Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card fan noise or OWC Accelsior

[JoeM]

Originally Posted by lucienpalmer

Faster is always better :)

The sonnet description says “SSDs formatted in a RAID 0 configuration, the card is capable of 8,500 MB/s transfers.”

I’m considering the Sonnet too. Any user feedback would be great to hear.

I put an Accelsior 2 TB in my 7,1 12 core Mac Pro for projects. I wound up using OWC’s SoftRAID software to create a striped RAID 0 volume. It's getting about 4500 MB/s write speeds and about 4700 MB/s read speeds.

[MixerGuy]

Originally Posted by Marsdy

Can anyone using a Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe card in a 2019 Mac Pro 7.1 comment on how loud the fan gets?

Would be great to hear from anyone using one to stream Kontakt samples in Pro Tools.

I’m weighing the Sonnet card up against the OWC Accelsior 4M2 card which doesn’t have a fan but is only x8 lane as opposed to x16 lane on the Sonnet card.

and now... the SILENT model. New. Fanless. Perfect!

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m.../overview.html

[JFreak]

Wow, that looks sweet

[Marsdy]

Originally Posted by MixerGuy

and now... the SILENT model. New. Fanless. Perfect!

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m.../overview.html

Annoying that was released just a few weeks after I finally got the old fan version!

Fortunately it’s very quite. Pretty much inaudible unless you put your head inches from the Mac.

[JFreak]

Good luck for your purchase.

I am annoyed that I cannot seem to find an external enclosure that would have TB2 and PCIe 3.0 x16 which would be perfect, even as single slot. Apparently all they make now is TB3 with USB-C connector which is unusable for me.

[basslik]

Good day.


Can anyone chime in and give us feedback in real world usage on either the M4 or the sonnet ?

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by basslik

Good day.


Can anyone chime in and give us feedback in real world usage on either the M4 or the sonnet ?

What are you running the 4x4 in?

You mean the OWC M42? That is Thunderbolt 3, so you get a maximum of 4 x PCIe 3 lanes to the box. As I understand it the unfortunate thing OWC did with that is split off 1 x PCIe lane to each M.2 card. So if you install one M.2 card you only get a ~1/4 the raw IO capacity as if using he cheapest M.2 to Thunderbolt caddy. And it only really makes sense as a product if you fill it with four M.2 drives, and in many cases also RAID/stripe the drives. Which all makes it a non-starter for me. Had they included a PCIe switch in the box it would be much more appealing.

[Darryl Ramm]

^^^ and for this reason many folks may be better off at least from a performance viewpoint getting single M.2 enclosures and say using multiple of them if more than one M.2 drive is needed, especially if you can separate them into different thunderbolt busses, as long as you can terminate the bus with drives that only have one Thunderbolt port, or find enclosures with two ports, or use a USB-4/Thunderbolt dock with multi-port expansion, like the nice new OWC dock for the Mac M1.

[basslik]

Thank you both for chiming in, great appreciate it.


Have old 5,1.

I see Sonnet does have the switch and to utilize all lanes in the x16 slot and getting the most around 7,500 speed.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by basslik

Thank you both for chiming in, great appreciate it.


Have old 5,1.

I see Sonnet does have the switch and to utilize all lanes in the x16 slot and getting the most around 7,500 speed.

The Sonnnet can utilize all lanes in a x16 slot. But AFAIK the Sonnet card does does not do lane aggregation, i.e. does not take two say eight old fashioned PCIe 2 lanes from the Cheesegrater and turn them into four PCIe 3 lanes.... etc, which is desirable since most M.2 drives are 4 x PCIe 3 lanes (or some 4 x PCIe 4... but that's a bridge too far).

If you are looking for that. The way to go may be a Syba aggregation switch based card like: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HYZY7P2 Lots of folks using those in the Cheesegrater classics, details findable all over the Infoweb.

If you have a computer with a spare PCIe 3 x 16 slot then the Sonnet card is a nice choice. (oh so old now, PCIe 3 needs to die and be replaced with PCIe 4 or 5... Intel is a large part of the problem there, I can't wait to see what Apple does with PCIe connectivity with future less thermally constrained Arm based processors.).