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Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3259
Around 11PM last night, as I was finally getting somewhere on writing the Mac Pro piece that went up today, I realized that Apple had updated Boot Camp Beta - presumably with real support for the Mac Pro.
The previous beta of Boot Camp had two problems: 1) the drivers wouldn't install on a Mac Pro, and 2) HDD burst transfer rates were limited to 3.9MB/s at best. The first problem was workable, especially since I could get network, chipset, audio and graphics drivers from elsewhere. The transfer rate issue however is not something I can deal with. Most USB drives have no problems giving you higher transfer rates than that; for your primary boot drive, 3.9MB/s just isn't ok.
When Apple released the new beta of Boot Camp, I assumed it fixed both sets of problems. After installing it on the Mac Pro, I can say that it did fix the driver problem, but it did not fix the transfer rate problem. The best I can get out of a SATA drive is 3.9MB/s, in other words, it's slow.
The problem appears to be that Windows is running the SATA drives in PIO mode 0 or 1, limiting transfer rate to somewhere in the 3 - 5MB/s range. I've tried everything to force the drives into something faster but none of the published tricks appear to work.
My guess is that there's either a problem with the Intel chipset drivers or, more likely, a firmware level compatibility issue with Windows XP. Although I'm impressed at the speed with which Apple released this update to Boot Camp, I'm not sure how long it will take for the drive mode issue to get resolved.
There was one more problem with the latest version of Boot Camp that I ran into, and I encountered it early on in the Windows XP installation process. One of the features of the new Boot Camp beta is the ability to install to a partition on any attached drive, not just the one you booted from (there was a way around this in the previous beta, but now it's visible in the interface). I told it to make my 2nd hard drive the Windows XP drive and to start the installation process, which Boot Camp did without a hitch. However the Windows setup (text based portion) would not let me install to that drive as it wanted to write files to my main (OS X) hard drive, and it couldn't as it didn't understand the HFS+ partition. The solution was to remove the OS X drive and continue with the XP installation, then later reinstall the OS X drive, but the problem annoyed me for a few minutes to begin with. Just a heads up in case anyone else is trying the new beta on a Mac Pro.