Help with HighPoint SSD7101A-1

[Keith Rondinelli]

I'm hoping community members can help me, because HighPoint's support is nonexistent and their online help materials are confusing at best. I bought a SSD7101A-1 NVMe RAID controller, touted by HighPoint as compatible with the my new Mac Pro 2019.

Installation of the PCIe card, and the SSD drives was fairly breezy. The drives are recognized when I boot the Mac (asked me to initialize).

The problems began, however, installing the card's extension/driver. Mac security blocked the driver, which I then allowed, but the driver/extension still isn't loading. When I try to connect to HighPoint's RAID Web GUI, it says it can't connect.

In my system report, in extensions, the HighPointNVMe extension is visible, but it is not loaded.

I've also tried disabling the SIP, uninstalling and reinstalling the driver, etc.

Has anyone had any luck getting one of these cards up and running?

I should also note that I am able to bypass HighPoints RAID software altogether and create the RAID via Disk Utility, and the speeds seem incredibly fast. Is there any downside to just using the card this way?

I'm fairly disappointed with HighPoints slow or nonexistent support. I am contemplating returning to Amazon.

 

[Adult80HD]

You need to boot your Mac Pro into Recovery Mode and disable Secure Boot. It is a problem with the T2 chip--or maybe just an intended action--but it will not load the driver correctly unless Secure Boot is disabled. After that you'll be able to run the web GUI for the app and set up your RAID array, etc.

You can use it the way you are using it, it's perfectly fine--but the GUI lets you monitor NVMe temps, etc. I got slightly faster read and write speeds using the NVMe software to set up the array on the card. BTW, if you format with APFS it's fine, but if you add encryption, it massively cuts the speed down--almost 50%.

If you want to learn more, there's a big long thread on these cards and similar over in the Mac Pro forum. I can't find the link at the moment.....

 

[Keith Rondinelli]

You need to boot your Mac Pro into Recovery Mode and disable Secure Boot. It is a problem with the T2 chip--or maybe just an intended action--but it will not load the driver correctly unless Secure Boot is disabled. After that you'll be able to run the web GUI for the app and set up your RAID array, etc.

You can use it the way you are using it, it's perfectly fine--but the GUI lets you monitor NVMe temps, etc. I got slightly faster read and write speeds using the NVMe software to set up the array on the card. BTW, if you format with APFS it's fine, but if you add encryption, it massively cuts the speed down--almost 50%.

If you want to learn more, there's a big long thread on these cards and similar over in the Mac Pro forum. I can't find the link at the moment.....

Thanks Adult80HD. I managed to figure this out after going back and forth with HighPoint's support team. Seems like these things really weren't that ready for the light of day on the Mac Pro. Do you think it's a reliable card? I wound up with one of the ones that doesn't allow adjusting of fan speed, so I'm also a little concerned with noise being I use my Mac for music production part of the time. I'm on the fence as to whether I'm going to keep it, or perhaps spend the money on one of the fan-less OWC SSD cards. Only downside to those is you're locked into a specific size (4tb, 8tb) and the HighPoint one is expandable.

 

[Adult80HD]

Thanks Adult80HD. I managed to figure this out after going back and forth with HighPoint's support team. Seems like these things really weren't that ready for the light of day on the Mac Pro. Do you think it's a reliable card? I wound up with one of the ones that doesn't allow adjusting of fan speed, so I'm also a little concerned with noise being I use my Mac for music production part of the time. I'm on the fence as to whether I'm going to keep it, or perhaps spend the money on one of the fan-less OWC SSD cards. Only downside to those is you're locked into a specific size (4tb, 8tb) and the HighPoint one is expandable.

In general the HighPoint card is highly regarded by the Mac Pro community and has been used for a number of years now in the older 5,1 models. Very stable, and high performance. Early results from those using the OWC card are showing much slower performance and very inconsistent performance.

You should return the one you have and get a newer one with the fan you can tweak, or if you're handy, do the mod to replace the fan. That's what I did. It's now silent and runs very cool.