While our gurus are hidden away in our back offices; neck deep in bench testing and capturing the new 2009 Mac Pro, I thought it might be nice to provide a pictorial glossary of this new beast. Many of us make the mistake that it’s obvious which shiny silver pieces hide the different drive bays and RAM slots; but I suspect lots of folks nod their heads knowingly with no idea what pieces go where. Apologies to those many Mac gurus who most certainly know all this stuff as far back as the Mac 128.
.Mac is a service mark of Apple Computer, Inc. “Dolby,” “Pro Logic,” and the double-D symbol are. The product described in this manual incorporates.
For the rest of us, I offer you a color-coded diagram of the 2009 Mac Pro:
Macbook Pro 2009
The blue rectangle surrounds the two Optical Bays. They use SATA drives (3Gb/s Serial ATA) and not the abandoned IDE/ATAPI drives. The top bay already contains an optical drive, but you can easily put in a Blu-ray reader/ burner in those bays. These devices will not play Blu-ray movies though, but that’s an issue for another blog. OWC sells a variety of SATA Blu-ray and other optical drives, some bundled with Roxio Toast.
The green rectangle surrounds the four SATA hard drive bays, which allow you to install up to 4TB of storage when using 1TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA drives. OWC offers a variety of compatible drives from which you can choose to pump up your hard drive space.
The red square shows the 4 PCI Express slots, one of which holds the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB of GDDR3 memory video card.
The magenta rectangle highlights the Processor and Memory boards. The RAM goes into a slide-out tray, but the positioning differs slightly between the 4-core and 8-core Mac Pro models. OWC has all the memory upgrades you need for reasonable prices; plus a trade-in rebate on Apple RAM, if you decide to replace the original memory too.
2009 Mac Pro Tower
Apple has posted the full technical specifications of the Mac Pro (Early 2009) in their support area, or you can download the manual from this PDF link.