Add three internal drives to the Mac Pro with the Sonnet Fusion Flex J3i

Wow, the 3rd drive uses the internal USB port. What's with the crazy plug on the drive end?

There aren't any single wide PCIe cards that can hold 4 2.5" drives?

tht said:

Wow, the 3rd drive uses the internal USB port. What's with the crazy plug on the drive end?

There aren't any single wide PCIe cards that can hold 4 2.5" drives?

That is a fairly standard USB 3.0 to SATA cable.

The 2.5-inch drive height pretty much precludes a single-wide PCI-E card with four 2.5-inch drives, but I can't say for sure that there are none. However, I have seen cards that support four M.2 drives, though.

Mike Wuerthele said:

tht said:

Wow, the 3rd drive uses the internal USB port. What's with the crazy plug on the drive end?

There aren't any single wide PCIe cards that can hold 4 2.5" drives?

That is a fairly standard USB 3.0 to SATA cable.

The 2.5-inch drive height pretty much precludes a single-wide PCI-E card with four 2.5-inch drives, but I can't say for sure that there are none. However, I have seen cards that support four M.2 drives, though.

It's an optical illusion that it doesn't look like the red SATA cable plugs?

As for mounting 2.5" form factor drives on PCIe cards, they are of course on the market. Here is one:
https://www.amazon.com/Sedna-Express-Extended-Connector-Included/dp/B07L5SPWNV


The thing with the Mac Pro is that it is much less height constrained for PCIe cards than "normal" PCIe cards. A 10 mm or less thick 2.5" drive will fit in a 1-wide PCIe card, as the picture shows. 15 mm can probably fit too, but it will be tight.

A full length PCIe card is 12.5". Apple's Mac Pro looks like it can hold 5" tall cards, at least. A 2.5" form factor has a 2.76 x 4 inch footprint. This means 4 can be mounted on a 1-wide 12.5" long PCIe card if some vendor wants to do it. Not sure what the worth of using a PCIe slot of 4 to 8 TB of HDD of however large slow SSD drives could be, but it's probably cheap, and probably faster in a RAID config that the SATA ports.

tht said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

tht said:

Wow, the 3rd drive uses the internal USB port. What's with the crazy plug on the drive end?

There aren't any single wide PCIe cards that can hold 4 2.5" drives?

That is a fairly standard USB 3.0 to SATA cable.

The 2.5-inch drive height pretty much precludes a single-wide PCI-E card with four 2.5-inch drives, but I can't say for sure that there are none. However, I have seen cards that support four M.2 drives, though.

It's an optical illusion that it doesn't look like the red SATA cable plugs?

As for mounting 2.5" form factor drives on PCIe cards, they are of course on the market. Here is one:
https://www.amazon.com/Sedna-Express-Extended-Connector-Included/dp/B07L5SPWNV


The thing with the Mac Pro is that it is much less height constrained for PCIe cards than "normal" PCIe cards. A 10 mm or less thick 2.5" drive will fit in a 1-wide PCIe card, as the picture shows. 15 mm can probably fit too, but it will be tight.

A full length PCIe card is 12.5". Apple's Mac Pro looks like it can hold 5" tall cards, at least. A 2.5" form factor has a 2.76 x 4 inch footprint. This means 4 can be mounted on a 1-wide 12.5" long PCIe card if some vendor wants to do it. Not sure what the worth of using a PCIe slot of 4 to 8 TB of HDD of however large slow SSD drives could be, but it's probably cheap, and probably faster in a RAID config that the SATA ports.

Wasn't this about four-drive cards? I know that two-drive cards exist. I don't think four-drive ones do.

Given that M.2 cards are very, very close in price to SATA ones, I don't foresee a four-drive card for 2.5-inch drives utilizing the extra volume in the Mac Pro.

Mike Wuerthele said:

Wasn't this about four-drive cards? I know that two-drive cards exist. I don't think four-drive ones do.

Does NOT work with Mac, but 4x SATA SSD via PCIe adapters do exist:
 https://www.amazon.com/Sedna-Controller-HyperDuo-Technology-Connector/dp/B07SGQLTQS/