Most of the time, your average Mac has a longer useful life than its PC counterpart. Unfortunately, the fast evolution of technology means that, after a while, that older Mac may seem a little slow and may not be able to take full advantage of current tech.
Such is the case for earlier Mac Pros. As they currently sit, they only move data at SATA 2.0 speeds, roughly three gigabits per second. If you wish to put the drives in to a RAID array, you are limited to either a mirrored RAID 1, losing half your capacity, or a RAID 0, which is faster, but increases the risk of data loss. On top of that, those RAID levels are all software-based, which can reduce overall performance.
Fortunately, if you happen to have a 2006-2008 Mac Pro, you can improve the performance in those bays, with only one small thing to lookout for.
How does it work?
The backplane (where the drives in the bays are connected) consists of four pass-thru SATA connections which are, in turn, connected to the SATA controller on the logic board (located near the front of the Mac Pro) via a mini-SAS connector.
The great thing is that mini-SAS is a fairly common connector for PCIe SATA controller cards. The trick is to find one with that mini-SAS connector on the inside. Fortunately, the Newer Technology MAXPower RAID mini-SAS 6G-1e1i controller card happens to fit the bill nicely. Not only does it feature an internal mini-SAS port, it also has a built-in (hardware) RAID controller which supports RAID Level 0, 1, 5, 10, and 50 along with individual drive support and disk spanning, as well as an external port for more expansion options.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; let’s concentrate on upgrading those drive bays.
What’s involved in the process?
Once you install the MAXPower card in your Mac, you’ll notice that the mini-SAS cable that connects to the logic board is located near the front of the Mac Pro and the internal port on the card is located near the rear - much too far away from each other to connect. This is easily remedied, however, by using a mini-SAS extender cable to bridge the distance.
Once connected, the four drive bays in the Mac Pro are now being controlled by the RAID card, making it capable of both high-speed data transfer and more advanced RAID options.
At this point, we run into a bit of a problem; the MAXPower card isn’t bootable in a Mac. You will need to put your OS on a drive installed in one of the optical bays.
For the best performance, we suggest getting an OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 3G SSD and attaching it via one of the “extra” SATA 2.0 connectors on the logic board, located near the front of the Mac Pro. Just run a SATA cable from the drive to this connector on the logic board (you’ll probably have to remove the fan to do this) and use a SATA power converter cable to adapt the power from the drive bay for your SATA drive.
If you don’t want to go the SSD route, you also have the option of hooking a standard SATA hard drive up much the same way.
You can install the system on this “fifth” drive, and use your upgraded hard drive bays to set up a RAID array for maximum data transfer.
There’s only one situation where this won’t work: if you happen to use Boot Camp to run Windows on your Mac. Apple doesn’t support Boot Camp on these “extra” connectors. In that instance, you’ll need to use an ATA hard drive hooked to the ATA connector in the drive bay. You’ll lose a lot of the speed advantage during booting and launching when you do it this way, but at least you still retain Boot Camp capability.
Whichever drive type and size you choose to put your OS on, we’ve got Multi-Mount bundles that include all the mounts and cables necessary to make installing it into the drive bay a simple process.
Is it worth it?
With all the effort you need to put into this sort of setup, you almost begin to wonder whether or not the speed boost is worth it. The key benefit is in the ability to read/write large amounts of data. If you’re accessing a lot of information (like audio or video editing or possibly a local file server for a small company) this could be just what you’re looking for.
We set up an Early 2008 Mac Pro (MacPro3,1) with four OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 6G SSDs and booted from a standard SATA drive installed in the optical bay.
To test the built-in card, we set all 4 drives up as a RAID 0 array using Disk Utility, then tested it using a series of benchmarking utilities (including ones from Intech, BlackMagic and Aja) running off the boot drive.
As you can see, speeds from the built-in controller topped out in the neighborhood of 725MB/s.
Next, we installed the MAXPower card and hooked it to the internal bays like we described above. Then, using the card’s RAID management, we set up another RAID 0 array and tested it again
As you can see, we more than doubled the card’s output with transfer rates topping out around 1600MB/s. Obviously, if your workflow includes heavy-duty data transfer, this setup will work nicely.
Are there other benefits?
Though it’s a key component in getting the most out of your drives, RAID functionality this isn’t the only benefit to this kind of setup.
If putting your drives in a RAID isn’t necessarily your “thing,” you’ll still benefit that the card converts the bays from 3.0Gb/s SATA 2.0 performance to the 6Gb/s performance of SATA 3.0, allowing you to take advantages in speed.
This card also adds SAS functionality, so you can now use SAS drives in the internal bays, which is a boon for more advanced users.
In addition to the internal upgrade, the MAXPower card also has an external mini-SAS port, which can be used with external storage systems utilizing mini-SAS, such as the OWC Mercury Rack Pro mini-SAS, giving you even more high-speed storage.
The Bottom Line
If you have a 2006-2008 Mac Pro that you need to move a lot of data through, upgrading the built-in SATA ports with the Newer Technology MAXPower RAID mini-SAS 6G-1e1i controller card may just be the performance boost your machine needs.
In case you didn’t pick them out of the article, here’s a brief shopping list of what you’ll need.
- Controller Card: Newer Technology MAXPower RAID mini-SAS 6G-1e1i
- Connection: mini-SAS extender cable
- Boot drive for optical bay (depending on needs)
- Maximum Speed: OWC Mercury EXTREME Pro 3G SSD
- More storage on boot drive: a standard SATA hard drive
- Boot Camp users: an ATA hard drive
- Mounting Kits for optical bay: OWC Multi-Mount bundles
Does this work with 2010s yet?
While the card itself could certainly handle it, the issue with the 2009-2010 units is getting the correct cabling.
In the 2006-2008 models the drive connections are separated and we do have the correct cabling to complete that connection.
In the 2009-2010 models Apple moved to an integrated backplane and we currently do not carry the correct cabling to connect the hard drive bays to the card.
We are still working on sourcing or creating a solution and if/when available we will announce it here on the OWC Blog first, but at this time we do not have any type of ETA.
I currently have a MacPro3,1 (2008) running with 3 Hitachi HDS723030ALA640 (3TB) drives as a Striped RAID set. I also have a single internal drive as not part of the RAID set. My Lion OS runs from an internal SSD. Would I be able to just plug in the Newer Technology MAXPower RAID mini-SAS 6G-1e1i controller card without having to reformat my RAID drives?
Yes. If the 3 Hitachi drives are set up as a RAID 0 (stripe) using Disk Utility, you should be able to install the card and the mini-SAS extender cable and the drives would still show up as is. (Your boot drive would need to be connected to something other than the 4 drive bays.)
What kind of, non SSD, disks would you recommend using? I am about to click buy but choking on the thought of $1900 in disks if I’m not going to get the performance out of it.
Hi Jared!
Any of the 3.5 HD’s we carry will individually deliver about 150MB/s. We have been impressed with the 3TB Hitachi….4 of them in a RAID 0 array delivers 600MB/s….so you’d get capacity plus speed!
Really, as long as you stay with 7200RPM…no 5400 ecoboost/ecogreen/etc. speeds….you’ll get the performance you seek.
Grant thanks for the swift response. I was thinking of doing 0+1 as I’m a little nervous about losing my data, I’m a music producer/DJ, & my current drives are acting strangely. So am I correct to say that a 0+1 raid setup would give me around 300MB/s?
NP Jared…we’re here to serve. Talking about RAID is akin to politics and religion….never quite sure where someone stands. ;-) To me, I’m a speed AND safety guy…so RAID 5 makes most sense to me. But since you are doing a software RAID…RAID 1+0 or RAID 10 is the next best thing….good article here:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/raid-1-0-is-the-cadillac-of-raid/131
as well as our own explanations (on the right side):
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/sata/RAID_Guide/RAID_Concepts
but to your question, either 0+1 or 1+0 should get you close to 300MB/s…
This topic is quite timely considering some thoughts Ive been having lately… I have a MacPro 3.1 with the Dual Quad Core 2.8 GHZ processors.. (I also have 16GB of RAM installed, which is Kingston, and 6 Western Digital SATA2 HDD’s in various sizes).
I run ProTools 9 for audio recording, an Apogee Duet as the audio interface on the firewire buss and an application called BFD for programming drums, as well as numerous other native plugins for EQ, compression, reverb and the like. Strangely I do find that the MacPro does struggle at times with what appears to be processor load (at least thats what the CPU meter in ProTools shows) when Im running even a fairly light session (say 8 audio tracks with a couple of plugins and an instance of BFD) and have been thinking lately that when the next MacPro comes out Ill bite the bullet and upgrade.. however I was running into “similar” issues on my MacBookPro 4.1 (IntelCore2Duo 2.5 GHZ, 2GB RAM, aluminium body) with running multiple VMware virtual machines (in the realm of a Windows XP VM and Windows 7 VM simultaneously) where MacBookPro was becoming quite unresponsive, which all things considering in understandable.. however I went the way of installing an OWC 240GB Sata2 SSD and 6GB of OWC RAM and since then the MacBookPro has been incredible. To the point where I can run 3 or 4 virtual machines as well as my usual OSX tasks and it doesnt seem to break a sweat..
The reason for detailing this MacBookPro success makes me wonder if I install a series of OWC SSD’s (Sata2 or even Sata3 and the controller as described in this article) and maybe even swap out the 16GB of Kingston RAM to 16GB or 32GB of OWC RAM in the MacPro whether or not I might achieve a similar level of success and get a reasonable performance boost for my audio work…
This also ties in with me being a little skeptical of installing Lion on the MacPro at the moment due to performance..
Sorry for it being a bit long winded..
Unfortunately, this not the best place to try and spec out individual machines. That said, adding more RAM and faster drives (esp. SSDs) do generally tend to improve performance. Whether it would be “enough”, I couldn’t tell you for sure, as I generally don’t deal on that end of the spectrum.
Fortunately, many of our sales staff interact with audio professionals on a daily basis and are quite familiar with the specific demands that various audio systems require, so a quick call to one of our phone reps should be able to help you make a decision.
Hi. Yesterday I installed the OWC 480 gig Memory Extreme Pro SSD in my 2007 Mac Pro 2,1 dual quad core 3 GHz with 16 gigs RAM. I have 4 750 gig HD that were original with my machine, 2 are striped into a RAID. I installed the SSD in my second optical bay using OWC’s multi mount kit, cloned my boot-up drive and am using it as my bootup drive. According to my AJA speed test, the SSD runs a read/write of 250/237 for 1920×1080 8-bit, my original boot drive is 48/50, my second internal drive is 70/69, and the Raid is 80/90. AN external 4 TB harddrive connected through an eSata port is 157/182.
So the SSD helped and feels much faster.
So I am looking at using the miniSAS controller card to see if it helps.
BTW – the installation instructions that OWC provided were great! Good luck!
While the mini-SAS card can help speed up the four hard drive bays in your 2007 Mac Pro, what it can’t do is speed up the drives themselves.
The drives that came with your Mac Pro are SATA 2.0, at best and it’s entirely possible that they’re SATA 1.0. If you attach them via the mini-SAS card, they’ll still read at the same speed, as the drives themselves haven’t changed. To really take advantage of the card, you would need some SATA 3.0-capable drives or (preferably) SSDs.
As far as I’m concerned, I’m waiting for the same thing to have SATA 6GBps on my Mi-2010 Mac Pro. I hope the card will be able to use the boot drive since I’ll be using my SSD on it.
Great stuff!
In addition to this awesome OWC tip, owners of older Mac Pros should know that “Booting the 64-bit kernel on the 2006/2007 Mac Pro” is also possible… for advanced users.
I found the info via the netkas website.
I should mention it does support booting after you clone over from another drive but it doesn’t support 6Gb/sec drives, just 3Gb/sec. But it does offer hardware RAID support of RAID 0,1,5,6,10 and good old JBOD, and still has an external Mini-SAS connection.
What about using instead the Highpoint RocketRAID 4321?
Do I see an internal mini-SAS connector? They do offer a internal mini-SAS to quad SATA cable Int-MS-1M4S
It says drivers included in Snow Leopard. Perhaps it’s not bootable. Does work with 2009&2010 Mac Pro.
We do not currently carry the Highpoint RocketRAID 4321.
This is great info. But what about those of us with 2009-2010 Mac Pro’s?
Jason
Unfortunately, this won’t quite work for the 09-10′s – but I know for a fact the “mad scientists” over in our labs are in the process of putting together a solution for the later models.
Stay tuned to the Blog for the info – we’ll be posting it here first.
Chris,
Have you guys tested this type of configuration with 6Gbps 3TB drives (like the HItachi 7200 RPM series?). For those of us without the cash to afford a RAID of SSDs, I’m just wondering how performance would stack up there.
Dave
Unfortunately, no, our dev team did not test this setup with standard hard drives, as we were much more excited about how fast we could get our 2006-2008 Mac Pros to run.