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Hi everybody , I’ve been using a first SSD on my Mac Pro early 2008 for quit a time , but I was wondering if its possible to add a second one in the DVD drive which is became obsolete . I easy find tutorial for installing SSD in the empty location for second drive ( the one I did already ) but not for an additional one instead of the DVD drive. Any ideas ? Thanks
If I remember correctly the optical drive in the first version of Mac Pro’s was IDE based so its I/O will be very slow! So you can’t just swap it out for a SSD. You do have four HD bays which can support either a HDD or SSD SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) drives unless you’ve got them all loaded up I would use one of them. If not you’ll need to get a SATA cable set to use one of the spare ports on the logic board to then route up to the optical drive bay to then use instead of the optical drive. Now the hard part this was a custom cable and need a 3.5” to 2.5” adapter frame and finding one today will take a bit of work! Which is why using the current HD bays would be better! Last but still very important! This system only offers SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) drive interfaces so the drive/s you install much be able to run at this I/O speed. Many drives today are fixed speed SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) these drives won’t work reliably in your system! One of the few which works across any SATA Interface (auto sense) is the Samsung SSD’s! Unlike Western Digital SSD’s which are fixed SATA III (6.0 Gb/s). Review your SSD spec sheet if it doesn’t list SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) don’t buy it!
