I recently acquired a classic Mac Pro 2010 5,1 and have been upgrading it to something nearer current tech levels by upgrading the video card, upgrading the CPU chips, adding USB3, upgrading the WiFi card to 802.11ac and upgrading the Bluetooth to LE specs with full Continuity compatibility.
This is more 'because I can' rather than a serious effort to build the fastest possible computer that ever existed.
One of the things I have done successfully is to fit a Star Tech PCIe card - see http://uk.startech.com/Cards-Adapte...Controller-Card-Mini-SAS-SFF-8087~PEXSAT34SFF which supports connecting four SATAIII 6.0Gbps drives via a single cable and I also bought via eBay the following http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/i...--2010--2011--2012-model-id-41--51-models.cfm which allows fitting drives in the standard internal drive bays but bypassing the Apple SATAII only connectors and instead using in this case the Star Tech card.
As mentioned this is all working, the drives are connected to the Star Tech card, they are still recognised by the Mac and I can boot from them successfully, I can also see that a SATAIII SSD drive is now working at full SATAIII speeds instead of SATAII speeds, this takes it from about 240MBps to nearly 450MBps a significant improvement for a single drive and if I setup a RAID0 using two SSD drives I would get even more performance.
The minor issue is that the drives when connected via the Star Tech PCI card are treated by the Mac (running Yosemite 10.10.3) as if they were external drives so they have an orange external drive icon and the eject button shows up next to them.
I seem to remember reading that there is a way to tell OS X to treat them as if they were internal drives and I vaguely recall this may involve editing a plist so that the SATA interfaces are re-labeled as internal connections but I cannot find the article again.
Does anyone know how this might be achieved?
This is more 'because I can' rather than a serious effort to build the fastest possible computer that ever existed.
One of the things I have done successfully is to fit a Star Tech PCIe card - see http://uk.startech.com/Cards-Adapte...Controller-Card-Mini-SAS-SFF-8087~PEXSAT34SFF which supports connecting four SATAIII 6.0Gbps drives via a single cable and I also bought via eBay the following http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/i...--2010--2011--2012-model-id-41--51-models.cfm which allows fitting drives in the standard internal drive bays but bypassing the Apple SATAII only connectors and instead using in this case the Star Tech card.
As mentioned this is all working, the drives are connected to the Star Tech card, they are still recognised by the Mac and I can boot from them successfully, I can also see that a SATAIII SSD drive is now working at full SATAIII speeds instead of SATAII speeds, this takes it from about 240MBps to nearly 450MBps a significant improvement for a single drive and if I setup a RAID0 using two SSD drives I would get even more performance.
The minor issue is that the drives when connected via the Star Tech PCI card are treated by the Mac (running Yosemite 10.10.3) as if they were external drives so they have an orange external drive icon and the eject button shows up next to them.
I seem to remember reading that there is a way to tell OS X to treat them as if they were internal drives and I vaguely recall this may involve editing a plist so that the SATA interfaces are re-labeled as internal connections but I cannot find the article again.
Does anyone know how this might be achieved?
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