Enough power for extra internal drives?

Paul M

Registered
Hi All,

I have a mid-2010 2 x 2.66GHz 6-core with all 4 internal drive bays filled, a superdrive in the standard location, and another HDD under that in the SATA connection designated "Lower" . Back in Jan 2012 I connected an SSD to a Sonnet Tempo E4i - with the power daisy-chained from the "Lower" SATA position, and so far things have been just fine.

Now I'd like to replace the Sonnet Tempo E4i with a MAXPower Raid mini-sas 6G-1e1i card (in the spare x16 slot) to get SATA 6G/s read speed with 2 SSDs.

I used BackMagic Disk Speed Test on one SSD connected to the E4i and got 270.1 MB/s read. With the mini-sas I got 474.1! :cool:

My question is, can a 2010 MacPro5,1 handle the power consumption of 1 SuperDrive, 5 HDDs and 2 SSDs?

Thanks in advance,
Paul
 
I found in my 2008 Mac Pro the power supply seems not to power PCI cards (I have a USB3 card & a 2 port eSata card) very good. The ports seem to be O.K. if i power each device connected to that port though. I have a sneaky feeling the power supply in the 2008 just isn't strong enough or it is stressed to the max.

So try the speed tests with just that one external connected to see if it gets the same reading.
 
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