Mooner's HackPro (Gigabyte Z68MX-UD2H-B3 in Mac Pro case)

[ptmays]

I was just doing the math, this edging could be a good little side business, the guy on ebay has sold 95' of it for $155 so he has used 1/5th of a roll and made back 65% of the investment take out shipping cost and you can call it 50% return so at 200' he will be in the black and be all profit so assuming he can sell the entire roll at the same rate as the first 95' he is looking at $465 profit off of a single roll.

So there is the business plan any takers, I will gladly be your first customer, I need 3'

 

[mooner]

I was thinking the exact same thing...

I've got about an extra 2 feet if you want it...

 

[ptmays]

Mooner

I am about to start working on the power to the SATA harness, I looked at the plug you linked to and I cant tell if it comes with the prongs to hook the wires to or not. I am thinking of just hooking up female 4 pin molex plugs on to the end of it so that it is just standard plug and play with any PSU. My question is what power supply cable did you use the 4 pin that older HDD's use or the 5 pin that SATA uses. The sata cords have an extra 3.3v that the 4 pin molex does not have. The apple sata only have 4 wires but I'm just not sure what voltage it needs. I may be over thinking this, I do that sometimes.

thanks for the help
PTM

 

[mooner]

If you order from Mouser (where I got my Molex connectors), you need to order the pins separately from the plastic plug. Separate part number...

My PSU only has 5 pin connectors coming out of it (12v, 5v, 3.3v and 2 grounds). It DOES include cables with Molex 4 pin power connectors, so I took a couple of those and hacked one end off of each cable to splice onto the Apple SATA harness. I used 2 PSU cables -- so there are only 2 drives per cable. The Apple SATA harness does not appear to use 3.3v...

 

[ptmays]

Thats what I thought, I like the idea of leaving the Apple Sata cable unmolested but for simplicity sake I think grafting on standard 4 pin molex females is the way I will go, it makes upgrading to a new PSU painless and its all going to be hidden behind the fan housing anyway. Now that I have cut a hole in the shelf and removed the fan divider there is a ton of room in the top area for the cables to run.

 

[ptmays]

Mooner

I did my wiring on the SATA harness today and tested it. I checked out the wiring order and for anyone looking for it in the future I an posting it on my thread as well as yours.

Starting from the outside edge of the apple connector it goes
Yellow 12v
Black Ground
Red 5v
Black Ground

The only thing that crosses over is the 5v red and one of the ground wires.

 

[mooner]

Interesting... Looks right -- if you had used a SATA power header, there would have been no "crossover"... The wire order for the MacPro harness is the same as a normal SATA power cable (which makes sense since it is a SATA connector)...

 

[ptmays]

I ordered my parts today, so soon core i7 2600k. It looks like I ordered the same mobo that you did, have you had any problems with OSX on it so far?

I have it most of the way back together, I still have a little work to do on the fans, I am moving he liquid cooler unit to the front rather than the back but that is minor. I love the SATA adapter you found that makes life so much easier, I'm just glad I didn't hack in to those cables 9 months ago when I did the first mods.

Would you mind posting some pics of your finished product, I would love to see how yours turned out.

 

[mooner]

Time to start thinking about FireWire 800...

I don't have a burning need for this interface (yes, bad pun intended). But it would be nice to have -- there are some wicked fast CompactFlash readers that require FW800...

I'm considering this card:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Aaxeon/FWB68300/

Primary advantage of this card is 1 internal FW800 port. Would be perfect for connecting my front panel FW800 port... I haven't found any other PCI-e cards with internal FW800, so this might be my only option.

On the other hand, I wish someone would just come out with a PCI-e Thunderbolt card. Then I could forget FW800 and do Thunderbolt instead... I'm sure that will be an option in 12-18 months...

 

[neilhart]

You may want to consider the BYTECC card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815283036

Newegg description: BYTECC 3-port USB2.0 & 1-port 1394B FireWire 800 & 1-port Firewire 400 Combo PCI ExpresModel BT-PEFWBU2.

While it is not clear from the description, the internal port is FW800.

Anyway I am running this card on my Mac Pro hack and using it to activate the two front panel FW ports (one 800 one 400) and it provides one of each on the rear panel plus 3 additional USB 2.0 ports. Please note the I got file corruption on my Front Port FW800 testing until I provided power to the 4 pin power connector on the card. Also, my testing so far has only been some bi-directional file transfers of a few GBs, as my hack is still incomplete and not "on line" so to speak.

Also note that I followed your lead on the wiring of the front panel (the USB power).

neil

neil.