Installing a PCIe card in the Mac Pro is, in some ways, easier even than a SATA drive. The same goes for the new Haswell-equipped MacBook Airs that shipped earlier this year. It uses the same connection, eschewing SATA for a direct PCIe link. And there's a lot more bandwidth to work with - 10 gigabits per second.īy going PCIe, you're going to more closely align your Mac Pro with Apple's new black, cylindrical Mac Pro. PCIe is the expansion card interface on the Mac Pro, the one you use for graphics cards and whatever other expansion cards you want to install. The SATA interface on the Mac Pro has a top transfer speed of 3 gigabits per second.īut there's another option if you're interested in maximum performance: go straight to PCI Express (PCIe). SATA is terrific because it's easy to work with and it's ubiquitous, so there are a lot of products - both hard drives and SSDs - designed to use it. Create a partition map to your liking just like you would a hard drive and you're in business. Once you've got the drive in, it's a simple matter of booting up the Mac and running Disk Utility in the Utilities folder. OWC also offers a replacement drive sled that does the job, if you're using a 2009-era or later Mac Pro. Mounting a 2.5-inch SSD into a 3.5-inch hard drive sled isn't tricky - you just need a simple drive adapter to get the job done.
SATA SSDs are, by and large, designed with a 2.5-inch hard drive in mind, because that's what's used in most laptops - and laptops are very popular. The screws match up with mounting holes that are already pre-drilled onto all 3.5-inch hard disk mechanisms. But you don't need your own screws - they're built into the sled. The screwdriver is used to actually mate the drive to the tray to hold it in place. The only tool you'll need is a Philips head screwdriver. To get inside your Mac Pro, you just lift a lever on the back of the box, then slide out the side panel. The internal drive bays are one of those features that's remained a constant through the Mac Pro's evolution, so regardless of which model of Mac Pro you use, it's going to be pretty similar.Īpple's made it very easy to get access to those drive bays, and to put in (and remove) drives. The various Mac Pros that have come out over the years differ in speed, interfaces and basic construction, but they all share common features. It's quick, it's easy and it's trademark Apple elegant, even within the brutalist architecture of the Mac Pro. What makes the SATA bays particularly easy to work with is the Mac Pro's "sled" design - each drive mechanism is mounted on a tray that easily slides out and slides back in, locking the drive into place without needing to manually connect any ribbon cables. SATA is also used to connect the internal optical drive (or drives) your Mac Pro comes with. Inside your Mac Pro are four SATA bays, each of which can accommodate a 3.5-inch hard disk drive.
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Serial ATA, or SATA, is the backbone of the aluminum Mac Pro's local data storage interface. All of them are running fresh copies of Mountain Lion 10.8.4, with up to date security patches. Both the SATA SSD and the PCIe card have 240 gigabyte capacities, which were pretty comparable to the original 320GB 3.5-inch hard drive that came with this Mac Pro. One is a SATA-based SSD - the Mercury Extreme 6G, the other is closer to what the new Mac Pro has - it's a PCIe card with SSDs on it, OWC's Mercury Accelsior_E2. To give you some sense of how significant the difference in speed is, I've borrowed a couple of different products from Other World Computing (OWC).
The bottom line is that you're going to see a huge increase in speed either way it's just a question of what your budget will allow. There are different options available for Mac Pro-compatible SSDs, and we're going to look at two of them here: a SATA-based SSD and a PCIe-based SSD. But should you replace your Mac Pro with the new one? If you want to get as much bang for your buck, upgrade your aluminum Mac Pro with an Solid State Drive (SSD). Apple's new Mac Pro has some Mac users buzzing: the tiny machine appears to be crazy fast, and it's a total redesign of the system - replacing the giant aluminum box of yore with a tiny little black cylinder.
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