I have two classic MacPro3,1s... and I have some old SAS drives laying around. I thought it would be a fun experiment to try to get a SAS controller put in to use the drives. Non-Apple of course, because of the horrible reviews on it. I found an Areca ARC-1222 on eBay, and got it delivered for US$21.
Since the Apple card is full length, removing the SFF-8087 cable from the motherboard and planting it on the card is easy. But the ARC-1222 is a half-length card, so we have to see if we can adjust the cables. Remove all drives and the front fan. Remove the SFF-8087 from the motherboard, remove the 8 screws holding down the SAS connectors, and pull out the cable (careful of the wifi/BT/other thin wires in there).
Starting on the left, you have power (the SFF-8087 pointing downward) and the drive bay SAS connectors 1 through 4. I need the SFF-8087 to be between connector 2 and 3. We are going to do some bending instead of soldering! No cable-stretcher required! With a little manipulation, you can untangle the wires between connector 1 and 2, the power, and the SFF-8087. Physically swap the positions of connector 1 and 2. There is just enough slack to get the SFF-8087 between 2 and 3, and still have the power reach the motherboard.
Screw the 4 SAS ports back onto the shelf mounts in order from left to right: 2,1,3,4. Now the SFF-8087 is just long enough to clip into the ARC-1222 in the top PCIE slot. Not long enough to go lower.
And when you install a full size 3.5 drive, the fan will have hardly any clearance. Luckily I had a WD-Ice 2.5 to 3.5 converter, so I could put a 2.5 Drive in the 4th bay where the fan is.
Since we now have zero of 4 drive bays to boot from, we have to use the optional SATA ports on the motherboard underneath the front fan. I used a thin strap of aluminum to mount two 2.5 drives underneath the existing DVD-ROM drive (I forgot to take a photo of the completed install).
Route the two sata cables from the motherboard to the top drive bay under the tray.
I installed a Molex 4pin to dual SATA power cable to power the two 2.5 drives.
This was a bit tricky. There is windows software to configure the card, but not MacOS software. So I installed the card in a windows environment so I could find the MAC address.
Once I had that, the card went back into the cMP3,1. The ARC-1222 has a built in ethernet port for in-band management. Connecting the Areca to the network, then I was able to log into the card from the cMP3,1. I have 3x2TB and 1x4TB drives, so not ideal for a raid setup. But I tried it, and initializing a 4x2TB drive as RAID-5 was taking some time. Google leads me to beleive that it would take between 24-48 hours, so I abandoned that just so I could verify MacOS could see the drives. I converted the raid to individual 'pass-through' disks. Upon restart, nothing showed up. Downloaded Areca driver for BigSur and installed in Ventura. Restarted and still no drives. Finally rebooted in Snow Leopard installer and the drives showed up, but failed on formatting. Restarted in Ventura again and then they formatted just fine.
OCLP of course! I have Ventura and Sonoma on the SSD, with room for Sequoia. I have Snow Leopard, Lion, High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina on the Mechanical drive. No idea what I really need the SAS drives for yet, this was just a proof of concept. More testing later...
I also swapped out the wifi a/b/g card for a newer a/b/g/n that I had laying around. Total drives: 4 SAS mechanical drives, the original IDE/PATA DVD, 500GB SSD, and 750GB Mechanical drive.
Part 1, Physical Installation
Since the Apple card is full length, removing the SFF-8087 cable from the motherboard and planting it on the card is easy. But the ARC-1222 is a half-length card, so we have to see if we can adjust the cables. Remove all drives and the front fan. Remove the SFF-8087 from the motherboard, remove the 8 screws holding down the SAS connectors, and pull out the cable (careful of the wifi/BT/other thin wires in there).
Starting on the left, you have power (the SFF-8087 pointing downward) and the drive bay SAS connectors 1 through 4. I need the SFF-8087 to be between connector 2 and 3. We are going to do some bending instead of soldering! No cable-stretcher required! With a little manipulation, you can untangle the wires between connector 1 and 2, the power, and the SFF-8087. Physically swap the positions of connector 1 and 2. There is just enough slack to get the SFF-8087 between 2 and 3, and still have the power reach the motherboard.
Screw the 4 SAS ports back onto the shelf mounts in order from left to right: 2,1,3,4. Now the SFF-8087 is just long enough to clip into the ARC-1222 in the top PCIE slot. Not long enough to go lower.
And when you install a full size 3.5 drive, the fan will have hardly any clearance. Luckily I had a WD-Ice 2.5 to 3.5 converter, so I could put a 2.5 Drive in the 4th bay where the fan is.
Part 2, Spare drives
Since we now have zero of 4 drive bays to boot from, we have to use the optional SATA ports on the motherboard underneath the front fan. I used a thin strap of aluminum to mount two 2.5 drives underneath the existing DVD-ROM drive (I forgot to take a photo of the completed install).
Route the two sata cables from the motherboard to the top drive bay under the tray.
I installed a Molex 4pin to dual SATA power cable to power the two 2.5 drives.
Part 3, Software
This was a bit tricky. There is windows software to configure the card, but not MacOS software. So I installed the card in a windows environment so I could find the MAC address.
Once I had that, the card went back into the cMP3,1. The ARC-1222 has a built in ethernet port for in-band management. Connecting the Areca to the network, then I was able to log into the card from the cMP3,1. I have 3x2TB and 1x4TB drives, so not ideal for a raid setup. But I tried it, and initializing a 4x2TB drive as RAID-5 was taking some time. Google leads me to beleive that it would take between 24-48 hours, so I abandoned that just so I could verify MacOS could see the drives. I converted the raid to individual 'pass-through' disks. Upon restart, nothing showed up. Downloaded Areca driver for BigSur and installed in Ventura. Restarted and still no drives. Finally rebooted in Snow Leopard installer and the drives showed up, but failed on formatting. Restarted in Ventura again and then they formatted just fine.
OCLP of course! I have Ventura and Sonoma on the SSD, with room for Sequoia. I have Snow Leopard, Lion, High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina on the Mechanical drive. No idea what I really need the SAS drives for yet, this was just a proof of concept. More testing later...
I also swapped out the wifi a/b/g card for a newer a/b/g/n that I had laying around. Total drives: 4 SAS mechanical drives, the original IDE/PATA DVD, 500GB SSD, and 750GB Mechanical drive.
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