Eight internal hard drives in a Mac Pro?
Thanks to barefeats.com for bringing this to my attention—maxupgrades.com is offering an internal Optical Bay assembly that with the removal of the DVD drive allows four (4) additional hard drives to be installed, or 2 drives while retaining the DVD drive.
I don’t really want to externalize my DVD drive, but you can bet that when I acquire a Mac Pro I’ll be adding a total of 6 internal drives—4 in the Apple standard bays, and two more using the Optical Bay assembly. How to configure them for performance, reliability and backup? Stay tuned for a future article on configuring a system’s storage for digital photography.
One should keep in mind that adding additional drives does add more heat into an area which might not have been designed for that level of ventilation or power usage (this will depend somewhat on the drives).
Also, the Mac Pro has six (6) built-in internal SATA ports to which six drives may be attached; more than six means you’d have to obtain an internal SATA card.