Can I do something to enhance my Mac Pro (mid 2012) Performance?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Zak7

Thanks for the replies and help.

Do you mean that the Samsung 850 Pro is slow? or slow because is in the Hard Drive bay and not in a PCIe slot with an adapter card?

850 Pro is a SATA III SSD. SATA III SSDs deliver around 500MB/sec , and your Cheesegrater only has SATA II on the motherboards so you will be getting ~250-300 MB/sec unless you install a SATA III PCIe card... but why do SATA anything when PCIe/NVMe based M.2 drives are so very affordable and have way better performance. A good M.2 drive with 4 x PCIe 3 interface (like a Samsung 970) today can deliver reads at around 3.5GB/sec. So more than an order of magnitude faster. Your crappy current HDD,... I won't even embarrass you by saying how slow they are once you factor in a little disk seeking.

Your cheesegrater has PCIe 2 slots so if you want to get the best performance from PCIe 3 based SSD today you need to use a switch based PCIe slot to M.2 adapter card (basically a Syba I/O Crest SI-PEX40129). This stuff has been discussed to death in past threads here, you can search for those.

You are in the stone age if running on HDD... but be careful rushing to change storage, go to NVMe etc. Read and learn first.