I've decided to ditch my Apple Raid Card and buy a decent controller from a mob who understands what they're doing. I did a lot of reading and found a series of controllers that not only work on Macs but also allow you to boot from drives attached to them. This is important for me as I want to boot from my SSD Raid. I decided to settle for a controller that can handle 4 drives without the need for external connectivity.
The best choice for me was the RocketRaid 3510. It has been tested on barefeats.com and produced great results with SSD disks. It only provides one internal channel which is exactly what I need. Check it out on the HighPoint website.
After ordering the HighPoint RocketRaid 3510, I thought about my options when it comes to connecting the drives. There are several ways to do it and I decided to keep the drives in the 4 bays and use the iPass cable that runs from the main board to the back panel of the drives. The only problem is that this cable isnt' long enough. It just barely fits onto the Apple Raid Card which is a full length card. My RocketRaid card is much smaller and the only way to make it happen is to use the extension cable provided by maxupgrade.com. These guys have all sorts of nice tools, so check out their website.
I ordered the following cable:
Now you need to be aware, that this only works for MacPros older than 2009. The latest models don't have the same layout anymore and there is no iPass cable running from the main board to the drives. The guys at maxupgrade have a solution for the 2009 series, too. But that's for somebody else to report on. You can read about it on barefeats.com at the bottom of this report.
To put the SSD drives into the bay slots, I also ordered these neat looking frames from the same mob:
They fit perfectly and slide into the drive bay, connecting the 2.5" SSDs to the SATA back panel.