Older Mac Pro Frying Drives in Bay 1

[JKingman]

Howdy...

I have an older Mac Pro (2008) that I took home from work (it was out of Warranty and kept eating hard drives). On the upside, it was replaced with a brandy new one at work. On the downside, it has since eaten two more drives at home. The 1TB TM drive (Slot 3) appears unaffected.

The questions:
1) Is there any issue (or settings change besides clearing NVRam) that would prevent me from putting the boot disk on slot 3 and a TM disk on 4?

2) Has anyone seen this happen before? Any thoughts on what causes it? I can't even pull those (now failed) drives and evaluate them with another machine - they're totally fried

Thanks!

 

[juanm]

You can put the boot drive in any bay you want.
One thing you could do is get a PCI-Express SATA card (or RAID) and connect your hard drives to it. It would bypass all the apparently defective SATA+power connexions.
Have you tried replacing the circuitry on the dead hard drives? If you buy a similar hard drive (the exact same model) depending on the model, you can replace the board and rescue your data.

 

[JKingman]

Thanks Juanm,

I've done the replacement daughterboard trick before (no joy). But there wasn't a lot of data on there that wasn't already in a TM backup anyway.

I like the SATA card idea - may be a good path to follow. Thanks again

J