Velocity Solo X2 Now Available

[roinigo]

Hi!
I've ordered the Velocity Solo X2 with 2 SSD...But i still don't understand how the second hold... I suppose it's not floating in the air so...? Could you explain me how to do please ?

[feinberj]

I've been using a Velocity Solo (original, not the x2) in a 5,1 Mac Pro (3.33, 6-core). It is very reliable, EXCEPT for the fact that the computer freezes on wake. The screen image comes back up, but it's frozen. Not even any cursor movement. I'm running 10.6.8. I'm considering getting a Velocity Solo x2 just to be able to sleep the machine again.

Originally Posted by VirtualRain

That's great you finally got this sorted... and respectable performance.

Q: (for anyone) has there been any issues or delays resuming from sleep?

[Einz]

Originally Posted by roinigo

Hi!
I've ordered the Velocity Solo X2 with 2 SSD...But i still don't understand how the second hold... I suppose it's not floating in the air so...? Could you explain me how to do please ?

I just installed mine today. Only one SSD can be mounted on the card. But there is another SATA connector on it. You will need a cable and source of power for the second SSD.

[prograham]

Originally Posted by hfg

I suppose I should update my experience with the Solo X2 not booting in a 2008 Mac Pro as detailed above in post #114 ...

As further troubleshooting, I reset the PRAM and SMC processors, and I removed the one other PCIe card that was in the system throughout all this. That other card was a simple dual channel eSATA interface that I run my external backup RAID-5 system on. Without the additional disk controller on the PCIe bus ... the Solo X2 now would boot!

Perhaps your problem with the X2 and X1 both on the PCIe bus has something to do with multiple disk controllers unable to co-exist?


-howard

Howard, have u found a way to get both cards to coexist yet? Did putting the esata card back in after booting once to X2 work? Thanks.

[All Taken]

Originally Posted by prograham

Howard, have u found a way to get both cards to coexist yet? Did putting the esata card back in after booting once to X2 work? Thanks.

I have a SAS RAID controller and a X2, both reside on the bus quite happily. If anyone is having issue booting just hold alt/option on the keyboard and manually select the Velocity drive.

[hfg]

Originally Posted by prograham

Howard, have u found a way to get both cards to coexist yet? Did putting the esata card back in after booting once to X2 work? Thanks.

No ... But this is in a 2008 Mac Pro which can be a bit finicky. I left the eSATA card out and use the second port on the Velocity x2 card with a cable to the back panel to run my external backup drive.


-Howard

[prograham]

Hmm I too have the MacPro3,1 also but haven't run into any finickiness? I've up'd the RAM to 16GB, soft raid 0 sata boot, one sata storage, one sata time machine, and swapped in a radeon 3870, and my favorite - 12TB G-tech via fw800. But of course I consider this pretty standard stuff that went pretty smoothly from what I can recall. Lucky I guess if 3,1 is indeed known as finicky but I have been wanting to put in an SSD for the #1 reason of modifying compressed movies.

I don't know if you're aware of this annoyance, but I love my pristine hand made itunes library and so do this almost everday: adding artwork or any metadata really to large files takes for-ev-er on 7200 sata. Especially to a blu-ray rip means opening the entire compressed 6+GB file and it's allllll hdd work. Which has just further made my head explode over all the NAND and Deserttechblah for especially dealing with compressed random writes/reads.

So, Ideally I'm looking at the X2 to get a sata III SSD speed but I also for a long time now wanted to buy a pci esata card. :\

[brentsg]

I'm currently looking to add perhaps 3 of these cards to achieve the following..

-2x Velocity solo cards, each with an Intel 520 SSD in RAID 0 to boot OSX
-1x Velocity solo card with a Plextor M3 to boot Windows 7 via bootcamp

I'm currently using an Nvidia 680 card in slot 2, but the rest of my slots are empty, 2010 MP.

Does anyonebsee a flaw here, perhaps introduced by bootcamp or the PCI configuration?

Thanks

[Dr. Stealth]

Velocity Solo X2 ~ Booting Win 7 x64 with Bootcamp ?

I asked Apricorn about this and they emailed me back that there were some "issues" that they were trying to work out. But that's all they told me.

Is anyone here booting Win 7 x64 with their x2 ? Any issues ?

Thanks !

[Gymnut]

Originally Posted by brentsg

I'm currently looking to add perhaps 3 of these cards to achieve the following..

-2x Velocity solo cards, each with an Intel 520 SSD in RAID 0 to boot OSX
-1x Velocity solo card with a Plextor M3 to boot Windows 7 via bootcamp

I'm currently using an Nvidia 680 card in slot 2, but the rest of my slots are empty, 2010 MP.

Does anyonebsee a flaw here, perhaps introduced by bootcamp or the PCI configuration?

Thanks

Not sure if this'll be a problem with your configuration but I've got two WD RE-3 drives striped in a RAID0 in bays 2 and 3 and I have to remove them before I startup in my Bootcamp partition(using BootChamp), otherwise I get a BSOD. Seems Windows(Windows XP and 7 in my case) doesn't like the Mac OSX created RAID.

I've got a OCZ Vertex4 on a Velocity 2 in one of the slots but I just use it as a scratch disk. Once Newegg lowers the price on the same drive(512GB), I'd like to get a second Velocity 2 and stripe two of them in a RAID0.

[Raytrace]

FYI, I just got my X2 and put a Samsung 840 PRO 128Gb on it.

Blackmagic reports as follows:

490 MB/s Read; 92% of max advertised speed
370 MB/s Write; 95% of max advertised speed

I'd say it's working well!

[OrangeSVTguy]

Just curious, the picture below is on their website and is want I'm looking to buy. But I only need 2 SSDs on a single PCIe card with one for OSX and other for Windows.


What model is this? 4 SSDs with possible RAID0 for each my OSX and Windows would be nice.

[Dr. Stealth]

Originally Posted by Raytrace

FYI, I just got my X2 and put a Samsung 840 PRO 128Gb on it.

Blackmagic reports as follows:

490 MB/s Read; 92% of max advertised speed
370 MB/s Write; 95% of max advertised speed

I'd say it's working well!

That's awesome, but..... Will it run Bootcamp ?

[Gymnut]

Originally Posted by OrangeSVTguy

Just curious, the picture below is on their website and is want I'm looking to buy. But I only need 2 SSDs on a single PCIe card with one for OSX and other for Windows.


What model is this? 4 SSDs with possible RAID0 for each my OSX and Windows would be nice.
Image

It's their discontinued PCI-X Drive array:

http://www.apricorn.com/products/pci...ontroller.html

I believe it was discontinued due to lack of interest; It is only SATA II btw, and I think Apricorn mentioned that for the foreseeable future they won't be reintroducing something like that.

[OrangeSVTguy]

Originally Posted by Gymnut

It's their discontinued PCI-X Drive array:

http://www.apricorn.com/products/pci...ontroller.html

I believe it was discontinued due to lack of interest; It is only SATA II btw, and I think Apricorn mentioned that for the foreseeable future they won't be reintroducing something like that.

That's a bummer. I'm shocked something like that didn't spark enough interest. 1 slot PCIe/pcix that could hold 4 SSDs. Bummer on the SATA2 but that's all I'm using anyway but with my SSDs in the 3.5" drive sled slots.

I'm sure no one was interested because of the price. What ever it was but I'd pay $150 for it.

[OrangeSVTguy]

Well found that they were originally $199. Found a website selling them for the same price which is more than I want to spend but if I could run 2 different raids for both windows and Mac it probably would be worth it. Reads are up to 800MB/s.

[Raytrace]

Originally Posted by Dr. Stealth

That's awesome, but..... Will it run Bootcamp ?

Don't know. Don't care. I've had nothing but headaches trying to install BC and since I don't have a strong need for PC software, I've stopped worrying about it.

I didn't leave the PC world only to find a way to use it again.

[Dr. Stealth]

Originally Posted by Raytrace

Don't know. Don't care. I've had nothing but headaches trying to install BC and since I don't have a strong need for PC software, I've stopped worrying about it.

I didn't leave the PC world only to find a way to use it again.

I've never had a problem installing or running bootcamp. I use it about 50% of the time. You obviously don't use any high end cadd or render programs so that is your good fortune. Interesting you use the handle Raytrace, the most high end Raytrace programs are on Windows & Linux, Both of which you could be running on your Mac.....

[Raytrace]

Originally Posted by Dr. Stealth

I can answer that question. No it can NOT boot into windows via bootcamp.

I've never had a problem installing or running bootcamp. I use it about 50% of the time. You obviously don't use any high end cadd or render programs so that is your good fortune. Interesting you use the handle Raytrace, the most high end Raytrace programs are on Windows.....

Cool, huh? I am into photo/video and use CS5, but haven't gone that far with it.

I tried to install bootcamp on an MBP years ago and tried it on the MP more recently. I don't remember exactly the issue but I simply couldn't get the install to take. I had a copy of WinXP and it just refused to cooperate for some damn reason. My main desire was to run RC Aircraft sims, and frankly I'd still like to but I was tired of the frustration with BC.

[grandaddy111]

Hi,
Anyone know why my speeds are slow? I'm using an ocz vertex 3 120gb and am getting around 150mbs write and 400mbs read. I have tried changing slots and also updating the ocz firmware with no effect - in fact I thing the read speed went down after I updated. I bought the velocity solo x2 to replace one of the generic sata 3 cards as I thought I would get a speed increase but so far there is little difference.

I am using a 2010 2.8ghz mac pro. The ocz disc is a little over half full

Many thanks for any ideas.

[Raytrace]

I've been trying to get this to work all afternoon and have come up empty. I went through all the recommended cloning steps and even went as far as removing all other PCI cards and moving the X2 around.

Nothing works..I can't get the machine to recognize it as a valid startup drive.

Sigh...

Originally Posted by hfg

Well ... since the current Apricorn web site doesn't mention the unreliable boot issue with 2008 Mac Pros, I went ahead and ordered a Solo x2 to try. I received it today and attached a Crucial M4 on it and plugged it into the slot-2 (x2.0, 16-lane) on my 3,1 Mac Pro.

Unfortunately, it did not appear in the bootable devices at the optionkey-startup screen. I booted from a HD image and the SSD drive does appear and is fully readable. It just won't appear in the boot list.

Any suggestions ... or must I accept that the 2008 MacPro has an unreliable boot as has been suggested, and just forget it?


I have sent my experience to Apricorn support, but have not heard back.

btw: I also have one of the eBay cards which claims to support SATA III and boot on all Macs. It appears to be a earlier version (Solo x1), and although it does boot, it does not seem to perform any better than with the Crucial M4 mounted in one of the standard drive sleds.

This is the eBay card:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...E:L:OC:US:3160


Thanks for any help you can provide...
-howard

EDIT: For current readers catching up ... my Velocity x2 is now booting fine on my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1. It turned out that there was some interaction with another PCIe card, a dual eSATA card, which prevented the boot. Removing the other card eliminated the problem.

[brentsg]

Originally Posted by grandaddy111

Hi,
Anyone know why my speeds are slow? I'm using an ocz vertex 3 120gb and am getting around 150mbs write and 400mbs read. I have tried changing slots and also updating the ocz firmware with no effect - in fact I thing the read speed went down after I updated. I bought the velocity solo x2 to replace one of the generic sata 3 cards as I thought I would get a speed increase but so far there is little difference.

I am using a 2010 2.8ghz mac pro. The ocz disc is a little over half full

Many thanks for any ideas.

The benchmark you're using is probably using incompressible data, which brings Sandforce drive write speed to its knees.

[brentsg]

I installed 2 Intel 520 series 180GB drives in a RAID 0 array using a pair of Velocity X2's today.

What's a good benchmark that uses compressible data? The Blackmagic benchmark definitely uses incompressible data as my write speeds are a good bit lower than my read.

Thanks

[hfg]

You might try the AJA disk test as used by many of the posters here. It will show much higher write speeds with Sandforce controllers. It is also a free download.



-howard

[mdelrossi]

@hfg
What was the other eSATA card you had in the machine?
And did it matter which slot it was in?
Thanks.
mdr