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I’m thinking about performing surgery on my Mac Pro. It’s been a while since my computer has felt fast, or like I had enough storage to do what I want to do with it.

I want a lot more storage in the case. I want to see the performance difference that upgrading to an SSD boot disk might make. I want to continue to support Boot Camp, since there is the off chance I may boot into Windows. Whatever happens, I want the new storage to be faster than what it’s replacing.

I already have a CalDigit RAID card, obtained late in 2010. I haven’t populated it yet, so I still have flexibility. The RAID card will allow me to add multiple drives into one larger volume, which should produce a performance benefit over having a single larger drive. (The latest generation of drives just hit 3 TB in capacity.)

Here’s the plan I am roughing out:

• Reroute the motherboard SFF-8087 (iPass) connection to the optical drive bay, breaking it out into SATA connections. From one forum post I found, I think that it would be good to have an iPass cable longer than the common 0.5 meter variety. The Adaptec 1 meter SFF-8087 to SFF-8482 cable seems to be a good choice; it has removable power cables that appear to be Molex-to-SATA. It’s also one of the least expensive options I uncovered, especially when considering cables that have SFF-8482 connectors that combine SATA data and power.
• Set up space for a 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch drive in the empty lower optical bay with the OWC Multi-mount 2.5“ to 3.5” and 3.5“ to 5.25” bracket and cable set for 2006-2008 MacPro. I don’t really need the entire kit, but I’m hoping the bundled Molex-to-SATA power splitter will work with the Adaptec iPass cable to support both drives from the single Molex cable in the bottom half of the bay.
• Get a relatively small OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD to set up as the primary boot disk, physically locating it in the OWC bracket in the optical bay. Connect it to the new iPass cable.
• Use one of my existing 3.5 inch drives in the optical bay as a Boot Camp disk. Connect it to the new iPass cable.
• Reroute the iPass connector from the motherboard to the CalDigit RAID card, so that the four 3.5 inch SATA drive bays are associated with that controller.
• Populate the four drive bays with matched drives for a RAID. These will hold user data that doesn’t fit on the SSD.
• Add a UPS that supports USB shutdown on Mac OS X. I’m looking at the CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD. Graceful shutdown during power outages will be critical for the RAID array.
• Optionally route the two remaining motherboard SATA connectors, which I’ve heard do not support booting or Boot Camp, to a back panel eSATA PCI Express insert. This would give me more options for external storage beyond FireWire 800. This will be important for faster local backup, if I can get to that point. (While the CalDigit RAID card does support external storage, it reportedly can only use CalDigit’s own enclosures.)
• Optionally add more RAM. Memory for my early 2008 Mac Pro is on the down side of the commodity curve, so it’s not getting any cheaper.

Of course, all of this is all more expensive than I would like — especially since right now it’s something of a gamble as to whether it would work or not — but the more I think about it, the more fun it seems. I haven’t taken on a project like this in a long time.

It was extremely satisfying to see the following dialog about the volume expansion when logging into my Infrant ReadyNAS:

The overall process of expansion took about four days, converting from four 320 GB drives to four 1 TB drives. (For reference, I selected the Hitachi 7K1000.B 0A38016 drive from ZipZoomFly, and did so almost entirely on price — despite my longstanding misgivings about IBM/Hitachi drives.)

The capacity expansion took longer than strictly necessary, because I wrote zeros across each of the drives before installing them, one at a time, in the ReadyNAS. (I ended up writing zeros to each drive twice, switching from the Disk Utility to the command line equivalent.)

Near the end of the process, I found out that the automatic X-RAID™ expansion doesn’t happen until you reboot the ReadyNAS after upgrading the last drive. I had also enabled a snapshot on the ReadyNAS, which also prevented the automatic volume capacity expansion, so I had to delete that.

I’m keenly interested in the CalDigit RAID card for the Mac Pro. It looks like a much better solution than the Apple RAID card to the storage problem — a First World problem if ever there was one — facing certain Mac Pro owners.

I’ve asked myself, “Now that you have this beast, how do you fill up its drive bays?”

The answer is somewhat difficult. You can put four drives in the bays, but in order to get a single volume, you’d minimally need software RAID. For example, you could configure a RAID 1+0 volume with Disk Utility. You could get the expensive Apple RAID card. You might populate a Drobo and connect it via FireWire. Or, you could get a CalDigit RAID card — which is the only bootable, fully-internal RAID controller I’m aware of that competes with Apple’s card.

One advantage of a solution that fits completely inside the Mac Pro case is that you have one less power cord to deal with. In this sense, the CalDigit RAID Card seems preferable to a Drobo. The CalDigit card interfaces directly with the Mac Pro’s own SATA ports, so you can use the existing internal drive bays and slide drives into the normal SATA/power connectors.

I just need to find one on sale …