MP 1,1-5,1 Increase Mac Pro SSD speeds

[Silly John Fatty]

I have some SSDs in my 5,1 Mac Pro right now, and I think the max. read/write speeds are somewhere around 500-600 MB/S from what I've seen in the tech specs of the SSDs I bought.

Probably it's less in practice.

But I was wondering if I could increase those speeds with a RAID system. If I got it right, RAID is basically merging all my SSDs to one single drive in Disk Utility.

Will I get more speed if I combine all my drives or have I reach the top already?

They're all just plugged in normally in the corresponding disk trays. It's two SSDs and one HDD.

 

[MarkC426]

SSD's in SATA ports will give you approx 250MB/s [sata 2].
If you put them on PCIe cards you will get the full 500MB/s [sata 3].

I have Sonnet Tempo cards in mine.

 

[Silly John Fatty]

SSD's in SATA ports will give you approx 250MB/s [sata 2].
If you put them on PCIe cards you will get the full 500MB/s [sata 3].

I have Sonnet Tempo cards in mine.

Amazing, so I've had my SSDs for nothing all these years. LOL.

These Sonnet adapters are really expensive, almost more than the SSD itself – at least when new.

When you look at used ones, however, they're super cheap. How come? Is there a lot of potential wear on these?

 

[MarkC426]

Even in the Sata port it's vastly faster than a HDD.

OWC also do one

OWC - Accelsior S - 2.5-inch SATA 6G to PCIe Adapter Card for Mac Pro (2006-2012), Mac Pro (Late 2019 - Current), and PC Towers

Chipset Asmedia 1062 Card Interface PCIe Card Form Factor Half Length; Half Height PCIe Lanes x2 PCIe Slot x4 PCIe Version PCI Express 2.0 Certifications RoHS Compliant Reach Certification Yes Mac OS Compatibility Yes PC OS Compatibility Yes Other Requirements Computer host or PCIe chassis with a...

www.amazon.co.uk

Also see here

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/has-anyone-tried-the-owc-accelsior-s.1893659/

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]

I replaced my Accelsior S - SATA 600 by an Accelsior 1M2 to get better speed.
Source

 

[Juicy Box]

I have had up to three of the internal drives in a SW RAID0 on my Mac Pro 1,1 before, and it does increase the speed a lot. No issues with putting them in a striping RAID. Been doing it with many different drives for around 15 years.

What do you plan on using the potential RAID0 SSDs for?

I have also had two SATA SDDs in a SW RAID0 to use as a boot drive in my Mac Pro, and while I did not have issue for a long time, eventually, the speeds, especially write speeds, got slower. I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that TRIM wasn't working properly.

Not sure if TRIM wasn't working correctly because of it being in a SW RAID0 or because it was also being used as a boot drive.

I ended up going to just a single SSD as a boot drive.

I currently have two HDDs in my Mac Pro in SW RAID0 to hold my Plex Media Server files, and it is almost twice as fast as a single drive, and it hasn't had issues at all.

The only time I had an issue was when one HDD in a SW RAID0 failed about 10 years ago, I lost everything, but of course that is the risk with striping RAID. Luckily, I had a back up.

 

[Macschrauber]

Amazing, so I've had my SSDs for nothing all these years. LOL.

These Sonnet adapters are really expensive, almost more than the SSD itself – at least when new.

When you look at used ones, however, they're super cheap. How come? Is there a lot of potential wear on these?

You didnt waste, ssd speed is about access time. If you do not do continuously data transfers I guess you will even not notice the double sata bus speed. For some reason I put my ssd off the PCIe controller and did not notice a slowdown.

Measuring and real world experience differ.

Anyway, in the meantime I use a NVMe with 1500 MB - but its not so much more faster than the ssd connected to the backplane in my other Mac Pros. Ymmv