Hmph... $29 + shipping for a spare sled is still cheaper than a new hard drive, or an out-of-warranty repair.

Or, you could buy an external SATA drive dock.

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There are 2 spare esata ports on the motherboard.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20Technology/MPQXES2/
For $25 plus shipping you have 2 external esata ports.
Easier to swap drives by unplugging a cable or 2 than taking your machine apart.

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I had just been in a regular PC shop in Munich (Germany) where they sell such adapters with a single eSATA connector for 5 Euro, which is about 7-8 US$.

Nevertech is asking a lot of money.

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If a $29 drive sled is a lot of money, you bought the wrong computer. That's like 1% of the purchase price of the computer. I'm not going to jury-rig a physically unattached hard drive laying on felt into a $3K computer. How clever will you feel if/when the SATA connector on the backplane breaks or the drive overhead from sitting on felt and having no airflow?

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I have a question about this: I just bought an external drive enclosure with an eSATA connector (by Revoltec), and also installed one of those eSATA connectors from the internal free SATA connectors to the back of my 8-core Mac Pro.

The problem is that the drive is not getting recognized by the Mac now (10.5.2). The enclosure came with a CD containing drivers for "MAC", but they're from 2001 and surely not Intel-adapted. And they appear to be for the USB interface (which works out of the box).

So, does someone know how to make the Mac recognize eSATA drives connected via a SATA cable adapter to the mainboard?



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Err, actually, I found that it _works_ just out of the box. But only when I have the drive connected at boot time! So, it's behaving like an internal drive that you cannot connect or remove while the Mac is running.

I wonder if there's a way to tell the OS that these two additional SATA slots on the board are to be treated like external drive connectors, allowing hot-swapping?



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Hot swapping isn't recommended on a Mac Pro!!

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