MOTUnation.com

Can those special screws that hold the SATA drives in place within their drive bays, be ordered?

I now have to use pliers on one of them, as the Philips screw head is stripped (how I hate Philips screws in general, for this reason!).

Only last weekend, when I was incrementally upgrading the size of each of my hard drives, did I notice for the first time why that one drive bay had always been hard to swap: Apple screwed up (no pun intended) and the lower plastic washer was on the top side just like the upper plastic washer.

I took care of that (it was hard to see until I compared to the other drive bays), but the damage was already done the last time I swapped drives in that bay. Tonight, when I got to the final round of iterations on drive upgrades, I had to bring out the pliers for one of the two screws affected by the manufacturing/inspection error.

Luckily, the other one that wasn't installed correctly isn't stripped, and the other two were installed correctly -- as were all four screws on each of the other three drive bays.

As these are specific to Apple's Porsche-designed MacPro 2010 (known as "5,1"), I seriously doubt they are stock parts available from anyone other than Apple.

If you are connecting via the internal SATA buss, just place your SSD in the optical bay and connect to the extra port there… you can move the optical drive to the lower optical bay and use it as a shelf if you like. That's what I did, and on it now rest, if I recall correctly, four SSDs.

This isn't an SSD; I put that one in the PCIe slot using the OWC setup.

Regular SATA drive. If I ever have to swap bays or drives again, that screw isn't going back in for sure. Even with pliers, I barely got it to turn this time. Totally rethreaded thanks to the original mess-up by Apple when they manufactured the bay.

I think OWC might have these screws available, they sell replacement sleds for the MP's ,so I suspect they also would have the screws.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MPRODBKTLG6/

I'd try calling & ask someone in tech support.
Any good authorized Mac repair shop will probably have these available as well,in NY I'd try Tekserve there must be similar shops in SF.

Thanks; it's worth a try. OWC should be quicker than trying to navigate Apple's overly-complicated parts catalogue. And it might be worth $20 to buy a new sled instead.