macpro burning through hard drives -- ? video card pulling too much power?

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2019 at 03:03, Ken Cunningham wrote:
>
> This has nothing to do with Macports, but  there are many people here who know stuff about this...
>
> About six months ago I put a new Metal-capable Sapphire HD 7950 video card in my 2010 MacPro (8 processors) to run Mojave. It required two extra power cables to give it all the extra juice it needs, in addition to the usual bus power. It seems to pull up to nearly 200W according to Tom's hardware <https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-7950-review-benchmark,3207-9.html>.
>
> Since then, I have bricked three SATA hard drives on that MacPro, two older 2TB ones (2012 era) but one 2016 4TB SSHD that was pretty new.
>
> All three of the drives just disappeared off the desktop unexpectedly with a message about not powering them off properly, and then at reboot would not spin up, and never did work again.
>
> I'm suspicious that the 7950 is pulling too much power and causing the SATA hard drives to fail. I also have an AJA Kona 3G in that machine that pulls 20W.
>
> Anyone seen this?

I don't have a Mac Pro, so no such experience.
I only had to replace the broken SATA cable on my previous laptop
about 4 times, and the laptop before that was happily frying at 105
degrees (Celsius) and kept displaying the gray screen of death. (No,
these were by far not the only issues, just somewhat related ones to
yours.)

You are not supposed to replace parts in apple hardware, you should
buy new one. (I was surprised to see that the best pro one can buy is
just $7k nowadays, it used to be $12k.)

Mojca