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Just got a mac pro quad 8 in the mail bought it used. Been on a motorola G5 dualie. So I'm pretty much in the dark about all the changes in ram [ this stuff looks very serious ] doing ok there so far but hardrives are a bit of a puzzle to me. The bays have a mb type connector at the back but they look a bit small to me. Can I put my old Seagater barracudas from the 90s and 2ks in the new mac. If not I guess I could run them as in external cases? Thanks.

Ron

I doubt you can put a 90s drive in a mac pro. It will likely be an IDE and I think the oldest Pros use SATA. But you have a drive you bought in the 90s, possibly pushing 20 years old, that is still usable?

G5s have SATA drive bays and were the first Macs to have them. The earliest drive standard was 1.5G.

The Pro takes a 3.0 SATA drive. Though these are backwards compatible with 1.5, not all of the 1.5 drives are forwards compatible.

If the drive is from the 90s, it's pre-G5 (introduced 2003).

Well, here's a trick, if you really want to use IDE, at least my Mac Pro 2,1 uses IDE for the optical drives, of which there are two bays. Notice that Mac Pros don't usually put their hard drives in the typical front stack, but there are two optical bays? You can put an old IDE drive in the second optical bay.

That said, I would only do it to get stuff off the old bugger and than deep 6 it. Welcome to the new age... SATA2 runs circles around the old IDE buffer rates, and since audio production is very taxing to the drives, you want good fast stuff. Hard drives are cheap, I mean, REALLY CHEAP. For a few years it was touch & go after the floods in Thailand (where most of the drive parts are made), but they're back on track, and you can get a 1TB drive for around $100. If you can afford it, find yourself a decent size SSD, too.

You can use this Universal Drive Adapter from OWC to connect your IDE drive via USB:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20 ... U3NVSPATA/


Frank Ferrucci