PCIe NVME The final upgrade for a 5,1? Worth it

[b mcgibney]

I was getting ready to jump on a new computer but a great deal came up on a metal GPU (AMD Radeon 7850 that the seller flawed with the boot screen EFI) I now have Mojave running on a 250 SATA SSD. I've been watching a few vids on adding a NVME drive sitting on a PCIe card.

Any recommendations on a known to work PCIe card?

The Boot Rom is already updated to 144.0

It seems that NVMe drives are quite a bit cheaper that SATA SSD's these days

A couple more questions for those who have done this:

Will I still have the Option to boot from my current SATA Drives. There are a couple of plugs that did not get updated and sometimes I Still want to run in Sierra?

As noted in my sig file my 5,1 is 2x 6 core with 32 gigs ram running at 2.93 Ghz.

Will adding the NVMe upgrade actually make Pro tools run bigger sessions or am I better leaving well enough alone? Thanks as always to those who have gone before Brian

[lancemcv]

Yes go for it and you can always boot off other system drives, but get the samsung 970 evo not the plus or pro versions. I have heard of problems with those as boot drives but maybe its just the pro models that has the issue. Get a pcie card with a heat sync as they run hot that being said I bought a cheap one on amazon without a heat sync and its been fine. Also limited by the pcie bus speeds so the pro versions don't really make sense. It will run over twice the speed of a regular ssd on a pcie card and you are running on the slower internal sata which is around 250MBs maybe 350MBs at best. NVME will get 1200 write 1300MBs or better. Boot times will be faster. Will it enhance your sessions maybe on the amount of tracks you can play and record but thats about it.

[b mcgibney]

Thanks for the concise response and recommendations . On the list for the next Pension Cheque

Brian

[JFreak]

If you really want to upgrade your storage speed, search this forum for comments by Darryl Ramm regarding "switching" type cards that mimic PCIe 3.0 speeds on PCIe 2.0 slot by combinging lanes.