internal 8tb hd for mac pro mid 2010?

Chris, I am very capable of confusion over simple things. Is the helper disk needed if the 8TB is only storage, while another disk (SSD) is the system drive? I don't need a mondo drive as the system drive, but I do need mondo storage.

Rotating drives, even very large ones, are limited by the data density on the platters and the spin rate. These drives tend to be only capable of about 125M Bytes/sec in one burst, followed by a substantial dead time while the drive does a seek to next track. 10,000 RPM drives do a little better.

Even SATA-II at 375M Bytes/sec is not a real bottleneck to Rotating magnetic drives.

Hi Dan,

hmm, if the helper disk is needed in every case ... i dont know.

In my case, i had a mp 2010, and a 8 tb system disk with 10.8.xx on it. I tried to update to 10.11. No success, somewhere in the upgrade process i got some error message. 10.8 was still perfect working on it. A second try gave the same result.

Then in a thid attempt i got an old disk, i dont remember its size, installed 10.8 on it. Then with the smaller helper disk i upgraded 10.11 with the 8tb disk as target. Success!

I removed the old helper disk, and booted 10.11. directly from the 8tb. Perfect, a 8 tb osx system and data disk.

All following system updates worked withour helper disk, now i have the current 10.12.3 on it.

In your case, simply try to do the update directly from your multi tb disk. But make a backup first! No backup, no mercy 😎

if you success, be happy. If no success, use a helper disk. ssd or rotating doesnt make a difference.

greetings from germany

Chris

Ooops, i didnt read carefully. You will keep your ssd as system osx drive. In this case i am pretty sure that you will not need an additional helper disk (which i needed only for the upgrade process, then removed after done this).

greetings from germany

Chris

There are three possible issue here.

SATA vs. SATA III

The built-in drive bays of the Mac Pro 2010 only provide SATA II capability. There is a way to potentially 'upgrade' them to SATA III capability but even the newest fastest spinning hard disks are unlikely to need the extra speed of SATA III. If you are interested in upgrading the drive bays the process requires two steps, first you need to buy a PCIe SATA III adapter, and secondly you need to buy new special drive sleds to fit in to the drive bays and connect to the PCIe SATA III card. (Realistically only SSD drives are fast enough to exceed SATA II speeds.)

I have done this myself 'because I could' using secondhand items but here are links for new examples.

http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_i d=189%20

https://www.startech.com/uk/Cards-Adapters/HDD-Controllers/SATA-Cards/PCI-Expres s-SATA-III-RAID-Controller-Card-Mini-SAS…

The way this works is that the above special drive sleds bypass the built-in SATA II connector and instead go via a miniSAS cable to the PCIe card. These drive sleds still fit in the original bays and still draw power for the hard disks from the original built-in connectors.

A SATA III drive will work in a SATA II and even SATA I drive bay. Unless one of the issues listed below applies.

Drive sleds, screw positions and bigger capacity drives

Some newer higher capacity drives i.e. 6TB or bigger use a different layout for the screw positions and as such would not 'fit' the original Apple provided drive sleds. It is possible to buy replacement drive sleds (not the MaxUpgrades ones) which will still fit the Apple drive bays and still use the built-in SATA II connections. See http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MPRODBKTLG6/

I do not know for certain whether the MaxUpgrades drive sleds are universal or only support older style screw layouts. It looks like the MaxUpgrade drive sleds have five screw holes which means that for the newer positions you might be able to fit three screws which would be sufficient.

Drive capacity limits, block sizes, etc.

It has been the case that some SATA controller chips have limits on the size of hard drive they will support, for example an old PowerMac G5 only supports up to 2TB capacity drives, also the Apple hardware RAID card as might be used in a Mac Pro 2010 has a limit of 2.2TB of usable space per drive making 3TB or bigger drives a waste of money. While 4TB drives work fine with the built-in drive bays and I believe 6TB drives also work fine I have not seen any comments about 8TB or 10TB drives since these are so new. Anther potential issue is block size, originally hard drives had a block size of 512bytes but some newer drives can now be bought which use 4K block sizes. As far as I am aware this should not cause a problem on a Mac Pro.

Finally you might need to be running a newer version of OS X than the 10.7.5 you still list in your profile.

Assuming the drive does work it should just be a matter of using Disk Utility to format it as normal. The defaults in Disk Utility should be to format it using the GUID partition scheme and to create a single HFS+ volume which will be suitable for installing OS X on to to boot if you wish, or you can then use it purely as a data volume.

Use extreme caution when initializing.

Since 10.8.4, Disk Utility creates a Logical Volume group on Internal drives over 2.2TB when using the ERASE function, then cannot do anything more to the drive.

If possible, use only Partition, or use an older version of Mac OS X to do the ERASE, or ERASE in an external enclosure. If completely stuck, the logical Volume group partitions can be manually deleted.

I have a mp 2010 / 5.1 too, and my main osx drive is a seagate 8tb. Works (nearly) perfect.

Why only near perfect:

- the old sata ports in the mp are much slower than the drive could be.

- Installing capitan had some issues.

First i tried to install 10.8, then upgrade to capitan. Then the upgrade from 10.8 to 10.11 didn´t work, only error, error, error.

Then i made a "1 tb helper disk with 10.8" using an older drive, started the upgrade to 10.11 with the 8tb as target. Bingo! Success. Updates from 10.11 to 10.11.4 worked perfect again.

Keep in mind that a "single disc install" on a 8tb disc will be faulty, and that with high probability you will need a helper disc smaller than 2tb for the first initial install of 10.8.

greetings from germany

Chris

... and i am eager to see what will happen when the first update to 10.12 will show up.

Yes, the drive should work even if your mac pro doesn't support sata lll, but it won't run at full speed.