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PSA: OWC selling drive sleds for new 6+TB hole pattern

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brentsg

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Oct 15, 2008
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I've been keeping an eye on this and hadn't seen it mentioned. OWC is now stocking drive sleds for 2009-2012 Mac Pros that will accommodate the latest 6+TB hard drives.

I have a new Seagate 8TB Archive drive and just ordered a couple of the sleds if anyone wants to wait to see how that works out.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MPRODBKTLG6/
 
I'm with sarthak. I don't have a window in the Mac Pro or anything, but Apple makes a great looking system and the blue looks weird. Plus they're kinda expensive - when I put SSDs into my 4,1 I bought newerTech AdaptaDrive sleds that screw into the stock trays, and they were only $15/each instead of $25+ for OWC's. Looks just like a hard drive.

In this case, though, if you can't physically fit a hard drive onto the old sled, it appears to be well worth the price and it's nice that they're colored like the stock ones.
 
Just got these. They do have screw holes. Quality looks nice. Pretty much like the original. Comes with rubber gaskets in all 6 holes.

Downside, is that the sleds don't seat in as well as the originals. Perhaps because of where the screw holes are, you really have to push down on the front to make sure the rear of the drive actually plugs into the SATA port. That in itself is no big deal, once you know/figure it out.

The other downside is it introduces a rattle. When the drives access I hear a loose metal cage like rattle. Annoying. I've retightened the screws as much as reasonable, and tried different lots, but still get the occasional rattle, which just is beyond annoying. It's a bit annoying how such a simple thing can go wrong. I wonder if these guys ate their own dog food here. Anyway, $100 down the drain...
 
UPDATE: After pulling out the rubber gaskets, reseating them, re-screwing the drive in, and moving the drive to another bay, it seems to have gotten rid of the rattle. Hopefully that solves it. Good luck to others giving this a try.
 
UPDATE 2:. So it still has an occasional rattle under load, at seemingly random times. Infrequent enough, so far, as to be livable, but still there. Annoying.
 
I have to say that I'm not particularly impressed by these, but in the end it gets the job done.

They generally look like the OEM part, of course with the new hole pattern. However, the metal manages to be more flimsy and less precise. Both of mine are somewhat misshapen, which renders one of them useless without some unusual force to seat it. Also, one of the 8 screws shipped wants to cross thread so bad it can't stand it.

The one that I used still isn't quite right, so it takes a bit more care to insert into the Mac. That last little bit of effort is required to seat it fully, due to the slightly bent shape. After some examination, I don't -think- it's bending any of the little tabs that are needed to secure the drive sled. I hope not..

So far no noise or anything. I'll send back the one that's excessively misshapen and hope for a better unit via RMA.

Regardless, I do have an 8TB drive seated now, and without the use of tape/strings/zip-ties, etc.
 
Hi Brent

Can I check I understand what you've experienced.

I think you're saying that new 6TB+ bare drives won't fit in the existing cMP sleds?

I have one of these disks on order and had assumed that it would just fit straight in.

If it won't fit I may have to rethink some plans. Why have the disk vendors changed the standard mount, was there something wrong with he old one?

Edit

Sorry just looked at the OWC page and it says 2009-2012, and since I have a 3.1 from 2008 I'm not sure what's what now?
 
Last edited:
Interesting I have a 6TB Hitachi NAS edition in bay 2 with the original tray for my Time Machine backups and didn't notice any difference with the screws on that.

The one issue I do have is that it only mounts on a cold boot - if I do a restart it isn't seen even in disk utility so I have to shutdown and then start up again. Thankfully I normally just use sleep mode which is OK but I'd be interested if the 8TB archive drive or any of the others don't have this issue.
 
Ok, for those that want to get the OWC tray and are worried about rattle, I found a solution. The trays rattled, but I notice if you put pressure on the front lip/fascade of the sled and pushed upward, the rattle went away. So the cantilevered pressure eliminated the rattle. So, I took out the sled with drive, bent it up a slight angle, seated the sled back in (which took a little bit more force) and the rattle is completely gone.

When closing up the case and pulling the latch down flat, it again took a touch more force to close, but really closes AOK.

So not terribly sophisticated, but it completely solves the problem. For others in my boat, they may want to experiment and see if this helps them.
 
tigerintank said:
Can I check I understand what you've experienced.

I think you're saying that new 6TB+ bare drives won't fit in the existing cMP sleds?

I have one of these disks on order and had assumed that it would just fit straight in.

If it won't fit I may have to rethink some plans. Why have the disk vendors changed the standard mount, was there something wrong with he old one?

Edit

Sorry just looked at the OWC page and it says 2009-2012, and since I have a 3.1 from 2008 I'm not sure what's what now?
Click to expand...
The 2008/2009/2010/2012 sleds are all the same.

The new drives have screw holes in different places. I bought a Seagate 8TB as an awesome internal Time Machine backup disk for my wife's 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 & then discovered that only two screw holes matched. I solved the problem with some gaffer tape but this is not a solution for everyone evidently some people find an invisible blue drive sled aesthetically displeasing so a drive sled adorned with strips of gaffer tape would be completely beyond the pale:)
 
Lucas Godfrey said:
Lou is correct, the sleds are not the same, the 2009 onwards are longer to accommodate more finger room to pull the sleds out.
Click to expand...
OK, I wasn't aware of that. They may be different but are they interchangeable? If the newer sleds are longer that implies that the SATA drive connectors & in fact the whole area where he disks slot in is more deeply recessed.
 
nigelbb said:
OK, I wasn't aware of that. They may be different but are they interchangeable? If the newer sleds are longer that implies that the SATA drive connectors & in fact the whole area where he disks slot in is more deeply recessed.
Click to expand...
Yeah, pretty much. The 4,1 onwards has the connectors on the backplane board, and so the drives themselves are about an inch deeper when installed then on the 3,1 and earlier. If you place a newer sled in an older Mac Pro you wouldn't be able to close the door.
 
I installed 4 of these into my Mac Pro mid-2010 with zero problems.

The only problem I am having is that I cloned my old 5TB OS/X Yosemite start-up drive to a new Seagate 8TB HDD and when I start up the Mac, it does not get recognized as thew new start-up HDD.
 
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