HOW TO: Have you RAID 5 and 4 BOOTABLE SATA ports for your Mac Pro!

[tk2k]

Hey everybody, I thought I would share my useful advice with you. This gets a bit technical, so bear with me.

 

It all stared a month ago when I wanted a full raid 5 array for my data. I got the CalDigit RAID card and 4x1TB hard drives. In additition, I wired the ODD_SATA ports for a 5th hard drive (mounted in the second optical bay) as a boot drive.

 

This caused a few problems

 

BootCamp In order for BootCamp to work on a Mac Pro, the EFI of the Mac Pro emulates a fake BIOS for Windows. This bios is different than the Mac Pro's EFI layer and lacks some features, such as...

AHCI is a specific kind of SATA controller used for the ODD_SATA ports, however AHCI is not supported by most BIOS systems, thus do not work on the mac pro.

Because of this, BootCamp would not recognize the main boot drive on the ODD_SATA port. In addition, since CalDigit has no support for windows installer drivers, I could not install on the RAID card.

 

 

Stuff you need to know for this to make sense:

iPass Cable: A mini-SAS cable that pretty much functions as a giant SATA connector, allowing the four Mac Pro hard drive bays to communicate with the motherboard via one cable. It's pretty nifty. In a RAID setup, this iPass cable is unplugged from the motherboard and instead connected directly to the RAID card.

 

The Workaround

Most people run a SATA cable up to their optical bay to get a fifth hard drive to work, or a SATA Blu Ray drive, the problem, as discussed before, is this will not work on any boot camp OS.

Instead of running a SATA cable up, I routed everything through the iPass. I purchased a Mini-SAS to 4-SATA cable off of ebay for $20, connecting that to the place where the old iPass cable (that is now connected to the RAID card) used to be.

This gained me FOUR additional SATA ports fully recognized by OS X, XP, Vista, Linux, etc . I wired two of these to the optical ports (one for my Blu Ray drive, one for my 5th/boot hard drive) and two to the back of the machine, giving me two E-SATA ports.

 

This solution makes it possible to have a full RAID-5 configuration as well as four bootable SATA ports inside your Mac Pro. Theoretically you could even use those overpriced cases to have eight hard drive inside your mac pro, four by RAID card, and four by iPass motherboard.

 

If you really wanted to, you could also use the ODD_SATA pots for OS X only and get a total of 10 SATA ports opperational inside your Mac Pro (not that you'd ever need that...) If you want to get the ODD_SATA ports working in XP or Vista there's a very technical thread here titled "[HOWTO] Boot Mac Pro in AHCI - XP / Vista / Linux, Add Blu Ray Drives in Windows & New Drivers for Sata controller"

 

Good Luck!

[rezwits]

That's what I want to do!!!

 

You did this with the caldigit raid card?

 

I want to boot into Windows to a drive connected via the old iPass slot (basically the SATA).

 

I don't even really care to see the raid in windows.

 

I don't think I need to connect the boot camp cable (caldigit) to get this to work right, basically because it would now be occupied?

 

Let me know if it's this cool.

 

Laters...

[tk2k]

That's what I want to do!!!

 

You did this with the caldigit raid card?

 

I want to boot into Windows to a drive connected via the old iPass slot (basically the SATA).

 

I don't even really care to see the raid in windows.

 

I don't think I need to connect the boot camp cable (caldigit) to get this to work right, basically because it would now be occupied?

 

Let me know if it's this cool.

 

Laters...

hey, I used the caldigit card, running thr ipass cable from the internal hard drives to thr raid card. I then got a sas to Sata cable (which is all thr ipass is) and wired that up to the optical bay. By doing this the computer reads that drive as if it was in an internal bay. Getting it to fit up there is pretty tricky and took a while, but tht end result was worth it. In addition you could wire thr extra 2 sata ports from thr breakout to be esata even.