ssd in drive sled or on pcie card - MacPro

[musicman691]

Mid 2012 5,1 MacPro with 3.46 GHz hexcore cpu. Going to add a 960 gig Samsung 850 Evo as system drive to replace the 1 TB drive currently there. I know the 850 will be way faster than the old spinner with both in their respective drive sleds. My question is: will I see any appreciable improvement in performance between that same drive in the drive sled or via an OWC Mercury Acelsior S in one of the pcie slots? I know the pcie card position will be faster but with the drive in question will it be enough to make it worthwhile to get the Acelsior card?

[Darryl Ramm]

The standard drive sled is SATA II 3 Gbps, so yes you can see a difference. How important that is to you, I can't guess. I would not be using SATA II on my system.

There are multiple ways of getting there a SATA III card with space for an onboard drive is probably the easiest, or it is also common to run a cable from a card and stick drives in the optical bay area.

I'd actually be looking at PCIe drives on a M2 adapter card, like an M.2 AHCI drive for even higher performance. Or look at a NVMe M.2 drive like a Samsung 960 Pro... but I've not played with the NVMe drives in a Cheesegrater, they won't be bootable... so for a system drive I'd us a AHCI M.2 drive or SATA III drive.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

The standard drive sled is SATA II 3 Gbps, so yes you can see a difference. How important that is to you, I can't guess. I would not be using SATA II on my system.

There are multiple ways of getting there a SATA III card with space for an onboard drive is probably the easiest, or it is also common to run a cable from a card and stick drives in the optical bay area.

I'd actually be looking at PCIe drives on a M2 adapter card, like an M.2 AHCI drive for even higher performance. Or look at a NVMe M.2 drive like a Samsung 960 Pro... but I've not played with the NVMe drives in a Cheesegrater, they won't be bootable... so for a system drive I'd us a AHCI M.2 drive or SATA III drive.

I expected you'd be pushing the nvme route but you completely missed the point of what I was asking - Samsung 850 EVO (as system drive so it would have to be bootable) in either a drive sled or same drive on a pcie card. I know the pcie card route will be faster but by how much? Are we talking about orders of magnitude or just a few percentage points?

I don't care what you would or wouldn't use on your system - I care about what I'd be using on MY system. I'm also not asking you to guess what would be important - I'm only asking you to answer the question put forward with the specifics I gave. I'm not made of money so there are times (and this is one of those) that I have to juggle performance versus price. Ultimate barn-burning performance isn't something I'm looking for but something a mere mortal like I can afford. It's the same balancing act I had to play in whether I got an 850 EVO or 850 Pro and quite frankly the extra little bit of performance or the longer warrantee wasn't worth $200 +/- more for the Pro over the Evo.

I'd hate to see how you'd respond if I was looking at something other than a Samsung

edit for additional:
I'm only asking here because the info I could find by Googling couldn't come up with even a close answer to the exact question I'm asking.

[Darryl Ramm]

I did not miss the point. I told you the SATA III is faster. I would not waste my time with SATA II--what your cost/performance trade off is I have no idea.

"will I see any appreciable difference" is a near mealiness question, yes of course you can see a difference, all high-end SATA SSD drives are SATA III performance limited. Dropping them to SATA II could almost halve large file IO performance. ... and since the card costs only $50... just do it if you have to go SATA and have a spare PCIe slot.

You won't find hard numbers online because nobody bothers measuring SATA III drive performance on SATA II controllers.

On the other hand at ~$50 on a SATA III PCIe card, and sacrificing that PCIe slot to the SATA Gods seems a waste vs the large performance increase you are giving up. You can buy a 512GB PM961 M.2 drive for the same price as a 1TB 850 Evo. M.2 adapter cards are a low as $15.

You can do whatever you want, I pointed out other, possibly better solutions. If you don't want to use them that is your decision.

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by musicman691

I know the pcie card route will be faster but by how much? Are we talking about orders of magnitude or just a few percentage points?

Orders of magnitude!!!

Sata2 to Sata 3 is already doubling it...


NVME is legit bro!!! Legit

[JFreak]

For a system drive, who cares if it's SATA II

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by JFreak

For a system drive, who cares if it's SATA II

The original poster obviously

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by JFreak

For a system drive, who cares if it's SATA II

I sure would: boot time, Pro Tools startup time, plugin load, sample load, ...

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I sure would: boot time, Pro Tools startup time, plugin load, sample load, ...

Yep but loads are one-time, once loaded it just runs. Recording and playback are the things where I'm concerned about storage performance.

It isn't so long ago when we considered shiny new SATA II spinners being more than fast enough. Now that a cheap SSD can use SATA II to its fullest, shouldn't that still be more than fast enough..?

But opinions do vary.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I did not miss the point. I told you the SATA III is faster. I would not waste my time with SATA II--what your cost/performance trade off is I have no idea.

"will I see any appreciable difference" is a near mealiness question, yes of course you can see a difference, all high-end SATA SSD drives are SATA III performance limited. Dropping them to SATA II could almost halve large file IO performance. ... and since the card costs only $50... just do it if you have to go SATA and have a spare PCIe slot.

You won't find hard numbers online because nobody bothers measuring SATA III drive performance on SATA II controllers.

On the other hand at ~$50 on a SATA III PCIe card, and sacrificing that PCIe slot to the SATA Gods seems a waste vs the large performance increase you are giving up. You can buy a 512GB PM961 M.2 drive for the same price as a 1TB 850 Evo. M.2 adapter cards are a low as $15.

You can do whatever you want, I pointed out other, possibly better solutions. If you don't want to use them that is your decision.

Already purchased the 850 Evo - will have it tomorrow. Besides I want to keep the system drive at 1 TB and not have to worry about scrunching things down to fit the smaller drive. So if we're talking about same size that M.2 drive goes way up in price versus the Evo. Again as I said I'm not looking for expensive barn burning performance in a sizable drive but something affordable and has a longer track record than nvme.

So I lose a slot - big deal. Not intending on going the UAD card route or other dsp stuff and really - I'll still have two slots left for UAD octo cards.