Installing a Samsung 840EVO SSD into a Mac Pro 3,1

[ralniv]

You should consider adding a PCI-e card with SATA-III (6 Gb/sec) and connecting your Samsung EVO to that. The SATA slots in your MP 3,1 are SATA-II (3 Gb/sec). I use the OWC Accelsior S, but there are other options out there. I'd be happy to run benchmarks and compare against folks running EVO's on the MP SATA-II ports.

 

[flowrider]

^^^^The top two PCIe slots in a cMP 3,1 are PCIe spec 1.0 which will limit the thruput of an SSD on a PCIe card. Slot 2 is PCIUe spec 2.0 and will allow a 2 lane card like the Apricorn Velocity Solo x2 to run at full speed.

Lou

 

[ReanimationLP]

I simply plugged in my 512GB Toshiba SSD drive into one of the two hidden SATA ports on the mainboard behind the fan cage in my 3,1. I also installed a SATA DVD-RW I had lying around as well into it. I tucked the SSD actually into the side of the optical drive cage (you can see it sticking out where the handle is to grab the cage out). It's SATA 3Gb/s only, but then again this SSD is only SATA 3Gb/s (it's the same one they sold with the Mac Pro as OEM)

Also dropped in 32GB of FBDIMMs from eBay. They don't have the big Apple heatsinks but they are working quite nicely. (I put some small RAM heatsinks I had onto the core of each for some extra cooling.)