Where is better an NVMe Drive on my MaC PRO 5,1?

[Zak7]

Hi,

I am buying a Mac Studio by November, but I need to hold on to my Mac Pro 2012 5,1 until that time and want to give her more speed... I am using SSD Drives

So I have only one Free PCie Card

Where will give my Pro Tools system more Speed and power?

To put the NVMe Drive on my MacOS or in my Audio(Pro Tools Session Drive)?

I have Pro Tools HDX and will find a way to use a newer MacOS(someone I know can install it using a patch) ..which one do you recommend?

If anyone knows a good PCIe Adapter to NVME that is duaL and that works well for a reasonable price under this circumstance with a Mac Pro 5,1 would appreciate that info

Thanks

[basslik]

Originally Posted by Zak7

Hi,

I am buying a Mac Studio by November, but I need to hold on to my Mac Pro 2012 5,1 until that time and want to give her more speed... I am using SSD Drives

So I have only one Free PCie Card

Where will give my Pro Tools system more Speed and power?

To put the NVMe Drive on my MacOS or in my Audio(Pro Tools Session Drive)?





I have Pro Tools HDX and will find a way to use a newer MacOS(someone I know can install it using a patch) ..which one do you recommend?

If anyone knows a good PCIe Adapter to NVME that is duaL and that works well for a reasonable price under this circumstance with a Mac Pro 5,1 would appreciate that info

Thanks

OWC Accelsior 4M2, although you have to use slot 1 or 2 to take advantage of the 4 lanes..


Use it for audio. Won't gain that much on the OS side.


I'm running the Syba I/O Crest SI-PEX40129 Dual M.2 NVMe Ports to PCIe 3.0 x16 Bifurcation Riser for audio. I love it.

[smurfyou]

I'd say the opposite, use it for system and not audio. Anything to help the bloated MacOS along. Or if its big enough use it for both.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Zak7

Hi,
So I have only one Free PCie Card

Nothing helps like clear details. What *exact* slots do you have free/can you arrange stuff to get a PCIe2 x 8 lane or x 16 slot to use for this?

Wanting "dual" cards tells us little useful. And you may end up slower than a single card if you don't know what you are doing. How much actual SSD space do you need?

With a switch based PCIe adapter card you can go from 8 x PCIe2 lanes to 4 x PCIe3 lanes on the M.2 card, or 16 x PCIe 2 lanes to Dual 4 x PCIe 3 lanes... all of which are still a bottleneck on modern PCIe 4 based M.2 cards, but it's a lot less than very slow PCIe 2 that the Mac Pro has natively.

I've written about this many times on DUC. You should be able to find past posts with a Google search.

The Samsung 990 Pro M.2 drives would be my starting point. Whatever drives you buy you need to plan on keeping the bloody firmware up to date. https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=425632

If you only have a single M.2 PCIe SSD try to plan on using it for everything, OS, sessions, samples. Or try to add another SSD if 4TB is not enough space. You should not be worrying about adding more SSD or separating load on the SSD for performance reasons.

[Zak7]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Nothing helps like clear details. What *exact* slots do you have free/can you arrange stuff to get a PCIe2 x 8 lane or x 16 slot to use for this?

Wanting "dual" cards tells us little useful. And you may end up slower than a single card if you don't know what you are doing. How much actual SSD space do you need?

With a switch based PCIe adapter card you can go from 8 x PCIe2 lanes to 4 x PCIe3 lanes on the M.2 card, or 16 x PCIe 2 lanes to Dual 4 x PCIe 3 lanes... all of which are still a bottleneck on modern PCIe 4 based M.2 cards, but it's a lot less than very slow PCIe 2 that the Mac Pro has natively.

I've written about this many times on DUC. You should be able to find past posts with a Google search.

The Samsung 990 Pro M.2 drives would be my starting point. Whatever drives you buy you need to plan on keeping the bloody firmware up to date. https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=425632

If you only have a single M.2 PCIe SSD try to plan on using it for everything, OS, sessions, samples. Or try to add another SSD if 4TB is not enough space. You should not be worrying about adding more SSD or separating load on the SSD for performance reasons.

HI,

Thanks for your reply
I could easy re arrange the PCIe Cards on my Mac Pro 2012

These are the cards I am using:

- MSI vVideo Card
- Pro Tools HDX
- Free PCIe
- StarTech 2-Port 10Gbps USB-A & USB-C PCIe Card

If you please can suggest me in which slots you would put the cards and if the NVMe drive you suggest for the MacOS or for the Pro Tools Sessions?

right now the MacOS is on a SSD

Thanks again

[Darryl Ramm]

You'll need to do the work to work out what cards fit/best work in each slot. But I would hope you could to free up the narrow x16 lane PCIe slot for a SSD card if needed, I can't recall HDX rules here, but hopefully that is not an issue. If you can free up the x16 slot then a dual M.2 slot switch based x16 card like the Sonnet M2 4x4 used half populated should give you 2 M.2 with PCIe 3 x 4 lane performance off a 16 lane PCIe 2 slot. If you only need one M.2 slot then you can use one of the x8 lane slots and say one of the Syba 8 lane adapters (I think their 16 physical slot card may still be only 8 electrical lanes?). If in doubt check with the card vendors, both make great products. I no longer have old Mac Pros to test this stuff on.

Again we have no idea what exact SSD you have now. Performance varies by nearly an order of magnitude, quality maybe varies by more. And we have no idea how much space you actually are after on the new SSD.

Make sure you are up to date on understanding how to set up the 5,1 to boot/support NVMe if you have not done that already. Lots of stuff online. And watch the firmware updates on all SSDs.

[Zak7]

Thank you Darryl

and so where a NVMe Drive will be better if I have to choose one ? For the MacOS or for the Pro Tools Session?

[basslik]

I tried variations.



My Syba 2x2 works great with raid for audio, not one hiccup ever, of course if one blade fails, your done. But I always back up after a session. I do have an SSD for the OS, and also the OS on a M.2. No real difference on the OS side, for me anyway.



HDX, I guess you will have to make sure what the HDX supports. Newwe OS, you will have to Use Martin Lo's script.



Are to updated to firmware 144. yet?. That will have to happen first before anything else.




MacFiver is sweet.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Zak7

Thank you Darryl

and so where a NVMe Drive will be better if I have to choose one ? For the MacOS or for the Pro Tools Session?

I've already said generally both. Why pick one when you can just use it for both. Yes there can be reasons but a-priori just use the fast NVMe SSD for system and session and samples (if they will fit).

And again (third time) you are asking questions without giving clear info. What is the current boot/system SSD? Make/Model? size? And how much space do you need on the new SSD? We have no idea if you are working with video etc. etc. Asking average idiots online for advice when you give less than clean info gets you less than an average idiots' worth of advice.

If the boot SSD is a very fast SSD then it's less important to make the new NVMe SSD a boot/system drive.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by basslik

My Syba 2x2 works great with raid for audio, not one hiccup ever, of course if one blade fails, your done. But I always back up after a session. I do have an SSD for the OS, and also the OS on a M.2. No real difference on the OS side, for me anyway.

That's a choice you made to use RAID/striping. My advice is to avoid RAID with fast SSDs, as I've posted about on DUC before. The complexity it introduces just potentially causes problems, and very few folks need it with fast SSD and disk cache. In particular if you can get the M.2 drives in the cheese grater classics configured to effectively have 4 x PCIe3 lanes via a switch based adapter card then you are getting pretty impressive performance out of a single card. And with 990 Pro M.2 drive going up to 4TB that's not a bad size for many users who don't have lots of samples or need video storage.

Thanks for mentioning the updates/tools you are current on that stuff, it's been a long while for me.