MacPro 5,1 - 6 Hard Drives (with internal Superdrive)

I'm throwing this out there because I searched for a long time for an EASY way to set up 6 hard drives in the MacPro case. This is how I did it. I'll throw some comments in at the end for anyone interested and also what I would have liked to have done differently. (there aren't any pictures, but I'll put up links to what I used)
Parts List:
2.5 inch Sata II hard drive - Western Digital 160GB (Scorpio Black)
3.5 inch Sata II hard drive - Western Digital 2 TB (Caviar Black)
Optical Bay Mount - OWC Multi Mount - http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MM352A52MP9/
Sata II Internal RAID PCIe Card - Vantec - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004QY7M9I/ref=oh_details_o01_s00_i00
Sata power splitter - StarTech - http://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-PYO2SATA-Power-Splitter-Adapter/dp/B002N2EHVQ
7pin Sata data extension cable - http://www.ebay.com/itm/120999365424?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m143 9.l2649
1m 7pin Sata female to female cable - http://www.ebay.com/itm/221046259401?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m143 9.l2649
Setup:
1. Pull your optical bay sled and install your two drives using your chosen mount.
2. Install your PCIe RAID card with internal Sata II ports.
3. Remove the power supply cable cover (I think that's what it's called; it's the plate immediately behind the optical bay sled, comes out with two screws)
4. If you have a hard drive installed in Bay 1, remove it from the case and out of your way.
5. Run your 1m Sata data female to female cable from your RAID card, under the top-most portion of your PCIe fan (do not remove the fan), and follow the bundled cables up through the divider, and in front of the optical bay doors.
6. Replace the power supply cable cover, being careful to route the Sata cable along with the other cables, and re-secure cover.
7. Connect Sata data splitter to Mac lower Sata connector. You will have to do minor fabrication to the splitter to allow it to fit.
8. Connect the 7pin Sata data extension cable to Mac lower Sata connector. You will have to do more minor fabrication to the splitter to allow it to fit.
9. Carefully replace your optical bay sled and begin connecting cables. You should connect your superdrive to the Mac upper Sata connector first. You should then connect the power splitter to both drives. Then connect your Sata data cables to both drives. You may have to adjust the position of the optical bay sled to adequately connect all cables.
10. Replace anything you removed (like your Bay 1 hard drive), and close up your tower.
11. If needed, install drivers for your PCIe card.
12. That's it, you're done. Take note that if your RAID card does not have boot capability, you will only get boot functionality out of the drive that you connected using the data extension cable. The drive you connected to the RAID card will only have boot capability if your card supports it.
My present computer:
MacPro 5,1 - Quad core Xeon 2.8GHz
Hard drive 1, 2 - 64GB Striped RAID for Scratch Disk
Hard drive 1, 2 - 900GB Unused (trying to convert at least half to a Windows XP drive, but that's another issue)
Hard drive 3, 4 - 2TB Striped RAID for Main Data
Hard drive lower - 160GB 2.5 inch Boot Drive
Hard drive external (PCIe) - 2TB Time Machine
Not including hard drives, we're talking about $60. I wasn't sure if this combination of items was going to work out, so I wanted to keep the dollar total low.
In retrospect, if I'm being totally honest, I should have just done what everyone said and used an external drive for time machine (or whatever 6th hard drive I wanted). Here's why: My RAID card doesn't have boot functionality, which I didn't think would matter. I planned on using the drive connected to the RAID card for my Time Machine. Everything works great, except I can't boot from my homemade OSX USB recovery drive and use Time Machine for a restore. This is because the RAID card drivers aren't on it. I could probably make a workaround, but I will just use my external clone if I ever need to do a full restore. Had I used an external FireWire 800 enclosure in the first place, I wouldn't have had to worry about it.
Notes about cables:
Don't buy the cheapest ones you can find on eBay. After fabricating my data extension cable, the L-shaped portion that the connectors lay on broke off inside my Mac's connector. I threaded the connectors back in, but for now, the two are married with electrical tape. Not very pretty, and a big reason why I didn't take the system apart to make pictures for the guide.
Know what lengths you need. I kind of guessed about lengths. The data extension cable should preferably be the same length as the power splitter. Unfortunately my power splitter was a little long, and my data extension cable was a little short. This created the need to bend them excessively so that I could cram them into the little space that was left. This caused my above issue in which one of the connectors broke.
OWC MultiMount:
This is what started my quest in the first place. This product existed, so clearly there must be an answer for how to do it. You can fit two drives in the lower bay, so you should do it, right? I love OWC, but this mount is pretty junky. It works, but it's not OEM styled. The material they use (which they say is aluminum) is very flimsy. I had to bend it back into position in several places to make the brackets line up. There's no sound from the bracket while the machine is running, which is good. But I was surprised at how seemingly low quality this mount was. I would have been much happier with a machined aluminum mount with rubber grommets like the stock hard drive sleds.
A word about which mount you get: You will be much happier if you mount 2 2.5-inch drives in the lower bay (at least in a vertical configuration). You'll have more space to work with, and other than price, there's no reason to stick a 3.5-inch drive in there (unless you're cheap like me).
When all is said and done, I'm happy that I got 6 Hard drives crammed into my case. I'll never (hopefully) outgrow my system. I have 2TB of data storage (which I doubt I'll surpass). I've got a boot disk that's plenty large, I've got a scratch disk that's super fast, and I've even got some additional high-speed hard drive space I'll hopefully get a Windows partition onto. The better option though, would be to put one hard drive in that bay. Skip all the add-ons, and get an external FireWire 800 enclosure. Dedicate one port on the rear of the tower to it, and stash it out of sight. It's exactly the same but easier to remove.
Feel free to ask any questions. I'll do my best to answer them.

Have you checked this site? They are out of stock at the moment, but more should arrive soon:
http://store.apple.com/au/browse/home/specialdeals/mac

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Can I boot an internal hard drive with snow leopard?

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Let me first document the steps that did not work and then I will document the steps that worked.
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Moral of the story - It is the spirit that counts.

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13in. Aluminum, Late 2008 MacBook, 250 GB (with upgraded Samsung SSD 840 Pro Series 256GB hard drive)
Processor 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
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plus
Apple Time Capsule 4th Generation 2TB
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If you have a time machine back up of your current drive you can do this
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Hi folks.
My 160gb hard drive on my iMac is full so I've bought 2 x 1tb external hard drives, my plan being to move my iTunes library to one of them (as this uses the majority of space) and run it from there and use the 2nd hard drive with Time Machine.
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Just bought a 2tb external hard drive with the intention of moving my iPhoto data files to it. I have so much of my 500 gigs being used up by images and video. Questions: Will this foul up my iPhoto app?
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Are you running a Managed or a Referenced Library?
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Regards
TD

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It means there is no bootable system on the drive. If you still have access to the old drive, then I suggest you boot from it then clone it to the new internal drive. Use OPTION boot to boot from the Recovery HD on the old drive:
Boot to the Recovery HD:
Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD and click on the downward pointing arrow button.
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Source means the external old drive. Destination means the new internal drive.

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I have a spring 2008 24" iMac running Snow Leopard.
I am about to put a new 2TB hard drive in it and after I do that I want to do a clean install of Lion on it.
I do not want to upgrade my Snow Leopard install to Lion. I will keep it on my back up drive as a fallback incase of serious workflow incompatiblities with the new OS.
For my workflow I create and use multiple partitions (Mac OS, Windows and multiple HFS+ for data) on my hard drive and I have seen that Lion creates it's own hidden recovery partition as well for the recovery functionality.
My questions are:
1) Will I have issues running Lion on a partition on a hard drive with multiple partitions that have different file systems?
2) If I install Lion into one of these partitions will it create it's recovery partition within the space of the partition it is being installed into?
3) I will be creating a clean install by downloading Lion using the App Store and then burning an installer DVD using instructions I found elsewhere and then using that to do the install on the new drive. Is that the best route to take?
All my current data I will have on a backup external hard drive and after I complete the Lion install on the new larger drive I will manually reinstall all my software and move my data back from my backup drive to the new drive one partition at a time except of course for OS partition. I keep all my real user data outside of that partition anyway.

I believe this article answers most of your questions.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718
or possibly
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4649
You will most likely run into the error message that "Some features of Mac OS X Lion are not supported for the disk" if you have multiple partitions set up, especially if they were not set up using Bootcamp and/or have serveral different file systems.
You can confirm that the Recovery Partition will not be installed by checking Disk Utility for your current partition map scheme.
This is most definitely not the end of the world as it is quite easy to create an external Recovery disk.
1) No, you shouldn't have issues running Lion, but Recovery HD will not be created.
2) No, and in your case it doesn't sound like it will be installed on your internal drive at all.
3) Yes. If you begin with an empty partition, then install Lion that would be considered a clean install.
Hope that helps.
Autumn

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