Mac Pro optical drive bays as HDD or SSD slot?

[gieppetto]

Hi All,

I've been thinking... could the Mac Pro's ODD bays accomodate a hard drive enclosure thing the same way the current MBP line can? Would that be a possibility for 2.5" drives? Could make for some pretty interesting RAID 6-ish combos.

Thanks for any info, I searched around but couldn't find an answer.

 

[DeeEss]

Hey,

Yes you are right and it's a popular move to do so. I have removed my ODD (there you go Nano ) and have placed two SSD's in both Sata connections. So I run 2 SSD's in Raid 0 and then the 4 Drive Bays I have a 4 Disk Mechanical Drive Raid 0 setup.

6 drive Raid 0 sounds amazing though I believe the Mac Pro bandwidth is saturated at 3. Someone here for sure will know the answer to that. Also I thikn you then need a RAID card. Again someone else can answer that for sure though.

 

[odinsride]

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MM35A52CMB/

I have one of these. It will let you mount two 3.5" drives in the optical bay. The specific model I linked also includes a mounting bracket to put a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" slot, so you basically mount the 2.5" inside of another mounting adapter.

 

[sammyman]

I can't figure out how to plug in the 2nd SSD. Do I have to unplug the Super Drive to accomplish this? I only see the 1 cable for SSD, and the 2nd cable goes to the Superdrive. Am I missing something?

 

[derbothaus]

Nope. You are not missing anything. You need to not use the DVD drive if you want 2 SSD's in there.