PCIe SSD cards and Mac Pro upgrades

[K Roche]

Originally Posted by lucienpalmer

Nope, he's not talking about M.2 chips, he's talking about mSATA, mini-SATA. That is basically like using a regular SATA SSD. Same protocol. The Syba card he is using does take up to 4 chips in a RAID, so he could theoretically get some good speeds. Still a good upgrade option.

But it's important to remember that it's still SSD SATA protocol running through a PCIe host card. mSATA is basically being replaced by M.2. That is a PCIe protocol with 10Gbit/s potential performance. The Squid from Amfeltec (mentioned earlier in this thread) is using 4 M.2 chips in a RAID 0 on PCIe. They have figured out a way to give each of the chips a full x4 lane bandwidth. It's crazy fast.

Ah thanks, much clearer now , this SSD dive language is new to me so I was indeed missing something.

[lucienpalmer]

Oh, one important thing I should mention- not all M.2 chicks are created equal. There are some that use the same connector, but they aren't full speed pcie protocol.

I recently found an article that did a good job of breaking down the specs and giving you clues to look for when shopping for M.2 cards. I'll try to find it again and post it here. Very helpful info.

[K Roche]

Originally Posted by lucienpalmer

Oh, one important thing I should mention- not all M.2 chicks are created equal. There are some that use the same connector, but they aren't full speed pcie protocol.

I recently found an article that did a good job of breaking down the specs and giving you clues to look for when shopping for M.2 cards. I'll try to find it again and post it here. Very helpful info.

That would be good general info although things do seem to change fast in this area.

As I posted in post # 30 (with Black Magic test scores) and as per my sig line , after watching a PCIe specific thread on the Mac Rumors forum for about 3 months . I went with a single Samsung SM 951 512 GB blade on a Lycom card adaptor and am pleased with results.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by lucienpalmer

Oh, one important thing I should mention- not all M.2 chicks are created equal. There are some that use the same connector, but they aren't full speed pcie protocol.

I recently found an article that did a good job of breaking down the specs and giving you clues to look for when shopping for M.2 cards. I'll try to find it again and post it here. Very helpful info.

A M.2 physical card (evolution/rename of the NGFF format) can support SATA or PCIe connections, and if PCIe it can typically be 2 or 4 PCIe lanes, with PCIe 2 or PCIe 3 lanes.

Modern M.2 cards are PCIe 3 x 4 lanes. The next question is the controller chips on the M.2 card supporting AHCI or NVMe. NVMe is more efficient/lower latency but requires BIOS that supports it to boot.

Once XPoint and similar (post-NAND Flash) memory starts shipping I expect this all helps puts pressure on a move from PCIe 3 to PCIe 4.

Where disk IO performance is important current/modern computers should ideally be using M.2 or U.2 (2.5" form factor) PCIe 3 x 4 lane NMVe drives. SATA and SAS interfaces are a joke by comparison...

[K Roche]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

A M.2 physical card (evolution/rename of the NGFF format) can support SATA or PCIe connections, and if PCIe it can typically be 2 or 4 PCIe lanes, with PCIe 2 or PCIe 3 lanes.

Modern M.2 cards are PCIe 3 x 4 lanes. The next question is the controller chips on the M.2 card supporting AHCI or NVMe. NVMe is more efficient/lower latency but requires BIOS that supports it to boot.

Once XPoint and similar (post-NAND Flash) memory starts shipping I expect this all helps puts pressure on a move from PCIe 3 to PCIe 4.

Where disk IO performance is important current/modern computers should ideally be using M.2 or U.2 (2.5" form factor) PCIe 3 x 4 lane NMVe drives. SATA and SAS interfaces are a joke by comparison...

I am pretty new to all this but, On the thread on Mac Rumors that was about this subject. If I remember correctly there was something about NVMe will not work as a boot drive on the 5.1 Mac's because of issues with the bios Has somebody figured out a reliable work around?

[kdwilson]

Originally Posted by K Roche

I recently upgraded my mid 2010 Mac Pro 6 core 333 ghz with a single Samsung SM951 512GB M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x 4 Internal Solid State Drive MZHPV512HDGL-00000
placed it in PCIe slot 3 with the Lycom DT 120 adaptor/card and is currently my boot drive.
...
...

Did you have to do anything special to be able to boot from this "drive"? I recently got the SM951 (256GB) with the Lycom DT 120. I cloned my boot drive with Super Duper (later tried Carbon Copy Cloner). Both times the clone was successful and was able to see the drive and even run Black Magic tests on it. However, I could never boot from it. I tried slots 2-4.

I'm currently running El Cap (10.11.6) with a MacPro 4,1 (flashed to 5,1).

[LoZion]

A bit off topic but I wanted to report on my Samsung SM951 PCI-express SSD and Lycom DT-120 adapter card fitted to my 4,1. Its been awesome so far. I have partitioned it in 2 volumes with El Capitan residing on one and PT sessions on the other. I average 1300mb read & write which makes for fast boot up times but more importantly sessions load up super fast, disk cache fills up at an amazing rate and all drive duties (backup, import/export, etc.) are improved by the fast rate. I basically get trashcan performance disk-wise as the SM951 is essentially the SSD found in the nMac Pro (albeit with a different firmware).

Total cost: 250$ for a 256g drive and card. All in all highly recommended!

http://duc.avid.com/showpost.php?p=2382190&postcount=90

[Darryl Ramm]

..and now we have the Samsung 960 Pro announced. Up to 2TB @ $1,299 MSRP in a 4 x PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 package. ~3.5 GB/s sequential read, ~2.1 GB/s sequential write. Pity it's the PC users who will most be able to make easy use of all this emerging technology....

[LDS]

I have been rocking an M.2 Samsung SM951 256gB SSD with a Lycom DT-120 adapter in my Mac Pro 4,1 since about February or March. Really cool stuff. Super quick and snappy feeling. You need to make sure you get the AHCI version for it to be bootable via OSX.

On a side note, I purchased a 480gB Samsung 850 EVO SSD for my laptop today. I can't believe how much they have come down in price over the last 6 months.

[Philipcwal]

kingston hyper x predator pcie ssd
1400 read
600 write

blows any sata 2 ssd out of the water
even if you install a pcie to sata 3 card, and run ssd on that, you will get maybe 500 mbps read/write speeds



i have 2 installed
1 running sierra
1 runnin win 7

extremely fast