Question about adding Hard Drive and Optical Drive to Mac Pro

[markw10]

I'm converting my home from Windows to Mac and just sold my Windows laptop to get a MacBook Pro. Within the next couple months I plan to upgrade my Windows Desktop to a Mac Pro.
The Windows desktop I have I plan keep as a secondary computer but it has two internal 250 GB SATA (3.5") Maxtor Hard Drives. I have no use for two hard drives once I do the upgrade so plan to keep one and remove the other. My question:
Can I simply add this to the Mac Pro as a 2nd hard drive for extra data. It wouldn't replace the main hard drive that comes with the Mac Pro. Would this be possible and is this hard to do? I'm relatively new to Mac so don't know if it uses common PC Components.
As well, depending how the hidef war plays out I want to eventually add a HD DVD or Blu-Ray Reader/Burner. Can I in addition to the Superdrive that comes with the Mac Pro add this as a 2nd drive if it's a common off the shelf optical drive?
i know there are some possible changes coming soon to the Mac Pro but I assume this is one thing that won't change between the current and new model.

 

[yippy]

The hard drive you can absolutely use. Apple uses the same hard drives as everyone else. You said yours was and SATA drive which is good because this is the kind the Mac Pro takes. Also, adding a hard drive to the Mac Pro is very easy, probably easier than taking it out of your current computer. When you buy it the manual should have simple instructions with pictures on how to do this.

As for the drive, probably. Macs can use most optical drives by default, and with a little free program called Patch Burn, they can handle almost anything. Whether they can handle the drive is really a drivers issue, a lot of times, even if Mac OS X can't use the drive, third party programs like Toast still can. So except for some really obscure bargain brand drives, Macs can use any, it is just a matter of how much work you have to do to get it to work.

 

[volvoben]

Indeed, any old sata hard drive will work in a mac pro (and pata drives will work in one of the optical bays but that's another story), but if you're planning on keeping the data on the drive you're moving there's a little more to it.

OS X can read NTFS (which, assuming you're running 2000, XP or Vista your second HDD is very likely how your disk is formatted), and with help it can also write NTFS. That said, if you want to keep the data without transferring it over ethernet etc. to the new drive in your mac pro, you can just toss the drive in, copy the files quickly onto your stock mac pro drive, reformat the windows drive to be HFS+ (the default mac filesystem) and copy whatever you want back to it. Technically you could just keep the drive NTFS and use the plugin (I think it's called macFUSE or similar), but I wouldn't suggest it.

Anyway, enjoy your new macs!