Some serious "outside of the box" thinking. To paraphrase 'The Architect': not being limited by the boundaries of perfection certainly opens up a few doors… =)
Have you emailed Sir Ive your suggestions to the imperfections in the Mac Pro design?
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Amfeltec x16 PCIe with 4 SSDs: 5900+ MB/s
- Thread starter cerberusss
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Some serious "outside of the box" thinking. To paraphrase 'The Architect': not being limited by the boundaries of perfection certainly opens up a few doors… =)
Have you emailed Sir Ive your suggestions to the imperfections in the Mac Pro design?
^ Does anyone know if this board / PLX chips in general use the whole width of the host interface? That is, will the data from the M.2 SSD be sent at x16 or only x4? The former would mean a PCIe 3.0 SSD could still achieve full bandwidth plugged in to a PCIe 2.0 motherboard.
I contacted Amfeltec to obtain pricing and they told me that Gen 3 is not compatible with Mac Pros.Thought I'd share this. Went to the Amfeltec website and saw they introduced more Gen 3 M.2 carrier boards. The two that caught my eye were the 2 slot and 4 slot boards. The slots seem wider now so maybe less spacing issues. Not sure if these support AHCI or NVME SSDs - my guess they are NVME only?
2 slot: http://amfeltec.com/products/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-2-m-2-ssd-modules/
![SKU-086-32-320x220.jpg]()
4 slot: http://amfeltec.com/products/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-4-m-2-ssd-modules/
![SKU-086-34-320x220.jpg]()
"Thank you for your interest in our products. Please note that we recommend to use Gen2 Carrier board for Mac Pro users because old Mac doesn’t support Gen 3 multi-modules Carrier board properly.
You can use or 2 SKU-086-31 or SKU-086-01."
I'm looking into the Gen 2 board. Looks as if its still available?
I've never looked into an M.2 PCIe option for my Mac Pro before, (5,1) and now that everything is NVMe I'm having a hard time sussing out compatibility...
Basically I'm looking at adding two Kingston HyperX Predator M.2s. Should I be good to go with these, or are there any other blades that anyone would recommend? (Won't be booting from this, just using it to stream audio data for sampling instruments...)
I've never looked into an M.2 PCIe option for my Mac Pro before, (5,1) and now that everything is NVMe I'm having a hard time sussing out compatibility...
Basically I'm looking at adding two Kingston HyperX Predator M.2s. Should I be good to go with these, or are there any other blades that anyone would recommend? (Won't be booting from this, just using it to stream audio data for sampling instruments...)
The Amfeltec Gen 3 board is compatible with 2010 Mac Pro towers. But the speed gets bottlenecked according to this Barefeats analysis:
http://barefeats.com/hard220.html
http://barefeats.com/hard220.html
In case this hasn't already been mentioned, TG Pro works great for customizing fan speeds, including in the PCI bay.
It'll get those temps down quite handily.
And it just happens to be on sale right now.
nope, custom and unique
No, PLX does generally not does this, i'm not sure the chips even support it in hardware. PCIe 3.0 is... a bit different to 2.0 which would require generally recoding as opposed to just both sided legacy (2.0) operation.
These are my go to now as well, best option without getting ripped off.
Not spam!
I have purchased and currently use TG Pro and like it, so I wanted to share about what works for me -- for the benefit of the poster that I was replying to. Hence the purpose of forums.
Well, some people prefer to pay for software. Free sometimes also means "quickly abandoned". I didn't view it as spam, just as a paid alternative.
Just bought the gen2 x16 Squid card from a EU online shop
It's a great investment, especially because I can now use the other three slots for other cards
Puked a little bit in my mouth for the price though.
It's a great investment, especially because I can now use the other three slots for other cards
Puked a little bit in my mouth for the price though.
Thanks to Barefeats. I saw their recent tweet where the posted speed of the Kingston Digital HyperX Predator PCIE. It comes in 480GB and 960GB flavors, and given their pricing looks like a good alternative to the Samsung SM951s. Initial tests by Barefeats show really good performance for an AHCI PCIE SSD. I would just buy 4 - rip out the SSDs and put them all in an Amfeltec card.
![71RJOSQahhL._SL1500_.jpg]()
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Sandforce based? Personally, I'd run a mile from these.Thanks to Barefeats. I saw their recent tweet where the posted speed of the Kingston Digital HyperX Predator PCIE. It comes in 480GB and 960GB flavors, and given their pricing looks like a good alternative to the Samsung SM951s. Initial tests by Barefeats show really good performance for an AHCI PCIE SSD. I would just buy 4 - rip out the SSDs and put them all in an Amfeltec card.
![71RJOSQahhL._SL1500_.jpg]()
Always look for the telltale sign of 240, 480 and 960GB capacities.
If so, performance using compressed data, such as video files, will be garbage.
I'd just be sure you know what you're getting before buying 4 of them
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Sandforce based? Personally, I'd run a mile from these.
Always look for the telltale sign of 240, 480 and 960GB capacities.
If so, performance using compressed data, such as video files, will be garbage.
I'd just be sure you know what you're getting before buying 4 of them
could you elaborate?
[doublepost=1481309171][/doublepost]
could you elaborate?
LOL those ssds were my main evil upgrade plan
I believe these use Marvell controllers - it's on the specsheet and on the Amazon page as well.Sandforce based? Personally, I'd run a mile from these.
Always look for the telltale sign of 240, 480 and 960GB capacities.
If so, performance using compressed data, such as video files, will be garbage.
I'd just be sure you know what you're getting before buying 4 of them
They are Marvell. I'll be honest, aside from the basics I don't necessarily know what some of the specs below indicate aside from the obvious ones, speed, expectancy, TBW, IOPS...
Or, to put it better, how some of the benchmarks translate, if they indicate these are crap etc... I'd be curious if anyone know how they compare at least on paper... datasheet here: http://www.hyperxgaming.com/datasheets/SHPM2280P2_us.pdf
From the manfacturers data sheet:
- Interface PCIe Gen 2.0 x4
- NAND MLC
- Controller Marvell 88SS9293
- Baseline performance2
Compressible Data Transfer (ATTO)
240GB — 1400MB/s Read and 600MB/s Write
480GB — 1400MB/s Read and 1000MB/s Write
960GB — 1350MB/s Read and 1000MB/s Write
Incompressible Data Transfer (AS-SSD and CrystalDiskMark)
240GB — 1290MB/s Read and 600MB/s Write
480GB — 1100MB/s Read and 910MB/s Write
960GB — 1300MB/s Read and 1000MB/s Write
IOMETER Maximum 4k Read/Write
240GB — up to 160,000/ up to 119,000 IOPS
480GB — up to 130,000/ up to 118,000 IOPS
960GB — up to 160,000 / up to 126,000 IOPS
Random 4k Read/Write
240GB — up to 120,000/ up to 78,000 IOPS
480GB — up to 117,000/ up to 70,000 IOPS
960GB — up to 111,000 / up to 72,000 IOPS
PCMark® 8 Storage Score
240GB — 5,015
480GB — 5,017
960GB — 5,045
Anvil Total Score (Incompressible Workload)
240GB — 6,500
480GB — 6,700
960GB — 6,800- Life expectancy 1 million hours MTBF
- Total Bytes Written (TBW)
240GB — 415TB 1.6 DWPD4
480GB — 882TB 1.7 DWPD4
960GB — 1600TB 1.8 DWPD4
Definitely going for the 960GB models.
Also, my Squid is a x16, so performance shouldn't be a problem, even if i put it into the x8 slot
I encourage you to examine your words and not be quick to judge. Are you absolutely certain that 100% of other people that read my reply would interpret it as spam?
Also just FYI, TG Pro is not unknown software. It may have been unknown to you at the time you first read my reply, but it is certainly known. It got reviewed by PC Mag and has several reviews on MacUpdate as well.
And cerberusss is right, I do prefer to pay for my software.
[doublepost=1481895311][/doublepost]
Well said. Thanks much!
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I did and yeah shipping was around $40-50 to the US. With 4 heat sinks it ran me $422. (Heatsinks were $4 each...)
Where are you? I found a place is the UK (for someone on a composer's forum) that had them for 385 pounds.
I did as well. Didn't really see many other options now that the Samsungs have gone through the roof, let alone being impossible to find... Would have been the same or more than the pre-made ones from tansintl. (Which are now gone anyway.) Running 2 in RAID 0 got me up to about 2600 MB/sec. We'll see how they hold up in the long term... Also you can buy these as raw m.2s without the cards...
Very intriguing stuff here! The jury is still out on NVMe? Because it's real difficult to get SM951 AHCI cards.
Edit: found my answer on another thread.
Edit: found my answer on another thread.
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