Sonnet Technologies Allegro Pro USB 3.0 4-Port

[Dizzi45Z]

I am moving to HDX and I am upgrading my Mac Pro to Solid State Drives and I am also looking to add USB 3.0. Has anybody had any experience with these?

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonn...s/USB3PRO4PME/

I'm especially interested in whether it interferes with HDX since they would both be using PCIE connections.

[panamajack]

Considered buying that card until Sonnet came out with their more recent USB 3.1 Gen 2 PCIe card, the Allegro USB-C PCIe. Supports transfer speeds up to 960 MB/s.

In a Mac Pro tower, will auto-negotiate to two lanes to sustain PCIe 3.0 bandwidth.

Just bought one direct from Sonnet for $59 and free shipping.

The external USB-C SSD drives are now less expensive than the older external USB 3.0 SSD drives and the USB-C ports (only two) have faster throughput.

Requires either Sierra, High Sierra or Yosemite, not compatible with El Capitan.

Bought for a MP with a Native PCIe card and a OWC Accelsior S PCIe to 6Gb/s SATA. Don't have HDX, so cannot help you on compatibility.

[Farhoof]

I'm using these on multiple rigs, all hdx2, no issues.
External ssd's on usb3 are also faster than internal sata ssd's (limited to 300MB/s on mac pro's)

[BScout]

Using the Allegro Pro USB 3.0 4-Port with a Mac Pro 12 core 3.06Ghz 64GB Ram with HDX2. No problems Mac OS X 10.10 to 10.12 (what I'm on now)

[Dizzi45Z]

Originally Posted by Farhoof

I'm using these on multiple rigs, all hdx2, no issues.
External ssd's on usb3 are also faster than internal sata ssd's (limited to 300MB/s on mac pro's)

Wow! Really? Internal SSD's are slower than USB 3.0 SSD's? Do you run your hard drives externally because of this?

[Farhoof]

Originally Posted by Dizzi45Z

Wow! Really? Internal SSD's are slower than USB 3.0 SSD's? Do you run your hard drives externally because of this?

No I only run OSX from an internal SSD, it's fast enough for that.
Video is run from an internal 4TB sata disk, and audio is run from self built portable 7200rpm harddisks (about 100MB/s read speed which is fast enough for playback).
The performance drops when you do a lot of simultaneous reading/writing, like when bouncing stems/deliveries/other mixes, so I do have external SSD's for that.
I would use SSD's if I only needed a few disks, but I need about 20-30 for many editors and projects, the laptop disks are much more cost effective and are working just fine for most of the work.

Don't buy generic portable disks, they can be extremely slow when reading/writing (Western Digitals drop to 8MB/s). I use HGST 7200rpm in a Startech enclosure. Fast, cheap and no idle spindown either. When your buying just for yourself you are safe with an external SSD connected to the Sonnet card. For maximum performance buy the Pro version of the card, which has a separate controller for each port so there's no sharing.

[Dizzi45Z]

Originally Posted by Farhoof

No I only run OSX from an internal SSD, it's fast enough for that.
Video is run from an internal 4TB sata disk, and audio is run from self built portable 7200rpm harddisks (about 100MB/s read speed which is fast enough for playback).
The performance drops when you do a lot of simultaneous reading/writing, like when bouncing stems/deliveries/other mixes, so I do have external SSD's for that.
I would use SSD's if I only needed a few disks, but I need about 20-30 for many editors and projects, the laptop disks are much more cost effective and are working just fine for most of the work.

Don't buy generic portable disks, they can be extremely slow when reading/writing (Western Digitals drop to 8MB/s). I use HGST 7200rpm in a Startech enclosure. Fast, cheap and no idle spindown either. When your buying just for yourself you are safe with an external SSD connected to the Sonnet card. For maximum performance buy the Pro version of the card, which has a separate controller for each port so there's no sharing.

Thanks for the info! I purchased the Pro version and I will get it tomorrow. I'm excited to give it a shot. I'm updating my sampler drive and system drive to Samsung SSD's and I plan to have them internal. But this USB 3.0 option will be nice for client's drives.

[Ru_C]

Originally Posted by Dizzi45Z

Wow! Really? Internal SSD's are slower than USB 3.0 SSD's? Do you run your hard drives externally because of this?

Yeah I just got one of these USB3 cards for an old 5,1 Mac Pro running pro tools vanilla, & was surprised that performance was better than the internal SATA.

I doubt it makes much difference for audio recording/playback, but it certainly helps for copying huge video libraries etc