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-   -   NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave (https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=405618)

mcnichols 07-14-2019 11:56 AM

NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave
 
I'm hoping Darryl Ramm will be able to give some guidance here - he's hailed by many as the ultimate NVMe guru!

Currently testing Mojave on an Evo 850 APFS drive on the SATA bus in a 2009 cMP, upgraded to 12-core 3.06GHz, 5.1 firmware, HDX card/HD interfaces, PT 2019.6 Ultimate, GTX 680 Mac Edition GPU. Audio drives are spinners, but I also have other Evo 840/850 SSDs containing audio samples and older OS partitions and backups.

I've read conflicting reports/warnings about use of Trim on Mojave, and the NVMe route has been suggested since Trim support for these new drives is apparently native. So, questions arising:

1 Is there any truth about Trim Enabled being somehow 'bad' on Mojave/APFS?

2 Is there likely to be a noticeable difference with an NVMe drive (some reports suggested it might actually be slower to boot)?

3 If I do go for NVMe, what drives/PCIe cards would be recommended for this setup, and is a heatsink necessary?

4 Is it safe to leave Trim Enabled to look after the other non-system drives after such an upgrade to the boot drive?

Many thanks for any experience shared.

Darryl Ramm 07-14-2019 01:47 PM

Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave
 
Is your SATA Evo 850 running via a SATA III adapter? The native mobo SATA II throws away some decent sequential drive performance.

Enable Trim. It’s natively supported on Mojave for third party SSD drives and has been for several recent macOS releases. Trim works with SATA, and PCIe AHCI and PCIe NVMe SSDs (interval and via Thunderbolt), the issue is USB drives that will likely not pass through Trim commands.... but turning on Trim even then should not hurt anything. How much Trim is important depends on what you are going. It makes no difference to read-mostly sample drives for example.

NVMe is way faster than poor old tired ancient SATA stuff. Several times faster for many things.... how important those are to you/if the cost is worth it is a value call. But especially with NVMe SSD Cost heading to SATA SSD price points I know where I want to spend my money.

I have mentioned boot time issues in other threads and provided links before some of the best online resources on this. You can find them, or when I am not typing on an iPhone I’ll find them and link here. You should be aware of those and if needed configure your system to minimize those times. If they are even important for you.

If you have PCIe slot/lane capacity in a Cheesegrater I would be trying to use a switched M.2 adapter card to get 4xPCIe 3 performance out of the PCIe2 slots.



And to be very clear.. I have no current *experience shared* in cheese graters. I would love to have one now especially given all the upgrade options... including NVNe. I am running on the latest 8 core MacBook Pro with internal 2TB NVMe SSD and an external 2TB Samsung X5 NVMe SSD. And several Samsung T5 transfer disks/infrequently used samples, etc. and HDD for backup/archive. My understanding of SSDs comes from other places, including helping invest in and work with some of the companies that developed pioneering stuff in this space. ... so I would especially love to see others here that are actually running NVNe on cheese graters let us know what is working best for them. Right now I just dream of owning a new Cheesegrater...

WorldStudios 07-14-2019 10:57 PM

Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave
 
I just Installed a Samsung 970 pro m2 NVMe blade in my 2012 MacPro running Mojave. It works fine. I have been running the ”Old” type of m2 blades for several years with no worries. I have had my system drive and my audio drive on two pci adapter cards and the third PCIe slot holds my HDX card. Now, I got something like 1100-1200 read speed and 700-800 write speed from the old blades. The new one gives 1400/1400, but it is speced out to deliver read speeds up to 3500. Is the MacPro PCIe bus slow or do I need a better PCI card to hold the m2 blade? I tried to google it, but found nothing. Not too many people do this I guess. :)

For comparison, SSD drives max out at 240-250 because the SATA bus is that slow in the MacPro.

Darryl Ramm 07-15-2019 12:33 AM

Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave
 
Your Mac Pro has a PCIe 2 not PCIe 3 slots and the NVMe m.2 card you have is PCIe 3. You are running it at half speed. You need to look for a switch based PCIe 2 x 8 adapter card that switches down to PCIe 3 x 4.

arche3 07-15-2019 08:31 AM

Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by WorldStudios (Post 2532720)
I just Installed a Samsung 970 pro m2 NVMe blade in my 2012 MacPro running Mojave. It works fine. I have been running the ”Old” type of m2 blades for several years with no worries. I have had my system drive and my audio drive on two pci adapter cards and the third PCIe slot holds my HDX card. Now, I got something like 1100-1200 read speed and 700-800 write speed from the old blades. The new one gives 1400/1400, but it is speced out to deliver read speeds up to 3500. Is the MacPro PCIe bus slow or do I need a better PCI card to hold the m2 blade? I tried to google it, but found nothing. Not too many people do this I guess. :)



For comparison, SSD drives max out at 240-250 because the SATA bus is that slow in the MacPro.

Did you notice a diff going to nvme? I'm running sata ssd for record drives. And a pcie ssd adapter for boot drive. Does it makes sense to go to ssd pcie record drives?

My track count is usually 75 to 125.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk

WorldStudios 07-16-2019 12:13 AM

Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave
 
Copying and moving files is a lot quicker and faster. But, since PT caches the audio files in internal memory anyway in the background, I doubt I notice any difference when I am running PT.

WorldStudios 07-16-2019 12:15 AM

Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm (Post 2532725)
Your Mac Pro has a PCIe 2 not PCIe 3 slots and the NVMe m.2 card you have is PCIe 3. You are running it at half speed. You need to look for a switch based PCIe 2 x 8 adapter card that switches down to PCIe 3 x 4.

Thanks, that sounds about right. Do you know of any such adapters that work in a 2012 MacPro?

mcnichols 07-16-2019 12:33 PM

Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave
 
Many thanks Darryl and Johan, especially for the reassurance regarding Trim.

I've moved the Mojave boot drive to a PCIe adaptor, and all seems to be working at the moment, though I did have some odd moments with PT failing to remember the window setup on 3 monitors. Mojave was not booting consistently (the initial boot screen appearing on a different monitor than expected) but this seems to have settled down after a 'command-alt-p-r' reset.

I'm still considering the NVMe upgrade. Can you identify or recommend one of the 'switched' cards you referred to, please, as I can't find any reference to this technology on Amazon, or any other retailer's site.

Any thoughts on the heatsink option?

Johan, may I ask which exact GPU card you're using, please?

Thanks again.

WorldStudios 07-17-2019 12:16 AM

Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave
 
You may. :D

AMD Radeon R9 280X 3 GB

arche3 07-17-2019 06:52 AM

Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by WorldStudios (Post 2532943)
You may. :D



AMD Radeon R9 280X 3 GB

So another pestering question. When you updated to Mojave. If the r9 280x was installed. You had the boot and progress screen right?

I have a 280x I can throw in for the update to give myself piece of mind something is happening.

Thanks again.....

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