Advice on reliable and affordable SSD for MP 5.1

[polanskiman]

I agree with this 100%. IMO the NVMe solution is unlikely to benefit the OP and therefore a SATA-II solution is likely to be the appropriate one.

Now if the OP wants to tinker than the NVMe is a solution to consider. As long as the OP is aware that such a solution is unlikely to gain him much, if any, performance over the SATA-II solution.

I honestly have no issues tinkering. I've de-lided my own CPUs so a BootRom hack doesn't make me shy. In fact it makes things more fun. What is important though is that it is reliable.

Joke aside, you are saying that there isn't much of a performance difference between the NVMe solution and the SATA solution? I thought the difference was like day and night... And my understanding is that there isn't much of a price difference if I go for Intel's 660p NVMe.

 

[bookemdano]

I honestly have no issues tinkering. I've de-lided my own CPUs so a BootRom hack doesn't make me shy. In fact it makes things more fun. What is important though is that it is reliable.

Joke aside, you are saying that there isn't much of a performance difference between the NVMe solution and the SATA solution? I thought the difference was like day and night... And my understanding is that there isn't much of a price difference if I go for Intel's 660p NVMe.

Whether you notice the difference probably depends a lot on what you're doing. Normal, everyday computing tasks are mainly random reads and writes, which an NVMe drive is not appreciably faster than SATA at. Where NVMe shines is in sustained file operations, like copying a lot of large files or working with large databases.

A bunch of users here like suping up their machines to eke every little bit of horsepower out of them. If that's you and you don't mind the experimental nature of booting from NVMe then go for it. But just know that for most people, NVMe is not going to knock your socks off compared to SATA SSDs in the way that SATA SSDs knocked the socks out of all of us when we switched from spinners.

 

[tsialex]

I honestly have no issues tinkering. I've de-lided my own CPUs so a BootRom hack doesn't make me shy. In fact it makes things more fun. What is important though is that it is reliable.

That's something that attract me too.

that there isn't much of a performance difference between the NVMe solution and the SATA solution? I thought the difference was like day and night...

Depends on what you do if your Mac Pro. If you have need for bandwidth, concurrent access, PCIe solutions will shine, but if you just use as a glorified type machine…

For me, sometimes with 5 VMs running concurrently, I can't stand using my SATA SSD (SanDisk Extreme II). But when I'm just text-editing, reading PDFs , the SSD is not the question and anything will do. Depends on your use case.

With PCIe SSDs becoming the norm, $199 1TB Intel 660p this quarter, SATA SSDs will or get much bigger or will fade away. The next months will be interesting.

 

[polanskiman]

OP, I made this video some time ago. If you happy with this performance. Then a low cost SATA SSD is all you need. Easy and reliable.

But if you feel this is still too slow, then I believe that you really need the top of the line NVMe to see a significant better result than this.

Looks acceptable and specially the desktop background picture.

 

[h9826790]

Looks acceptable and specially the desktop background picture.

Haha, thanks, that’s my wife

 

[polanskiman]

Whether you notice the difference probably depends a lot on what you're doing. Normal, everyday computing tasks are mainly random reads and writes, which an NVMe drive is not appreciably faster than SATA at. Where NVMe shines is in sustained file operations, like copying a lot of large files or working with large databases.

A bunch of users here like suping up their machines to eke every little bit of horsepower out of them. If that's you and you don't mind the experimental nature of booting from NVMe then go for it. But just know that for most people, NVMe is not going to knock your socks off compared to SATA SSDs in the way that SATA SSDs knocked the socks out of all of us when we switched from spinners.

That's something that attract me too.
Depends on what you do if your Mac Pro. If you have need for bandwidth, concurrent access, PCIe solutions will shine, but if you just use as a glorified type machine…

For me, sometimes with 5 VMs running concurrently, I can't stand using my SATA SSD (SanDisk Extreme II). But when I'm just text-editing, reading PDFs , the SSD is not the question and anything will do. Depends on your use case.

With PCIe SSDs becoming the norm, $199 1TB Intel 660p this quarter, SATA SSDs will or get much bigger or will fade away. The next months will be interesting.

Ok I think I got it now. You guys have clarified things up.

Honestly I don't use the MP to do heavy stuff just once in while I need to be able to run 2/3 VMs at the same time but that's rare. I mostly do photo editing, compiling, web-browsing and moving ********s of files from a drive to another. In fact one of the reasons I want to upgrade my MP with a fast drive is because it has become so slow that I have neglected it in favour of my MacBookPro.

I will wait and see what happens in a month as I am not in hurry but if the NVMe solution is basically the same price as the standard SSD then I might go for the NVMe. If SSD have a significant drop in price or jump in size then I might just go fo that instead.

On question remains though. Will I see any performance difference between plugin the SSD straight to a sata port (disk tray) and plugin the SSD on PCIe card?

Haha, thanks, that’s my wife

Lucky you!

 

[tsialex]

On question remains though. Will I see any performance difference between plugin the SSD straight to a sata port (disk tray) and plugin the SSD on PCIe card?

Honestly, for 90% of the time, no. You will see the eventual large copy of files going faster, but for 90% of the things that you do, 4K random, PCIe SATA3 will do nothing for you.

 

[h9826790]

Honestly, for 90% of the time, no. You will see the eventual large copy of files going faster, but for 90% of the things that you do, 4K random, PCIe SATA3 will do nothing for you.

100% agree, I have PCIe SATA III card, And I can also tell the difference is practically zero 99% of the time especially this is your first SSD (except multiple large files copying to / from different volumes. Otherwise, the other end is the bottleneck, usually can’t even fully utilise the SATA II bandwidth).

 

[pl1984]

Joke aside, you are saying that there isn't much of a performance difference between the NVMe solution and the SATA solution? I thought the difference was like day and night... And my understanding is that there isn't much of a price difference if I go for Intel's 660p NVMe.

NVMe SSDs can be considerably faster than SATA SSDs depending on the task. As they say a picture is worth a thousand words (credit to handheldgames):

The image on the left are the performance benchmarks for a Samsung 840 EVO SATA SSD, the one on the right for a Samsung 970 PRO NVMe SSD.

If you compare the sequential metrics (rows one and three) you see a night and day difference. The read throughput of the NVMe solution is 3,252 MB/sec which walks all over the SATA solutions 284.6 MB/sec. The NVMe solution is 11x faster than the SATA solution. Because of the significant difference it is this metric (sequential reads) which is often touted in comparisons. In fact one benchmarking tool, Blackmagic, only appears to provide this single metric.

While the sequential metrics are night and day different they are also not representative of the benefit most users will experience with an NVMe solution over a SATA one. Why is that? Because most users usage habits tend to favor the random category. In the images above these are the 4K metrics found on rows two and four. Here we find the NVMe solution provides 369.4 MB/sec compared to the SATA solutions 180.0 MB/sec. This represents a 2x increase over the SATA solution, not nearly the night and day difference as the sequential performance. While a 2x increase is welcome keep in mind the comparison is between an older, less performant SSD (the 840 EVO) and a newer, higher performant SSD (the 970 Pro). Thus part of the increase is due to comparing older versus newer as well as consumer grade versus professional grade drives.

To answer your question about using a SATA-III PCIe adapter the above benchmarks should answer that question too. Looking at the random (those labeled 4K) you'll find only one, the 369.4 MB/sec of the 970 Pro, exceeds the cMP's SATA-II bus limit of 300 MB/sec. IMO it's unlikely you'll encounter this limit (keep in mind these numbers come from a benchmark tool) and, if you do, you're unlikely to notice.

All that said the only reason I am not recommending an NVMe solution is because you indicated you wanted to use the SSD for a boot drive and your primary usage habits, like many, look like they'll be random in nature. Since the Mac Pro does not natively support booting an NVMe drive you have to resort to hacking. If you're fine with hacking boot support then by all means go with the NVMe solution. If you don't need to use it as a boot drive then an NVMe solution should work without hacking as a data drive (I have not confirmed this under OS X but I know it works in Linux).

 

[AlexMaximus]

Ok I think I got it now. You guys have clarified things up.

Honestly I don't use the MP to do heavy stuff just once in while I need to be able to run 2/3 VMs at the same time but that's rare. I mostly do photo editing, compiling, web-browsing and moving ********s of files from a drive to another. In fact one of the reasons I want to upgrade my MP with a fast drive is because it has become so slow that I have neglected it in favour of my MacBookPro.

I will wait and see what happens in a month as I am not in hurry but if the NVMe solution is basically the same price as the standard SSD then I might go for the NVMe. If SSD have a significant drop in price or jump in size then I might just go fo that instead.

On question remains though. Will I see any performance difference between plugin the SSD straight to a sata port (disk tray) and plugin the SSD on PCIe card?

Lucky you!

Important to know for your question SATA SSD on PCI card yes/no is your Windows / Boot Camp usage. (if you have any)
Out of my experience, Boot Camp has problems on certain PCIe SSD's as a boot drive. Somehow I could not get my Accelsior-S card to boot up Windows7. Because of that, I use that SSD regular in one of the HDD bays to boot up Windows 7. All other PCIe Blade SSD solutions I use are fine for the Apple side of it.
I am aware many do not agree with me. But I would always go PCIe if possible, especially if you are on an Apple only system with HighSierra. Don't forget, the new Apple file system is optimized for newer style SSDs as well. If you want to use your cMP 5.1 as long as possible like I do, PCIe is in my opinion absolutely the way to go. No new iMac comes with old SATA SSD's today.

 

[MacGamver]

I just got a Crucial 500MX 500GB SSD SATAII on a cMP 5,1-2012 for $115. The difference is STAGGERING! Like night and day the boot speeds and generally everything else. Even if it is not "the fastest thing possible" it will greatly improve performance.

 

[Kevbasscat]

Found a 1TB Crucial MX500 for $169 on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX50...2&sr=8-3&keywords=1tb+ssd+hard+drive+internal

 

[Pressure]

You can grab an Intel 660p 1TB NVMe for around $200. That gives you 1,800 MB/s read and write. Although it is only rated at 0.1 DWPD (write endurance) but that should satisfy almost all normal usage patterns.

It's the cheapest, high capacity NVMe drive on the market currently.

 

[Kevbasscat]

Found a 1TB Crucial MX500 for $169 on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX50...2&sr=8-3&keywords=1tb+ssd+hard+drive+internal

If you look the Samsung 1 Tb EVO 960 is $169.00 on Amazon. Sata 3, 6 GHz. I’m getting this for my 9,1 iMac, because I don’t want to take it apart again. I also bought the c2d 3.06 Ghz Processor, for $23.00 I have tried twice to double the DDR3 1066GHz, PC 8500 to 16Gb, because multiple people and companies told me I could, including Etrecheck. It’s just my theory but I believe the NVIDIA MCP79 AHCI is just too finicky. Am I correct in assuming that? There is a memory app in El Cap. Does anyone know if I can use that to double?
[doublepost=1538186684][/doublepost]How do I place a picture (jpg or png) to these threads?

 

[polanskiman]

I

If you look the Samsung 1 Tb EVO 960 is $169.00 on Amazon. Sata 3, 6 GHz. I’m getting this for my 9,1 iMac, because I don’t want to take it apart again. I also bought the c2d 3.06 Ghz Processor, for $23.00 I have tried twice to double the DDR3 1066GHz, PC 8500 to 16Gb, because multiple people and companies told me I could, including Etrecheck. It’s just my theory but I believe the NVIDIA MCP79 AHCI is just too finicky. Am I correct in assuming that? There is a memory app in El Cap. Does anyone know if I can use that to double?
[doublepost=1538186684][/doublepost]How do I place a picture (jpg or png) to these threads?

I do not see the 1 Tb EVO 960 being at that price. It's more like 298USD.

 

[bookemdano]

I

I do not see the 1 Tb EVO 960 being at that price. It's more like 298USD.

Ah I think he was talking about the 860 (SATA) not the 960 (NVMe)

 

[polanskiman]

Ah I think he was talking about the 860 (SATA) not the 960 (NVMe)

Seems you edited your post but that link you provided earlier is not for a 1Tb but 500Mb.

 

[Kevbasscat]

I

I do not see the 1 Tb EVO 960 being at that price. It's more like 298USD.

@polanskiman
Samsung 860 EVO 1TB mSATA Internal SSD (MZ-M6E1T0BW)

 

[bookemdano]

Seems you edited your post but that link you provided earlier is not for a 1Tb but 500Mb.

Indeed I did. I edited it probably a minute later (after I posted) but I guess maybe edits aren't reflected in the forum notification you would have gotten.
[doublepost=1538698276][/doublepost]

@polanskiman
Samsung 860 EVO 1TB mSATA Internal SSD (MZ-M6E1T0BW)

Yes, but do you realize you said 960 in your original post, not 860. The 860 and 960 are completely different.

 

[polanskiman]

@polanskiman
Samsung 860 EVO 1TB mSATA Internal SSD (MZ-M6E1T0BW)

That’s the 860 not 960.

 

[Kevbasscat]

Indeed I did. I edited it probably a minute later (after I posted) but I guess maybe edits aren't reflected in the forum notification you would have gotten.
[doublepost=1538698276][/doublepost]

Yes, but do you realize you said 960 in your original post, not 860. The 860 and 960 are completely different.

Please forgive me. Typo on my part, because the 960 is an M2 config. I was searching for sata 3. I should never type without glasses, lol. My bad.
[doublepost=1538725424][/doublepost]

I

I do not see the 1 Tb EVO 960 being at that price. It's more like 298USD.

I believe if you read my complete post, I said SATA 3, that should have been an indication that I had a typo, along with me stating I was using it in an early 2009 iMac, which is SATA 2. No NVMe ports that I’m aware of in it. Just for clarification.