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  #1  
Old 07-14-2019, 11:56 AM
mcnichols mcnichols is offline
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Default 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.
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  #2  
Old 07-14-2019, 01:47 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default 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...

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 07-14-2019 at 01:57 PM.
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Old 07-14-2019, 10:57 PM
WorldStudios WorldStudios is offline
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Default 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.
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Old 07-15-2019, 12:33 AM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default 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.
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Old 07-16-2019, 12:15 AM
WorldStudios WorldStudios is offline
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Default Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave

Quote:
Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm View Post
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?
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Old 07-16-2019, 12:33 PM
mcnichols mcnichols is offline
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Default 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.
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  #7  
Old 07-17-2019, 06:51 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave

Quote:
Originally Posted by WorldStudios View Post
Thanks, that sounds about right. Do you know of any such adapters that work in a 2012 MacPro?
Oops sorry forgot to reply earlier. The card that gets almost all the attention is http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/feedback/...ro_Review.html and see all the info at https://forums.macrumors.com/threads...e-ahci.2146725

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 07-18-2019 at 04:06 PM.
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Old 07-15-2019, 08:31 AM
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arche3 arche3 is offline
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Default Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave

Quote:
Originally Posted by WorldStudios View Post
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.

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  #9  
Old 07-16-2019, 12:13 AM
WorldStudios WorldStudios is offline
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Default 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.
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  #10  
Old 07-19-2019, 01:35 PM
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arche3 arche3 is offline
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Default Re: NVMe upgrade for Mac Pro 4.1/5.1 Mojave

Yeah. The gearhead in me is going to do this m.2 blade thingy. Switching thing. I'm pretty much over software. For my studio I've only been getting hardware to use as inserts. I'm sticking with my icon d control 48 fader desk for the foreseeable future. For my audio nerd instinct it's all hardware now. Bring it.

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