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With the card in place and 3x1TB drives installed, time to see what this card is all about.

Of course, Apple wired all that stuff up in the board itself. PCI slot 4 is specifically for the RAID card, it won’t work in any other slot (I tried). Routing all those cables around the other PCI cards would be a mess! Well I was wrong.

I had noticed this in the past and figured it was there to ensure some doofus wouldn’t put the card in another slot further away from the hard drives. What I did notice was the top PCI slot not only had the amount of lanes available printed below it but also “RAID”. Huh? I looked for a special connection on the board that maybe this card would slot into when seated in the PCI slot but did not find that either. Alas there isn’t a single connection on the card to run cables to anything. I had never given it any thought but the first thing I asked myself was “where do I connect the drives?”, assuming I’d have to take the existing SATA cable out of the Mac so there would be space for cables to run from the drives to the card. The card was untested when I asked to borrow it ( was awesome enough to let me have this card for a bit, even though they know I tend to break things just so I can figure out how to make it work again) so I didn’t know what to expect when I received it. For testing I used an entry level Early 2009 Mac Pro with single 2.66GHz 4-core CPU and 16GB RAM, running macOS 10.12.5 Sierra. With 512MB cache and a 72 hour cache battery backup occupying just a single slot, this card is not just good looking, it sported some pretty good specs for a RAID card in that day. I’ve worked on systems with the card built-in and in operation but the RAID’s were working so all I could really do was stare at it for a minute and move on. This time not to take apart and mess around with but simply to test and see how it works as I never had a chance to do so. I recently got my hands on an Apple RAID PCI card.