Is it possible to upgrade the Mac Pro with SCSI/SAS drives?

Hi guys I am considering to move on to a Mac Pro from my old PC.
The Mac Pro enclosure is quite unique in its hard drive holders as no cables are used and all drives are connected with a plugin mechanism.
So I am curious if that will allow me to upgrade to a SCSI/SAS storage system which requires cable connections between drives and the SCSI/SAS card on the PCI-E slot. I dont know if this will be possible with the Mac Pro enclosure.
Has anyone tried to do this？
Btw is there any Ultra320 or SAS(preferably) interface card available for Mac OS X?

The connectors for SATA drives can be used with SAS drives. However, the controller needs to be SAS compatible. I have never installed a SAS drive in the Mac Pro bay to see what happens. If some one has a SAS drive and wants to try this I would be interested in the results.
My guess is that the Mac Pro would not see the drive.
Areca sells the Mac Pro PCIe bootable ARC-1680 SAS controller in several configurations. This controller allows the user to utilize SAS or SATA hard drives connected to the card. The ARC-1680x comes with two external mini SAS connectors that can support eight direct connect hard drives or up to 128 devices (in theory) when used with SAS expanders.
The ARC-1680LP has one internal mini SAS port and one external mini SAS port. I looked at the Mac Pro internal SATA connectors and they can unscrew from the frame but there is only about 1/2" of clearance in that area of the case. In addition, I would want the hot swap bays to still operate and I did not see an easy way to patch into the existing SATA connectors. It would be nice if the Mac Pro factory connectors used snap on SATA connector on the back of the backplane so that users could interface the 4 SATA bays with an internal PCie controller. However, its hard wired in the existing configuration. With the new Mac Pro PCIe RAID 5 card on the market there must be alternative connectors that allow this type of installation to work properly.
Based on the ease at which the Areca SAS controller can be added as an external using the ARC-1680x I went with that option. I am using it with eight direct connect SATA hard drives now. I plan to expand the storage by adding a SAS expander in the form of a hub or an enclosure with SAS capabilities. I have been looking at a 16 bay SAS enclosure but I am not sure how loud it will be
Details on the ARC-1680 can be found here:
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/pcietosas1680series.htm
Its very cool to have SAS or SATA capability along with a bootable card that can support tons of hard drives and RAID levels 0, 1,1E, 3, 5, 6, 10, 30, 50, 60 or JBOD . I booted the Mac Pro with a 2TB Mac OS X 10.4.10 RAID 6 volume and ran Xbench. It shows a 400MB/sec. hard drive setup and raises the overall Xbench score substantially.
While I doubt I will boot the Mac Pro from the RAID 6 volume much, it is very cool that that function is available. This is the only PCIe host adapter I have found with boot capabilities besides Apples new $999 4 port SATA internal card. SAS has lots of expansion capabilities. Users that want pretty much unlimited hard drive connectivity will enjoy the new ARC-1680x.
Have fun!

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