I have the new MacPro on order and as most will know this version does not have any internal storage on internal expansion possibilities anymore. I am selling my 'old' (2011) MacPro but I will probably take out the really special stuff since most do not appreciate this. On this forum I guess some of you use MacPros and could really benefit from these components.
1) I have an Areca 1880 RAID controller for the MacPro. This card fits into one of the PCI slots and allows up to 8 SATA drives attached to it. You can configure these drives into RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 or 10.
2) I have a 5 1/4" bay caddie. With this you can insert 8 SSD drives into the bay beneath the DVD drive. Attach 8 SSD drives onto the RAID controller and you have a work disk that is almost as fast as memory (write and read speeds of up to 2000mb/s and sometimes even over)
I had a hard time upgrading my MacPro because of the Phenomenal working disk (7 disk SSD RAID5) that is in my current MacPro. I found something of a solution eventually (geez... they make it hard for a guy to configure really speedy machines) and so now I have no use for these components anymore.
Caddie:
http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_ID=190&ParentCat=350RAID Card:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sas-6gb-raid-controller,3028-4.htmlREALLY! THERE IS STILL NOTHING THAT OUTPERFORMS THIS ON THE HDD/SSD FRONT!(not even the big TB2 RAID systems, I have chosen one of these to replace this).
My asking price for the Areca and the Caddie is 250euros. I can help you out on how to use it if necessary. Send me an email if you are interested.
Just have a look at these benchmarks to see what this is capable of:
