Mac Pro 1,1 extra SATA port issues

Hello all,
When we try to use the additional SATA ports on the Mac Pro, (the extra ones behind the cooling fans) they seem to be very unreliable--drives dismount themselves, for no apparent reason.
We are running the SATA to eSATA dual port cable adapter from OWC. We are also still running the stock superdrive via IDE.
Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a known fix for this?
Any help is appreciated.
System Specs:
Dual Core Inter Xeon
2.66GHz
2 PROC - 4 Cores total.
9GB Memory
1.33GHz System bus
Boot ROM: MP11.005C.B08
SMC: 1.7F10
Snow Leopard 10.6.4

NewerTech I assume kit.
It isn't the SATA ports, it isn't the drives, it is the case they are in.
I've run drives off those for over 3 yrs as boot drives, as RAID and general purpose. They have to be on at startup, you can't hot swap, for that you need a PCIe like Sonnet or others.
They will not work relibly with those USB/eSATA type cases.
A simple $29 metal case, no fan (also has USB)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00342UT7A/
OWC has some low cost metal w/ fan dual drive cases also.

Similar Messages

How diagnose the extra SATA ports on the Mac Pro (early 2008) logic board?

I have had two SSDs in an OWC multi-mount in the second optical bay, one for Lion and one for Photoshop scratch. However, I recently began having intermittent boot problems. Sometimes there wouldn't be an Apple symbol upon boot/reboot, yet sometimes there would and the computer would boot. I have not experienced any crashes, kernel panics or such.
I thought the Lion SSD was faulty so installed Mountain Lion on the scratch drive, a Mercury Electra 3G which I have recently received as a replacement from OWC due to a previously faulty SSD. However, immediately there were boot problems from that SSD.
I have a feeling there is something wrong with the two extra SATA ports on the logic board. I am now booted off the Lion SSD placed in an external USB enclosure, which works but is a bit slower (I will get a bracket to install that SSD in the ordinary internal bays).
My question is how I can diagnose the logic board generally and specifically the extra SATA ports. I have Tech Tool Pro 6. I also thought I had AHT but on the Leopard DVD 1, which came with the Mac Pro (10.5.2) and on which AHT is supposed to be there is no trace of AHT. Odd. Booting from that DVD will only bring up the Leopard installer.
Btw I do think the Electra is broken because I am unable to boot ML from it in the USB enclosure.
Grateful for any ideas how to check my logic board.
Cheers
/p

If you could move the drives easily to another location then you could test the drives and also - make backup images! just to be safe. SSDs and their firmware and problems are almost all too common, even this last June a large issue with SandForce which OWC uses in some/most of theirs, and I get the feeling they are usually behind in testing and sending out firmware updates.
Corsair, Crucial and Intel have all had issues since it surfaced in May.
Diagnosing a motherboard with Apple Service Diagnostic CD is one thing. Swapping out SATA cables though no. WD Lifeguard does check communication to an SATA device drive and can - but you need to see the device in Windows or their boot CD (linux I imagine). Quite good utility though maybe not for an SSD.

Mac Pro 2008 Not Recognizing SATA Hard Drives After Power Failure...

So we recently had a weird power "outage" where the power still seemed to be surging some (my monitor was blinking wouldn't turn completely off until I yanked the plug on it), and to my dismay, when the power came back on, I started having boot issues with my Mac. Luckily I had a couple of identical dual-quad core machines sitting around (workgroup environment), swapped my hard drive into one of them, and was back in business on-the-fly.
However, I'm now trying to troubleshoot the faulty machine (qihout throwing parts at it yet) and am stuck at an impasse. With the hard drive of the secondary machine cross-installed into the one that got "hit" by the outage, I simply got the chime and then it stuck on the dreaded gray screen, and out of all the boot options, the only one that would get me a different result was to try to option-boot into the Startup Manager, which would still give me the gray screen but also a mouse cursor after about a minute. Zapped PRAM... reset SMU... even swapped CMOS battery... all to no avail.
So I started yanking things. Memory.. video card... and finally the one and only (swapped) hard drive. The last one did it, and I was finally able to option-boot, start up from the Installation CD, and ultimately, D-boot into the hardware tests on the CD. Ran both normal and extended tests and everything checked out fine, with no errors (and based on the potetnial error messgaes I read about, these tests check everything from the logic board to the power supply, and voltage across both).
Now I'm torn and not sure which route to go from here. Machine seems to operate relatively normally when booting from CD... all hardware tests pass... Super Drive works (not sure it that's SATA or PATA, but guessing the latter at this point)... it just won't take a hard drive (which I verified is fine in another computer), regardless of which of the 4 bays I put it in. I'm also hard presed to believe that the power outage/surges caused the SATA cable(s) to go bad yet nothing else, which still have me leaning towards SATA controller on the board or a power supply issue despite the fact the tests passed.
Thoughts, opinions, or comments... from experience or otherwise? Thanks in advance!

Look hatter. I'm not saying it doesn't, but "prevention" is not why I started the thread. It was to troubleshoot the already existing problem, and you suggesting I run out and drop a combined $1000 on UPS units for each of the five 2008 Mac Pros I still have in my department is neither contributory to the thread topic nor cost-effective just to (possibly) prevent another (what seems to now be) $10 cable issue yet another 6 years down the road. Thanks, though. :/
Well it wasn't the power supply, nor apparently the SATA controller (I don't believe at this point). I finally got the hard drive to recognize and boot again, but ended up having to use one of the two extra SATA connector ports on the board (which I can only assume are handled by the onboard SATA controller as well) and a 4-pin molex to SATA power adapter connected to the power output for the secondary optical drive. As such, It very well may just be the "Hard Drive Harness Cable", although I need to order a male to female SATA extension cable so I can hook the drive up directly to the data side of that the drive bay connectors to determine whether it's the data side or the power side causing issues. I'm again assuming power, since the extra SATA ports seem to work, I'm pretty sure the drive isn't spinning up fully, yet the bays obviously 'recognize' there's a drive in there (thus the gray screen when one is plugged in).
Anyway - I'll update when I get to that point, primarily for posterity's sake, as I found several "unresolved" gray screen threads on the web (and even in these forums) that sounded just like mine yet offered little ultimate help. In the meantime, does anyone want to speculate on whether it's the cable itself or maybe the SATA chain power plug on the board could be bad? It looks to be pretty close to the main power input connector on the board, so just wondering if (worst case scenario) something could have popped on the board between the two? Seems unlikely, but...
Either way, I can always work around it all if necessary by utilizing the same setup I got it to boot with.

Installing Windows on drive attached to extra SATA port

I posted this incorrectly into the MacBook Pro so I have reposted here:
I have a Mac Pro with 4x500GB drives in RAID 10. Since bootcamp can't be installed on this RAID setup I took the stock apple 250GB drive and put it into an external SATA enclosure.
I have since booted to that external sata disk (by holding down the option key during boot) installed bootcamp and partitioned that drive for windows XP. So the drive now has both OSX and a partition for XP that I made via bootcamp. After that was finished I clicked the key to "install Windows now" or whatever.
The plan here is to just turn on that external drive whenever I need to run windows or install firmware updates for the Mac since apple can't seem how to do either with a software RAID set in place on the existing 4 internal drives.
After doing the above steps I now have 2 problems:
1. When booting from a XP SP2 disk to install XP the only drives seen are the 4 internal ones and not the extra sata port that is connected. This leads me to believe that I need to slipstream drivers for the extra two unused sata ports into the install disk but am not sure, I am hoping for some input.
2. Now when I power off the external SATA drive the only way I can boot back into my normal OSX RAID10 setup is by holding down the 'option' key and choosing one of the 4 RAID10 disks that are listed. After I do this it boots fine but I have to do this every time I boot my system which get really old.
If I don't hold the option key down down the system will just boot to a black screen asking me to "insert boot media". It seems like it is stuck in the bootcamp mode so I need to figure out how to get out of it.
I wonder if I can just uninstall bootcamp from the external SATA drive to fix this so that my system will boot normally? I will give this a shot tomorrow b/c I don't have time tonight but I appreciate any helpful advice.
If anyone has any ideas on how to get XP installed while running RAID please share. I know I can use an IDE drive but I have 2 optical drives installed so that is out for the moment but I may need to do that if I can't get the SATA option working.

The enclosure is usb and eSATA (external SATA) the drive is connected via a SATA cable to a SATA 3.5" adapter plate on the back of the mac pro that is connected to one of the unused extra 2 SATA ports that are tucked away behind the heatsinks on the Mac Pro's motherboard. So it is SATA all the way to the motherboard, I am not using USB at all.
As noted above, yes you can install XP on an IDE hard drive and put it into the optical bay area but I have two DVD burners installed there and would like to use the setup I have now if possible.
I was able to fix my 2nd issue listed above thanks to a suggestion in another forum of going into my startup disk options and choosing my RAID 10 setup. Now my system boots fine.
So back to the issue of installing XP on one of those extra unused SATA ports, if we can find out what brand controller those 2 ports are (intel, siig, silicon image, etc.) we could slipstream the drivers into the XP CD and then the windows install should work. Coming from a PC backgrounds and having installed various versions of windows literally at least 500+ times I have had to use the 'F6' optoin to install SATA/RAID/SCSI drivers from a floppy hundreds of times. The problem here is that we don't know what brand hardware it is or if it is possibly an issue with EFI not enabling those ports or something unless OSX boots, because booting to OSX connected to one of those extra ports works fine.
I guess I should also just ask again to be clear: You CAN'T install bootcamp on a RAID setup correct? Because I get an error everytime I try to run the bootcamp setup assistant. Geez, I wish apple would just enable the native RAID support built into the intel southbridge, that would solve the bootcamp problem, the RAID 10 setup problem where you can't setup RAID 10 via the GUI, and also the fact that you can't install any firmware updates to the box.
MB Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8) Mac Pro 2.66, 4x500GB RAID 10, 1GBx4, X1900XT MB Pro 2Ghz Dual Boot w/MCE 2005

Can't boot windoze from extra sata ports in MacPro?

I recently bought a 5th HD for my Mac Pro planning to mount the drive under the optical drive and take advantage of the 2 extra sata ports on the mobo. Because my Vista drive was the only one with the old style power connector ( and I have no adapter ), I thought I'd put it up there and the new drive in the sled. Long story short, the Vista HD mounts when I boot into my Mac OS(s), but it won't boot into Vista..
Is this a known limitation of bootcamp/windoze/MacPro? Will a SnowLeopard OS drive boot from that sata port or is it only going to be useful for data drives? Any other limitations of those 2 extra ports?
Sorry if this has been answered before, I couldn't seem to form a useful query..
TIA
Message was edited by: flommer

Hi flommer,
by default Windows or better said the Apple BootCamp Drivers for Windows can not see or use the odd SATA ports.
Have a look here http://osx86.net/archive/index.php/t-3159.html for possible solutions to that.
Hope it helps
Stefan

MAC PRO KONA 3 External SATA dropped frames

Recently our company upgraded to KONA3 card with the new MAC PRO. We were not aware our External SATA drives would not be 100% compaditable with the MAC PRO. The drives do mount and seem to work fine in Standard Def and compressed HD, but start to drop frames when dealing with Uncompress capturing. Spoke with AJA and was referred to use Fibre or SCSI based on the LH FAQ portion of their site.
We've installed a temp Fibre Channel Drives and set the card on port 4, with the KONA3 card on Port 3. Do note the drives are RAID 0.
Still having dropped frames when capturing Uncompress HD to the drives.
My questions are:
1) Why does the MAC PRO not support External SATA?
2) Any ideas to contribute to my Fibre issues?
3) What type of other storage solution has been proven to work?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thank You All For Your Professional Experience
Marcus
MAC PRO 2.66 Dual Core Intel
2GB of RAM
3.2 TB of EXTERNAL SATA (from Promax)
500GB FIBRE CHANNLE
OS 10.4.8
KONA 3 Drivers vs3.3
FCP 5.1.2
MAC PRO Mac OS X (10.4.8) KONA3; External SATA

My questions are:
1) Why does the MAC PRO not support External SATA?
The only Mac Pro compatible External SATA drive is from CalDigit. This has been proved by people in Barefeats and Creativecow. More and more people are using CalDigit S2VR HD and their FASTA-4e card to do the editing.
3) What type of other storage solution has been proven to work?
S2VR HD has been provedn to work and work very well with great price. Many people are raving about CalDigit's products and its support.
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862284
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862289
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862301
http://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/newreadpost.cgi?forumid=8&postid=917131
Power G5 Quad and Intel Mac Pro Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Does the Mac Pro v1.1 support SATA II 6Gb/s?

Does the Mac Pro (late_2006) support SATA II 6Gb/s internal hard drives?

Of course not, not in the sense that 6G existed but you still can use any SATA II/III specification drive.
So yes they are supported in that sense.
Only limit is if you use current SSD you still get great IOPS and such just not the sustained writes.
NO Mac Pro actually has an SATA III port. And it is more about features and specs and all drives have to be backward compatible or drive vendors would be foolish and go out of business (not everyone can or wants or needs to upgrade their motherboard).
You can add PCIe SATA 6G such as CalDigit and others.

Mac Pro Boot from PCIe SATA Card

Is it possible to boot a Mac Pro from a PCIe Sata adapter? I bought a PCIe SATA III card to connect to my 64 Gb C300 SSD Drive. The internal SATA II drives are not fast enough to take full advantage of the C300.

Old Thread But Great News for MAc and PC Laptop Owners I know and trust this company and just bought this for my MAc Pro it boots up the hard drive a couple ways. In Mac hold down the option key and or once in MAc OS tell it to startup disk the external Sata (eSATA)
Worked 100% on my Mac Pro 2008 and this works on Laptops Mac and Windows
One catch its expensive but can go up to 6G WOOOOOOOOWs
Only card out of TON I have tried that will boot at least MAc OSX dunno about windows/Boot Camp but I think theoretically it will with the "Option" key wait and be patient and once you choose the sata drive maybe you can boot boot camp dunno? Actually yes you can once you set the startup disk to the esata boot camp windows will boot!!! Wooooooooot
http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-6g/

Extra SATA ports in Windows

Has anyone gotten the extra SATA ports to work in windows XP? they don't seem to be active.

I have a seagate 7200.10 320GB installed in the 2nd Optical drive bay. Its being used as an XP boot disk with a second partion HFS+ formatted as a share between XP and OSX.
In osx partition the lone drive you want to use using the MBR partition option. Add a second fat32 partition as a share if need be. Or, if you use macdrive in XP make it HFS+.
Shutdown and remove all drives but the xp boot drive. Install XP.

Mac Pro with Dell UP2414Q Sleep Wake Issue

Hi,
I have *two* Dell UP2414Q displays connected to a new Mac Pro, both using Display Port 1.2 (MST) setting in order to get 4K @ 60Hz.
Works fine. Except Google Chrome which is really lame at redrawing all these pixels when you scroll up/down.
The issue is: when the displays go to sleep for a longer period of time (actually it's probably when the Mac Pro itself has gone to sleep) and I wake the system up, the Dells sometimes won't wake up!
And if I start fiddling with the display buttons I will get a half image (left half of the screen). Same problem on each display except sometime it's the first one that doesn't wake up, sometimes it's the second one and sometimes it's both. Unfortunately the situation where they both wake up is extremely rare
Has anyone else had similar troubles?
Note: I have had similar sleep wake issues with just one UP2414Q connected.
I'm running OS X 10.9.4 (of course).
I'm also having a 3rd smaller display connected though a DVI adapter. That one wakes up 100% of the time. I previously had 3 of these and they did always wake up all 3 without issues.
-Francois.

I have this issue with the UP2414Q monitor and my new Mac Pro . . . . . and then some.
I started by losing the right half of the screen on wake up. After about two months of use, my monitor has developed a fault where both sides of the monitor are displayed but at seemingly very different calibrations. The left half is contrasty and the right half seems to be correctly matched to my working profile. This is using the display port connections. HDMI doesn't have this problem but it also won't run at 60Hz, which was an important factor in my choice of this monitor.
At this point I contacted both Apple and Dell. Although I have had quite a few different Apple support staff over a period of a week or so, they did keep good notes, were very patent and seemed to take a genuine interest into trouble shooting it. I cannot say the same for Dell. At first they did ask questions and did the right thing by sending a replacement. It worked fine on display port, then on HDMI but when I connected it back to display port the split screen problem occurred on the brand new replacement one too. After a day of fiddling with connections it went back to displaying correctly with all connections and has not reverted but it does now have the dead right halve on wakeup more frequently than before. I reconnected the original monitor but that has the split screen problem and I can't find a way of getting it to go away. It is unusable.
This incident with the replacement monitor was five days ago. In that time I have tried to contact Dell support by the original e-mail of the technician that initially helped and by phone, through the support number. The email gets the repeated response "Dear Sir/Madam, Thank you for your email. I have left for the day, hence my reply will be delay". It happens in the mooring or the afternoon. A phone call to Dell's support number always starts with a promise to be transferred to the technician dealing with my case and, without fail ends by me being left on hold indefinitely with a terrible one minute audio loop followed by a repeated promise of the next available agent. I once waited over 30 minutes, just to test it. I live in Australia but this was clearly an international call centre. Dell obviously have no intention of dealing with my case. They will have to talk soon though because I still have an extra one of their monitors.
Unless there is a firmware update for this monitor, I would strongly advise against buying one for a Mac, or any Dell product for that matter.

Mac pro late 2013 one usb port doesn't work

Hello there, I've purchased a used Mac Pro (4 cores, late 2013), and seems like one USB port (lower right) is dead, the rest work fine.
Things I tried:
1. Fixing disk permissions.
2. Resetting NVRAM/PRAM.
3. Running Apple diagnostics (Holding D / Holding Cmd+D during startup).
Nothing helped. What do I do now?

When you plug something in, go to the System Profiler (Apple menu, then "more info"). Does it recognize whatever is in the USB port? Could be a driver issue...

Mac Pro w Boot Camp - SATA, AHCI, EFI, BIOS - what can we do? (Cross Post)

I am trying to centralize the discussion of this particular issue which prevents the Mac Pro from being the ultimate cross platform system.
Please refer to the original thread located at:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=225349
Mac Pro 2.66 Mac OS X (10.4.7) 4 x 512MB RAM Modules, Boot Camp 1.1

I agree with all the posts. I did the whole thing again to 1.1 and find this system base device and the sata drive speed UDMA issue to be serious for cross platform. What I would like to know is what is the performance with the sata on the Mac OS side. I did a encode of video and it
didn't seem to be much faster than my G5 Dual 2.0 processor machine. I would like to hear from others on their video encoding to see if this sata issue goes throughout the whole machine. I'm dissappointed with the winxp thing. 1.1 is better and did alot better install, but I do realize that it is beta. Non the less, the sata issue is huge. What makes it worse is that Intel won't even give a little bit of support, basically they said to me that it was all Mac problems. I hope there are many changes, in the mean time the cross platform is not working for me. I did get autocad to run reasonable, but nothing like it should with the power under the hood.
Mike in WA
mac pro Windows XP Pro

I have an optical mouse that came with my Mac Pro plugged into the USB port on the keyboard. After a year of working normally, the trackball all of a sudden stopped scrolling down. It scrolls up just fine, but not down. Any thoughts?

I have an optical mouse that came with my Mac Pro, the only thing plugged into the USB port on the keyboard. After a year of working normally, the trackball all of a sudden stopped scrolling down. It scrolls up just fine, but not down. Any thoughts?

Well
I tried all of the suggestions, sort of. I did not have alcohol wipes, but I did take alcohol and pour some ona white paper towel and then rolled the mouse touch ball aroound and that finally cleared up the problem. Just inverting it on paper did not do the reick, it needed some help with the alcohol. Of course the probelm is the debris that gets inside and it really needs to come out.
This is a huge problem for RIM devices users too.

Mac Pro Compatibility With Older SATA Drives And DVI Connectors

I soon plan to replace my 5 year old G5 with a new Mac Pro and need two questions answered so that I will know what options i have for the transfer of older data and apps. The Apple web site for the Mac Pro includes the following paragraph which gives me reason for concern:
Your Mac Pro includes four drive bays, allowing you to configure it with
up to 8 terabytes of storage using 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s drives, up
to 2 terabytes of storage using high-performance solid-state drives, or
any combination of each type of drive. Configure each drive bay
separately.
Does the phrase "using 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s drives" mean that the Mac Pro will ONLY work with 3Gb/s drives or that it performs best with 3Gb/s drives?
I currently have two internal SATA 250/300 GB Maxtors (Maxtor 7Y250M0 and Maxtor 6B300S0... both are 7200 RPM but I don't know the data transfer speed). Ideally I would get a Mac Pro with a single 1 TB drive, move one or both of these older SATA drives to the new computer, one temporarily and the other permanently in order to transfer data and Apps to the new machine. If this is not possible then the new machine will need to wait until after I get a new larger FW external drive to use as a data transfer medium (I had planned to do that anyhow). I need to do some advance planning for this so I need to know what to expect in advance. I noticed this possible wording ambiguity on Apple's description of the Mac Pro long ago, but now I need to find out the answer for sure. Apple, you need to be more specific with your words.
Can anybody answer this question for me?
My second question regards display connectors. Does the standard (no bucks added) display card include a standard DVI connector or only the newer Mini-DVI connectors. I think I see a standard DVI connector in the low res picture of the back of the Mac Pro but am unsure. My 5 year old Apple display bit the dust a year ago and I had to replace it with an HP 2009m display (mumble grumble) which does use a standard DVI connector. A new Apple display is too rich for my blood so I plan to continue using the HP display for now and need to find out if I will need a display adapter to go with it.
Many thanks to anyone who can answer these questions authoritatively.
For anyone who asks why I still run 10.3.9 on my G5, I can only answer response speed. New OS versions always act like a lead anchor on a machine with their added overhead and Tiger really does feel like a ball and chain tied to me... it just does not reaspond as fast as I do. I look forward to the speed of a new machine.
Phil Rogers
--

Does the phrase "using 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s drives" mean that the Mac Pro will ONLY work with 3Gb/s drives or that it performs best with 3Gb/s drives?
Any commercial sATA drive will do just fine. 7200 RPM is not a requirement.
WD "Green" drives have caused user complaints about "long delay until ready" when installed inside a Mac Pro, but are fine for backups.
You are making the leap from PowerPC to Intel Mac. Eventually, you should re-initialize your old drives to GUID partition table for best responsiveness.
Migrating your System will not be possible. Use the pre-installed System or Install a new System on a GUID-partitioned drive with the release DVD in the box.
Migrating your Applications is a Bad Idea. You should plan on re-installing all your third-party Applications from their release discs.

Just got the new 2010 Mac Pro and the Mini DVI ports are dead

Anyone else having this issue?
Anyone know if they need to be "enabled" somehow?

Yes, the adapter does seem to go all the way up to the plastic shell. And the the adapters and displays work fine when driven by either of my MacBook Pros. And there seems to be some sort of connection being made because when the adapter is unplugged, the monitor goes through its typical "I'm unplugged" test mode phases with color screens and so forth, but when I plug it in to the Mac Pro, it goes black.

Mac Pro 1,1 extra SATA port issues

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