Mac Pro 3,1 SATA optical drives - sometimes not visible
Mac Pro 3,1 , early 2008 , 2.8GHz 8 core , 16 Gb RAM , El Capitan 10.11.6
Some time ago , I added a Pioneer BDR 209 SATA Blu ray writer into the lower optical drive bay of my Mac Pro using the SATA port on the motherboard ; I continued to use the original IDE Superdrive in the upper bay .
Recently , the older IDE drive started acting up , making nasty noises , tray not always opening etc , so I purchased another BDR 209 , along with the necessary cables to install it . I took my time , carefully removing the redundant IDE cable whilst retaining the power cable that was loomed with it , and routing the two red SATA cables down to the ports on the motherboard .
I also gave the machine a good vacuuming out as its amazing the amount of dust & fluff that builds up inside ( I do this about once a year ) .
Anyway , on building back up - success - both drives working beautifully , showing up in the menu bar and in Roxio Toast .
Only , now , a week or so on , I've noticed that sometimes on boot up both drives might show up , sometimes only one , and sometimes none . If I restart the machine , I will get a different result from the last time , but unclear why ...
All cables are neatly and securely installed , I've tried resetting NVRAM and PRAM to no avail . I recently did a clean install of El Capitan and reinstalled all my applications so the machine is otherwise running sweetly .
Any ideas ?
Does one of the drives need to be IDE , surely if there are two SATA ports on the motherboard you should be able to run two SATA drives ?
Mac Pro