capacity limits on the Mac Pro that would apply, so if you can find a 2TB or bigger drive it should work. If you did upgrade the internal drive bays to SATA III as described above then it would still allow booting with a SATA SSD drive. Option 1, 2a, 3 and 4 can be used for boot drives, as mentioned I do not believe Option 2b can used for booting and I am not sure about Option 5. striping across all four drives you can get four times the speed of just one drive and also it combines them so that 4x1TB drives would also give you a total of 4TB of capacity. Option 5 would be to get the Amfeltec Squid card and up to four AHCI PCIe SSD drives, by using RAID0 i.e. Option 4 would be to get a PCIe SATA card on to which you can directly attach a standard SATA SSD drive, these cards are SATA III so you also avoid the limitation of the standard internal drive bays only being SATA II.

This would let you use a genuine Apple SSD drive as originally fitted in an iMac or MacBook Pro 2015 or MacBook Air. Option 3 would be to get a similar PCIe adapter designed specifically for Apple's own proprietary connector AHCI PCIe SSD drive.

NVME is a newer standard than AHCI and NVME is specifically designed for SSD drives, however whilst you should be able to use such a drive as a data drive you may not be able to use it as a boot drive. Option 2b would be to get a standard M2 connector NVME PCIe SSD drive and the same PCIe adapter as above. Option 2a would be to get a standard M2 connector AHCI PCIe SSD drive and a PCIe adapter card like this So, using a SATA SSD drive in one of the bays is option 1.

You need to first get special replacement drive sleds as per ID=189&ParentCat=351 and you also need to get a PCIe SATA III controller card which has a mini-SAS internal connector e.g. Option 1 the easiest is to get a SATA SSD drive and as others have mentioned a 3.5' to 2.5' adapter and then you can fit it in one of the standard drive bays.Ĭontrary to what people have said here it is possible to upgrade the drive bays from the original SATA II to SATA III, it is merely that it is not really cost effective to do so. There are several different types of SSD that could be used.

Macbook pro 13 mid 2012 ssd upgrade