAID array I use as a backup and it can also be booted from.

The only thing you have to be aware of when you set up these arrays is that the logical drives cannot be greater than 2TB if you expect to be able to boot from them. I didn't have this problem with my Promise R6 array connected to my iMac, but this Areca card does not seem to support larger than 2TB boot drives.

As to your question, the HDD drive bays will support whatever speed your RAID card supports (so yes, it will support 6gbps throughput).

I am not sure what you are using your computer for, but with this set up you will definitely have a computer with very little I/O bottlenecks.

I should say that money was not so much a concern on my end -- this server was built for my office -- speed and reliability were the primary concerns.