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  #21  
Old 06-21-2019, 12:58 PM
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JFreak JFreak is offline
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Default Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz

Quote:
Originally Posted by musicman691 View Post
Originally when I had just the one boot partition on that ssd I had it mounted in one of the regular drive bays. When I moved it to the pcie card it sped up something wonderful. So drive-for-drive pcie will always be faster.
Yes, what happened was you skipped the Southbridge -- architecture which wasn't a problem with spinner speeds, but is a real bottleneck for flash storage.
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  #22  
Old 06-23-2019, 11:56 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz

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Originally Posted by skizzo View Post
PCIe NVMe SSD's booting SLOWER than SATA SSD's on cMP models are quite well documented and discussed.

PCIe is external hardware, SATA is internal. Priorities are placed on internal connections for obvious reasons. Putting more cards into PCIe slots is going to slow the boot process for having to scan and load more crap. I don't know the intricate reasons to why PCIe NVMe SSDs boot slower but they just do.....for 4,1 and 5,1 cMPs. That is what we are discussing here. If your implying your surprised because it's different on a PC then that is irrelevant. It seems like they do boot faster on a PC but again, we are talking about a 10 year Mac Pro, not the 10 month old z390 chipset MB's that boot in 10 seconds with a NVMe SSD.
You got stuff backwards on internal/external as others have pointed out. You are likely being confused by extra labels that macOS/Finder ads to "external" drives, that's largely just a convince about how they are treated by the Finder. That has nothing to do with their performance.

The reasons that booting cheesegraters in some configurations is not that NVMe SSDs are slow or on slow connections, it's because of the complex POST and boot process in the cheesegraters. The "other reasons" I referred to. And if you are having slow boot there you have to look at this. The answer is not "they just do", the answer is very specific reasons.

One of the better resources (but may be a bit hard go find with a search) is. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...h.2yfwj6riry79

There are also several large threads on Apple support forums and macRumors etc. including this one is a great resource: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads...030791/page-14 (note the sy to use PCIe switch enabled PCIe adapter cards to run a 4 lane x PCIe 3 NVMe SSD at full PCIe 3 speed in a cheesegrater which is only PCIe 2... does that buy aggregating 8 PCIe 2 lanes).

With all these threads folks have to be careful about old information, many still say NVMe wont' officially boot on a cheesegrater, etc. It did not until Mojave and Boot ROM 14.0.0... NVMe boot was not officially supported on the cheesegrater, latest Boot ROM is I believe 14.5. And you sure do not want to be trying to hack or patch this Boot ROM like may have been needed in the past.

The cheesegrater upgradeability with these recent changes is amazing. I'm sad I don't have a cheesegrater any more. I'm all in on MacBook Pro, and I am using an external Samsung X5 NVMe Thunderbolt 3 drive or things including alternate boot images. Pretty stunning portable drives.

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 06-24-2019 at 12:09 AM.
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  #23  
Old 06-27-2019, 01:19 PM
skizzo skizzo is offline
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Default Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz

i suppose if you do not have a PCIe NVMe SSD you wouldn't know that it is treated as an external drive when in macOS or Windows. of course it's internally in the computer....and clearly not the point of my post. JFreak mostly got it with the SSDs on internal native SATA sled ports being seen as internal per the OS and NVMe drives on PCIe NVMe controllers being seen as external per the OS. Adding in hardware is going to prolong the POST, and PCIe NVMe SSDs are part of that behavior. No different than booting with 1 ram stick or 8, more hardware = longer POST. And there is obviously a sequence to the POST, so certain hardware is initialized before/after others. regardless of my lack of more detailed knowledge on that process PCIe NVMe SSDs boot slower than a SSD connected to the native SATA ports on the cMP

I said "PCIe is external hardware" but should have clarified "PCIe NVME SSDs is external hardware to the OS". I mean cmon, what ****ing idiot would think it's external when its clearly inside the machine? common sense and logic would make someone realize I didn't mean something inside a computer is external.

I deff never said anything about them being slow, or on slow connections either. the PCIe 2.0 x 16 ports are the fastest connection on the computer as far as I know. and clearly the ~3200Mb speeds (capability, but are bottleneck by PCIE 2.0 x4 so its closer to ~1500Mb...unless you really spend on a controller with a switch) are way faster than what...like 500Mb speeds of of 2.5" SSDs? They are night in day in performance. but for our niche of a niche use case in cMPs they also make a noticeable difference in boot times. even the disk format matters, APFS and TRIM support has impacted boot times for cMP users even

heck, when you booted to the PCIe NVMe SSD for a while it would boot TWICE. I never looked at it in verbose mode to see what was happening but anytime you switched disks going to a PCIe NVMe SSD, and this was with OFFICIAL support, it would boot loop twice. the 2nd boot would make it to the OS every time though. This issue existed during the hacking period, and during the first official support bootrom which was 140. This double boot loop issue only went away with 141 i think, or 144. There were other ways to circumvent it by using apps like "Boot Manager" created by another macrumors user. My point being here is the support for this hardware is an afterthought to say the least given this tech didn't exist in 2009 and it shouldn't be surprising they have some challenges like that. One of them being they boot slower on these systems when compared to modern systems
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  #24  
Old 06-28-2019, 09:22 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz

I don't disagree at all with the warning you are providing, actually thank you for doing that and catching me out earlier. But POST time issues are well understood, available in detail on the Internet, including the link I gave. Folks worried about boot time should look at the specific times other folks report, for different configurations, and things can can be done to optimize them.

My personal assumption would be any legacy Cheesegrater I owned would have all NVMe SSD, and only NVMe SSD, and yes those would be sitting off 4 x PCIe 3 switch based adapters. I am just too used to having lots of PCIe SSD storage not to want that. I'd sure like a Cheesegrater again given the PCIe SSD support story available now. And those poor *new* Cheesegrater owners will be wanting 4 x PCIe 4 switch based adapter cards soon.
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  #25  
Old 07-02-2019, 04:57 PM
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Default Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz

May I ask in Pro Tools 9, what's the recommended core's setting ?


Running dual 3.46 tray, thanks.
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  #26  
Old 07-02-2019, 07:44 PM
Darryl Ramm Darryl Ramm is offline
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Default Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz

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Originally Posted by basslik View Post
May I ask in Pro Tools 9, what's the recommended core's setting ?

Running dual 3.46 tray, thanks.
Presumably you have 12 physical cores, which is all that matters so the number to start with would be 11. The idea is to leave one physical core dedicated to non-plugin processing. YMMV, depends on workload, been discussed all over DUC in the distant past--search for those discussions. And there are all the other correct parameter tuning and questions of what problem if any you are trying to solve/why you are asking. That is stuff I don't want to get into and wreck this thread any more. If you have more questions please start a new thread.

Trying to help you get better help here for yourself, not just criticizing you:

Please don't spam unrelated questions onto the end of other threads like this, you are very likely to disrupt other users trying to get help, those who created the thread or those who will find it in future looking for similar help.

If you search for this question you should find many answers on DUC. With lots more detail. Like google this...

correct core setting Pro Tools 9 site:duc.avid.com

That magic "site: duc.avid.com" tag on a google search is the best way to search for stuff on DUC, much better than the near useless built-in vBulletin forum software search.

Otherwise if you can't find the answer with search, create your own thread in the appropriate forum area, give it a descriptive title and ask your question there. The likely correct forum area would be http://duc.avid.com/forumdisplay.php?f=50 Click the "New Thread" button.

Lots of folks have trouble finding all the DUC forums, they are here:

http://duc.avid.com/index.php

And that "New Thread" button is hard to find. Unless you know to look for it once in a forum section.

Last edited by Darryl Ramm; 07-02-2019 at 08:16 PM.
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  #27  
Old 07-08-2020, 05:27 PM
JGM JGM is offline
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Default Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz

Greetings all.
Resurrecting this old thread because I'm curious about this particular upgrade. I am running the latest version Pro Tools Native on my Mac Pro 5,1(Mid 2010) in OS X 10.13.6, along with 2 x Apollo Quads in Cascade mode. I’m not looking to buy a new Mac Pro, as its just not in the budget at all, or any other Macs that does not allow for PCIe cards. Neither am I at the point yet where I want to dive into the whole Hackintosh scene. So this is kind off my last attempt to get some juice out of my aged machine.
The specs:
12 Core 3.33GHz
Currently 16GB soon to be 58GB RAM
Internal SSD in Bay 1 for OS. Various other SSDs and HDDs.
I'm getting CPU resources and other errors in 60+ track count mix sessions with moderate amounts of plugins.
So my thinking is besides the RAM upgrade to make the below upgrades in an attempt to get better performance and more stability:

Sonnet Tech M.2 PCIe card w/ 2 x 1TB SSDs in RAID 0 for OS and other programs. Plus another 250GB SSD to use as a Pro Tools tape machine.

So based on other’s experiences will I gain better performance and stability out of my machine, especially in terms of running Pro Tools?
And also if the upgrade will make a difference, is it possible to clone my current OS SSD onto the M.2 RAID SSDs, or do I have to do a full and clean install including reinstalling all of my softwares and programs? Any advise based on personal experience is greatly appreciated as I would like to get this done ASAP.

Thanks in advance for all responses.
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  #28  
Old 07-08-2020, 05:33 PM
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Default Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz

I guess you mean 48GB ram? That should be enough and runs optimal speed. Though if you install 64 it does not slow down too much.

There are new m.2 cards that can take 4 SSD and are fanless, can offer 5-6GBps performance on 5,1 Mac Pro. Maybe you should think about that? OS and backups can safely be in the internal SATA bays, no problem there.
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  #29  
Old 07-08-2020, 11:03 PM
henningaround henningaround is offline
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Default Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz

Wouldn't it be more efficient to exchange the graphics card?
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  #30  
Old 07-09-2020, 07:23 AM
JGM JGM is offline
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Default Re: Upgrading a Mac Pro 5.1 12core 2.4Ghz

Thanks. All good points.


Anyone else would like to chime in?
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