Well, the time had come to put some new storage on my MacPro, I thought I'd wait until after NAB until purchasing a fibre channel card with the new 4 port card and the rumours of [[iSCSI]]. So I thought I'd look into putting some drives in the MacPro directly, how difficult can that be?

I did some surfing and selected 3 Western Digital 320Gig disks from Maplin as these seemed to offer the best price/space ratio. This is not my main form of storage, I have an XserveRAID so maxing the thing out to its limits with expensive 750 Gig disks wasn't that attractive. So I placed an order online at about 3pm and was very surprised although deighted when DHL turned up at 10:30 the next morning.

Now, how easy are these to install, there are 4 steps.

1. Open the box that the disks came in
2. Open the MacPro and screw the disks to the metal carriage from the MacPro
3. Slide the carriages into the MacPro
4. Close the door, power up and initialise the disks - you will get a dialogue box on the screen anyway.

That's about as easy as it gets to add [[SATA]] disks to a MacPro.

The MacPro has 3 extra internal bays with carriages to accept disks. Here you can see disk 3 being inserted. Just out of sight on the left is disk 1, the original boot disk.

Now, what really got my goat was the fact that a well known forum host was saying that he didn't recommend internal RAIDs. This is an existing machine feature by Apple, not a bodged disk stuffing exercise as previous third party products have been. Heat and noise so far have not ben a problem, in fact my G5 that is located 10 feet away drowns out the MP and that only has two disks in it. Every G5 owner will recognise that 747 takeoff noise every now and then, compare this to the almost silent MP.

What I find amazing is that technolgy moves so fast. This type of storage is now available to everybody and can be bought on the High Street. It was only 4 years ago I bought a Medea raid for about £3,000. It had less storage than the disks I installed in 15 minutes.