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SATA 6.0Gb/s Drive in Mac Pro 1,1

M

MrLatte23

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 18, 2007
148
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I'm contemplating adding one of those new 2TB 64 mb Cache, 7200 RPM Hard drives in my 2006 Mac Pro. I'm not sure where the tipping point is, so I ask can my aging Mac Pro keep up with the SATA 6.0Gb/s from the hard drive.

I'll probably put in one of the internal bays, but my second related question is can one of these drives in an external enclosure with Firewire 800 and/or eSATA keep up with it.

I don't want to purchase a fast drive only to have some bottleneck choke it down.
 
The drives itself will not reach the 6 Gigabit/s per se, which is 750MB/s, SATA 1.5Gbps is fully sufficient for HDDs.

Firewire 800 offers 55-75 MByte/s so a SATA 6Gbps (or SATA 1.5Gbps) HDD is not used to its best.

Also SATA 6Gbps is backwards compatible to SATA 3Gbps, but I don't know if it is compatible to SATA 1.5Gbps.
 
The Caviar Black and RE4 2TB models will be fine on SATA 3.0Gb/s, as they can't quite saturate it (burst rate comes close, as SATA 3.0Gb/s tops out ~270MB/s, which is much lower than the theoretical max of 375MB/s).

WD's 2TB drives:
Burst rate is ~250MB/s
Sequential Read and Write ~120MB/s
Random Access is just under 12ms
 
You have the 6Gb/s HDD and I/O card, but I haven't found an external case that supports 6G yet. Am I correct that the external case needs to support 6G too?
 
JonnyG said:
You have the 6Gb/s HDD and I/O card, but I haven't found an external case that supports 6G yet. Am I correct that the external case needs to support 6G too?
Click to expand...
If it's eSATA, NO. :) It's just a cable (with the correct gender on each end), no circuits involved.

If it's connected via USB or FW, it won't matter, as they're slower anyway. :p
 
physicalpatrick said:
as far as i can tell this won't work in MacPRO1,1 because it's PCIe v1.0...this card is PCI3 v2.0
Click to expand...
The card would function, as it's backwards compatible. But it won't have but 250MB/s due to the single PCIe lane = gimped for anything that's faster than that (i.e. SSD's, which is what really makes this card attractive).
 
So this card would be better than what?

nanofrog said:
The card would function, as it's backwards compatible. But it won't have but 250MB/s due to the single PCIe lane = gimped for anything that's faster than that (i.e. SSD's, which is what really makes this card attractive).
Click to expand...

A standard eSATA connection?

I'm already using the NewerTech eSATA Extender cables, but with 7200 RPM SATA 3.0 HD's in OWC enclosures. Would this card get me anything faster with a better HD. If it'll work in my Mac Pro 1,1, might be worth a try to get more drives off of Firewire.
 
MrLatte23 said:
A standard eSATA connection?
Click to expand...
In this particular case, Yes, as the PCIe lane speed is the limiting factor in terms of max bandwidth available to that port.

The actual drives used can have a larger impact in terms of slowing it down even further (mechanical disks).

MrLatte23 said:
I'm already using the NewerTech eSATA Extender cables, but with 7200 RPM SATA 3.0 HD's in OWC enclosures. Would this card get me anything faster with a better HD. If it'll work in my Mac Pro 1,1, might be worth a try to get more drives off of Firewire.
Click to expand...
Mechanical disks, even those specced with 6.0Gb/s controller boards (board on the disk, not SATA/eSATA), aren't anywhere near 250MB/s (less than 150MB/s right now, and that's for the largest disks = highest platter density).

Tom's Hardware has a running article where they post real world data benchmarks on most common storage devices (here - I find it easier to search the specific drive model numbers I'm interested in). Definitely worth a look if you're in the market for new disks and want to know how fast they can run. ;)
 
I know this thread is very old but I felt it would be better to revive it and ask my question than start a new thread…

I've got a 2006 Mac Pro also. I'm wanting to buy some new hard drives for it and can get a pretty fair deal on some 1.5tb drives that are 6.0gb/s. It's my understanding that the 2006 Mac Pro is SATA II, am I correct?

I'm currently running some SATA III drives without issues, though I'm sure they're probably not running at the true speed of 3.0gb/s IF the Pro is SATA II.

SO… can I put those SATA 6.0gb/s drives in my 1,1 and will they work, only at a reduced speed without any major issues? Also, can someone tell me what the largest drive is that you can put in a 1,1 that it'll read and write to without issue, think I read somewhere that 1.5tb was the largest.
 
I've got a 2tb WD caviar black in my 1,1 and it works fine. As per the previous posts, I don't think a spinning disk can saturate sata 2 (maybe if it's in a raid0?).

SSD is another story. My intel 330 is definitely limited by the 1,1 but it's still quite speedy.
 
Just so long as I can use the 6gb/s drive without issue since the other offerings are getting kinda slim now.

Far as SSD goes, I'm looking at the Samsung 840 EVO and thinking of that as just a system install for OSX. Hoping I can run it off the SATA port on the logic board, fill my 4 bays with 1.5tb drives and store my stuff on those.
 
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