how to run a thunderbolt hard disk on my old mac

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how to run a thunderbolt hard disk on my old mac

Hi,

I heard from Western Digital supplier here in my country(Malaysia) that they will no longer come out with Firewire 800 hard disk and replace with Thunderbolts.
My company uses FW800 HDD for our Video Editing jobs and I would like to ask is there any ways that I can run Thunderbolts HDD on my old Mac Pros?
As far as I know, all my office machines does not have Thundebolts and it would cost a bomb for us to change all the Mac Pro.

I was told that they will be using USB3.0 for the upcoming batch of HDD but it will be still slow to use USB to work comparing to FW or Thunderbolt. Also our Mac Pros does not have USB3.0 ports as well so plugging in USB3.0 will only run at normal speed.

Would appreciate if anyone can share their knowledge and help me here.

Thanks

Best Regards,
Alistair.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.5)

Posted on Feb 3, 2013 11:22 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 4, 2013 1:40 AM in response to alister_88

There is no way to use Thunderbolt with a Mac Pro. There are PCI-e USB 3 cards for the Mac Pro, such as from CalDigital, but read closely about drivers.

You do';t have to buy FW800 drives from WD. You can buy the bare SATA drives then install them in FW800 enclosures from other companies. If the drives are larger than 2.2 TB, make sure the enclosure supports them,

For fast external storage you can use PCI-e cards to connect to external drive enclosures. There are simple cards, such as

<http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/MXPCIE6G2S2/>

or more elaborate ones, with features such as RAID, eight SATA ports, support for enclosures with port multipliers, etc.

This card

<http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-q6g/>

can support twenty SATA drives (four port multiplier enclosures with five drives each) for up to 80 TB.

You can use up to three cards.

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Answer 2

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Feb 4, 2013 9:54 AM in response to alister_88

Caldigit sells a USB3 + SATA3 PCIe controller

I stopped using FW800 as drives exceed its limitations and only use native SATA or USB3

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