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Highpoint 7101A - PCIe 3.0 SSD performance for the cMP
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Thanks for the suggestion. How many blades are in your 7101A? I assume you put a heatsink on each blade and then another one on the PLX chip? Do you monitor the temps at all?
I run mine currently with the fan unplugged/removed and with the stock cover on (just removed the end plate to allow the PCI fan to get some air in there. Temps are OK but it's still winter here (for a few more hours anyway). I think I would feel better with a cooler, especially during the summer months. Only problem is the market seems to have dried up on those quieter 50x10mm fans. I can find the 36dB ones no problem, and I've found the quieter ones but only in the 5V configuration. Noctua doesn't make any 50mm fans, and while I might be able to adapt a 40mm one, it's not a blower style so it would not be as effective given the design of the card.
As an aside, does anyone with a v2.0 board revision actually have the fan speed control setting working? It's so weird to me that there was so much talk in this thread about needing a 2.0 board to get it, but now Highpoint tells me I actually need a v3.1.
zedex
macrumors 6502
I do that too. By setting up PCIe Expansion Slots fan with appropriate settings in iStat Menus - I have never had problems. 😎
skodises
Contributor
Since folks are still fighting the fan noise issues, I thought I'd post the link back to my 2021 post about building up my fanless 7101A. It is still in use as we speak, running my main work machine to support a Windows 11 environment under Parallels, and has never even hiccuped. Stone reliable, which is what I need in a daily driver. All in all, it has been the second-best thing I ever did for my CMP 5,1 (second only to TSIAlex's boot rom services!).
Have a look and see what you think, if you are considering going fanless. It is very doable.
Have a look and see what you think, if you are considering going fanless. It is very doable.
roobarb!
macrumors 6502
Didn't even go that far myself. 😉
Oh, I've just looked at your post - very neat! What on earth are those two huge long cards in slots 3 and 4, though?
skodises
Contributor
If that question was directed at me: those are Sonnet Tempo Pro Plus cards. Each one hosts a pair of 2.5" SATA SSDs, and has ports for an external ESATA dock or enclosure. They are absolutely vintage now, but at one time (before NVME) they were about the best way to get relatively speedy drives into a CMP.
Right now, each of them hold 2 TB drives. When I built this machine in 2012 I needed to move multi-GB image files around (technical image analysis using Gimp). They were so much better than any spinners. And they lived much, much longer than the equally-vintage OWC Mercury Accelsior/Accelsior E2s, several of which died dramatically and expensively while in my possession... Now, I do everything active on the 4x 2TB NVME drives, and keep the Sonnets around as semi-speedy backup drives, backing up nightly (with CCC). I then back up the backups onto spinners via a desktop ESATA dock weekly, and rotate the set of spinners offsite to my safe deposit box monthly after a final full clone.
The best spinner I have does about 95MB/s on Blackmagic, the Sonnets do about 500, the Accelsiors did about 700 (for the few months they lasted, anyway), and the NVME does about 4500 in Raid 0-2 for my data drive. Needless to say, backing all that stuff up to spinners is an overnight activity at the first of the month...
We had a house fire a year ago, and the machine actually *survived* it- but ya gotta believe that I was still really glad that I had the offsite storage. I also wasn't too annoyed that the remaining stack of dead Accelsiors in my spares box got fricasseed along with the rest of the house: the fragility of those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned proprietary Sandforce SSD blades they used have been discussed here at length. Anybody who might wonder why I use such an overkill belt/suspenders/duct tape/superglue backup scheme with SSDs: there's your answer...
Right now, each of them hold 2 TB drives. When I built this machine in 2012 I needed to move multi-GB image files around (technical image analysis using Gimp). They were so much better than any spinners. And they lived much, much longer than the equally-vintage OWC Mercury Accelsior/Accelsior E2s, several of which died dramatically and expensively while in my possession... Now, I do everything active on the 4x 2TB NVME drives, and keep the Sonnets around as semi-speedy backup drives, backing up nightly (with CCC). I then back up the backups onto spinners via a desktop ESATA dock weekly, and rotate the set of spinners offsite to my safe deposit box monthly after a final full clone.
The best spinner I have does about 95MB/s on Blackmagic, the Sonnets do about 500, the Accelsiors did about 700 (for the few months they lasted, anyway), and the NVME does about 4500 in Raid 0-2 for my data drive. Needless to say, backing all that stuff up to spinners is an overnight activity at the first of the month...
We had a house fire a year ago, and the machine actually *survived* it- but ya gotta believe that I was still really glad that I had the offsite storage. I also wasn't too annoyed that the remaining stack of dead Accelsiors in my spares box got fricasseed along with the rest of the house: the fragility of those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned proprietary Sandforce SSD blades they used have been discussed here at length. Anybody who might wonder why I use such an overkill belt/suspenders/duct tape/superglue backup scheme with SSDs: there's your answer...
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amarmot
macrumors member
Hey all. I recently tried a Highpoint R1104 4 blade NVME card in Slot 2 of a Mac Pro 5,1. It successfully achieves 4x4 (x16) speeds, and in Softraid the Raid 10 performance is close to what you would expect (2.5 GB writes, 5.0 GB reads). But then I tried Raid 4. This slows down reads somewhat (as expected for 3 vs. 4 data disks). But writes are incredibly slow - around 450 MB/s! I assume the bottleneck must the parity calculation? If so, would a card with hardware raid (SSD7101A-1) be a better choice for Raid 4? It seems many are using SSD7101A-1 with software raid, which would seem to defeat the purpose of having a hardware raid card. The SSD7101A-1 supports hardware raid, but only Raid 0, 1, and 10. It does not provide a parity calculation.
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If anyone was wondering, my SSD7103 with driver v1.1.30 is working fine under Mac OS 14.0 (Sonoma), so the 7101A probably works, also. Unfortunately, HighPoint no longer supports my card, per their web site.
Inspector42
macrumors member
I did a similar cooling mod as described here.
I was able to measure the temparature of the PLX8747 directly on the recessed heat spreader of the PLX with the big heat sink mounted. With stock PCI cooler speed of the MacPro at 800 rpm I measured a maximum of 55°C. The heat sink itself could be touched at any point so that was well below 50°C on the upper surface with an ambient temperature inside the Mac Pro of 27°C.
This is in line with the specified typical power dissipation of 8W from the PLX and an estimated thermal resistance of 2-3K/W for the heat sink. Solutions with a copper heatsink and substantially more fins resulting in a bigger cooling surface will perform even better.
The PLX does not seem to have any significant power management features as this temperature did not change by more than 5°C regardless whether I transferred data or left it alone over a longer period. Adding device properties in open core config for ASPM also did not make any difference and Hackintool shows ASPM off for the PLX regardless of the properties.
I have 2 Samsung 970 EVO Pro configured as RAID 0 and one Sabrent Rocket that I intend to use as a boot drive.
The RAID provides write speeds slightly above 4100 MB/s and read speeds slightly above 4600 MB/s when using Apple RAID. HighPoint drivers had write speeds around 3750 MB/s and comparable read speed.
So I am not using the HighPoint drivers. As a nice side effect I can see the temperatures of the SSDs in fan control app and can therefore control the fan speed depending on the SSD temperature.
I performed a torture test of transferring 400 GB from the Sabrent to the Samsung RAID with 2700 MB/s continuous transfer rate limited by the Sabrent SSD. It revealed that the heat sinks I attached to the SSDs are to shallow (6mm) and the SSD in the two middle positions have substantially higher temperatures than the ones in the two outer positions as they are exclusively getting preheated air from the PLX heatsink. I will eventually replace them with ones that have higher fins.
I was able to measure the temparature of the PLX8747 directly on the recessed heat spreader of the PLX with the big heat sink mounted. With stock PCI cooler speed of the MacPro at 800 rpm I measured a maximum of 55°C. The heat sink itself could be touched at any point so that was well below 50°C on the upper surface with an ambient temperature inside the Mac Pro of 27°C.
This is in line with the specified typical power dissipation of 8W from the PLX and an estimated thermal resistance of 2-3K/W for the heat sink. Solutions with a copper heatsink and substantially more fins resulting in a bigger cooling surface will perform even better.
The PLX does not seem to have any significant power management features as this temperature did not change by more than 5°C regardless whether I transferred data or left it alone over a longer period. Adding device properties in open core config for ASPM also did not make any difference and Hackintool shows ASPM off for the PLX regardless of the properties.
I have 2 Samsung 970 EVO Pro configured as RAID 0 and one Sabrent Rocket that I intend to use as a boot drive.
The RAID provides write speeds slightly above 4100 MB/s and read speeds slightly above 4600 MB/s when using Apple RAID. HighPoint drivers had write speeds around 3750 MB/s and comparable read speed.
So I am not using the HighPoint drivers. As a nice side effect I can see the temperatures of the SSDs in fan control app and can therefore control the fan speed depending on the SSD temperature.
I performed a torture test of transferring 400 GB from the Sabrent to the Samsung RAID with 2700 MB/s continuous transfer rate limited by the Sabrent SSD. It revealed that the heat sinks I attached to the SSDs are to shallow (6mm) and the SSD in the two middle positions have substantially higher temperatures than the ones in the two outer positions as they are exclusively getting preheated air from the PLX heatsink. I will eventually replace them with ones that have higher fins.
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eGoodchild
macrumors newbie
Highpoint 7101A users: Has anyone ever had issues where only 3 of the drives on the card are accessible? I have this on two cards, on two systems. Obserbed on both Sequioa and Sonoma, on two cards, on two Mac Pros. I feel like I must be doing something dumb 😛