Hi Mooner, Neilhart
I'm really impressed by your Mac Pro hacks. After building a G5 Hackintosh myself I now got a new project case from a 1,1 Mac Pro. Currently I'm gathering all the stuff and have a (dumb) question about this MiniSAS-Sata cable of yours. I naturally want to preserve the original hdd sleds and their functionality.
Did you only use the "barrel" and the cable from the kit you mentioned in the link? Is the PCIe card there only to add RAID functionality and not needed if one doesn't need RAID? At least to my eye it seemed that you had connected the SATA cables to the motherboard instead of the PCIe card.
I found several very cheap MiniSAS to 4xSATA cables from European eBay sites but no MiniSAS to MiniSAS "barrel" anywhere. USD 60 seems a bit expensive if one doesn't need the RAID functionality but like Neilhart said, it's well worth it if it works out of the box.