GCSF has an excellent write-up on the “Why doesn’t Apple use Intel Inside stickers?” question from last Tuesday’s iMac press event. Personally, I didn’t understand the vitriol with which that question was met from the Mac ‘blog-o-sphere.’ Okay, that’s not true, I understood it, I just didn’t agree with it.
While it’s nice to see that Apple have finally offered a hardware RAID solution for the internal drives of the Mac Pro, I am saddened by the fact that I will not be buying one since they cost a thousand dollars.
Regular consumer-level RAID cards go for about two to three hundred bucks. But they can’t be used with the internal drive bays in the Mac Pro because those bays connect to the motherboard through a a pair of proprietary cables. The data half of that pair plugs into the motherboard with an HDI-36 connector. The question that keeps me up at night is: Why hasn’t anyone determined the pin-out of that plug and made an adapter cable? It’s just a simple 30cm cable with an HDI-36 socket on one end and 4 SATA plugs on the other.
Hell, I’m tempted to do it myself. Wiring up a cable is well within my abilities and I’m pretty sure I could find the right socket somewhere in the digikey catalog. But there is the remote possibility that my homemade cable might accidentally bridge the wrong pins, fusing part of the RAID card’s circuitry open and burning out the southbridge. It’s a remote possibility, but it would necessitate a new motherboard for my Mac Pro, and would almost certainly void my warranty. And a new motherboard from Apple would cost about as much as their RAID card.
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