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Six hard drives in a Mac pro

The Mac Pro includes four built-in drive bays, but it has six SATA ports on its logic board (see diglloyd Dec 26, 2006 blog entry Eight Internal Hard drives in a Mac Pro). MaxUpgrades offers two optical bay assemblies which allow the installation of either two additional hard drives or four additional hard drives. The 4-drive assembly requires externalizing (removing) the optical drive, which I decided against.

I ordered the US$129 SZ-MCMPOPT01 2-drive kit. The kit is well-designed, with a sturdy aluminum construction. Unfortunately, it was delivered with no instructions whatsoever, leading to a frustrating experience trying to figure out how it should be installed. I emailed MaxUpgrades, and the support person responded with multiple pictures of the installation and cable routing. But there’s no valid excuse for shipping this product without installation instructions; very few users will figure it out (I couldn’t).

There are several helpful things to know about the installation:

  1. The original metal “cage” containing the optical drive does not get reinstalled.
  2. To allow access, remove the leftmost two built-in hard drives.
  3. Route the SATA cables from the optical bay down to the SATA ports. I recommend a needle-nose pliers to assist with this, but be careful and make absolutely sure you’ve unplugged the power cord from the Mac Pro.
  4. Disconnect the power cable from the video card (if you have the power-hungry X1900 video card, which requires its own power cable).
  5. Attaching the SATA cables: Remove the single screw holding the plastic baffle and wiggle the whole assembly up about 1/2" out of the Mac Pro enclosure so that the SATA cables can be attached to the ports on the logic board. Then push the plastic baffle back and screw it down (a magnetized screwdriver is very helpful). Without doing this, I found it impossible for my fingers to fit into the gap and attach the cables, though MaxUpgrades support insisted it was possible. Not for me.

I added two additional Maxtor 7h500F0 500GB hard drives (see diglloyd.com Hard Drives), bringing the internal storage to 3 terabytes. Using Temperature Monitor, I found that the newly-installed hard drives run about 5-10°F cooler than the ones in the standard drive bays. This is what it looks like after installation:


Optical bay with MaxUpgrades kit and 2 additional hard drives [Mac Pro]

My “Master” drive is now a six-drive striped volume, offering nearly 400MB/sec sustained transfer speed. The remainder of the space was used to create two 3-drive striped volumes. Failure of one hard drive means loss of Master and one of the backups, but not both. This setup is designed for speed and convenience; I maintain several other external backups.


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