Level 6

16,014 points

Maximum capacity HDD in Mid 2010 Mac Pro?

Hi, I have a Mid 2010 Mac Pro, 3.33 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon (Mac Pro5,1). I have 4 available HDD drive bays. Three of which are currently occupied with a 1TB Sata HDD. I have one available empty slot. I'm looking to put in a larger HDD for storing/streaming content from to my Roku.

Current HDDs are all Western Digital: WD1003FZEX, WD1001FALS and WD1001FALS. All from the black/caviar family.

I'm looking to stick to the same family, but get a larger sized drive such as the WD4003FZEX.

My question is, what is the physical size limitation of internal hard disk drives for my system, if there is one. I've read 16TBs total but don't know for sure. I know the architecture is the biggest limiting factor but is it possible to put a 6TB drive in this computer?

Thanks in advance 🙂

Mac Pro, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1), / 5870 / LED Cinema Display

Posted on Jan 12, 2015 4:42 PM

22 replies

Nov 11, 2015 12:32 PM in response to P.O.fromberlin

Excellent news!

The bad news is that in El Capitan 10.11, support for Disk Utility RAID has been taken out of Disk Utility. Now you are forced to use Terminal:

$ diskutil RAID

but otherwise, it continues to work.

Striped RAID is great for fast temporary storage, but if the RAID breaks, you are likely to lose everything. Backups are very important !!

Nov 12, 2015 12:24 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Hi again and thanks for the warning but I am not going to put anything on this volume that I cannot loose or recreate. For serious business you need backup for sure. In fact this was only a test to see if the hardware could handle it, I will use it under Linux, the older (2010) Mac Pro is a great solid piece of hardware.

Many thanks again for your candid support.

P.O.

BDAqua

Level 10

250,253 points

Jan 12, 2015 5:29 PM in response to pmiles

Yes, all the 6 TB drives should work, even higher if they made them, at this link click on the Compatibility tab to see...

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western%20Digital/WD60EFRX/

Jan 15, 2015 3:29 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I´m sorry if I insist, but can I use one of these HD disks

Western Digital

4TB

5TB

6TB

SATA III 64MB Red

in my Mac Pro 5,1 (mid 2010)?

Thank you so much.

Best regards.

kahjot

Level 4

2,463 points

Jan 15, 2015 4:02 PM in response to ateliercunha

It sounds like your plan should work.

Jan 15, 2015 4:44 PM in response to kahjot

Great ,-)

Thanks a lot for your help.

Nov 11, 2015 12:27 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks again, this solved my problem, I could erase all logical volume group information, this is what I meant with "uninitialise" 😉

I now have a RAID with 64 TB with r/w at over 550 MB/S 🙂

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Maximum capacity HDD in Mid 2010 Mac Pro?