Chosen Solution
My Mac Pro is a 2007 2x2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon Recently picked it up really cheap. I was hopefully I could use the stack of SAS drive’s I’ve accumulated. It came without a RAID card so I picked one up on eBay and replaced the spent battery. The card is recognized and the RAID Utility reports the card is good, battery is charged and write cache is enabled but all my icons are greyed out and it does not see SAS drives when installed. It is installed in the 4th PCI slot. The RAID card I have is the second generation I believe (date on card of 2009) and it doesn’t have the iPass connector. Because I can’t plug in the iPass cable I’m assuming I have the wrong card? I had read that it would work without but that does not appear to be the case. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
OK, the SAS drives won’t work with Apple SATA II (3.0 Gb/s) controller. You’ll need to find older SATA II drives to use your RAID controller. Newer SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) drives won’t work. To clarify, I’m talking about fixed speed drives. These are drives which only list the one data rate SATA III (6.0 Gb/s). There are a few auto sense drives which unlike the fixed speed drives have the ability to match the data rate to the systems I/O port. As an example: Samsung 860 EVO 2.5” SATA SSD note the interface line lists 3.0 Gb/s. Review the drives spec sheet if its not listed like Samsung it won’t work in your system.
