MP 7,1 Intel Optane SSD 905P as bootable SSD Drive in Mac Pro 7,1

[rxs0]

Intel Optane SSD 905P as bootable SSD Drive in Mac Pro 7,1

Intel Optane SSD 905P SSD

Intel Optane SSD 905P Series (1.5TB, 1/2 Height PCIe x4, 3D XPoint) reseller single Pack

www.amazon.com

$2159.97 on Amazon
Unboxing pics

 

[rxs0]

Base Configuration:
Entry level Mac Pro 7,1 with 256 GB SSD.
Retrospectively, I would recommend a 1TB disk or greater when ordering system from Apple.

GeekBench Scores below.

Setup:
1. Restart.
2. Press both command + R keys at same time as system restarts.
3. Select Utilities in top menu, select Startup Security Utility.
4. Under Secure Boot, Select "No Security"
5. Under Allowed Boot Media, Select "Allow booting from external or removable media, Does not restrict the ability to boot from any devices.

 

[Romanesco]

What are the benefits of running this over stock SSD? And to what degree?

 

[rxs0]

Install SSD card:
I used a x16 slot for this test.
I also have an amfeltec squid PCI Express Gen 3 Carrier Board for six M.2 PCIe SSD modules in a x16 slot, currently with a single Samsung 500GB EVO 970 SSD. I will be testing this card with 6 Samsung 970 EVO drives in RAID 0 configuration soon.
I "wired" the keyboard to the Mac Pro with the included keyboard cable.

 

[rxs0]

Setup SSD drive:
1. Restart.
2. Press both command + R keys at same time as system restarts.
3. Start Disk Utility
4. Select "Show All Devices" in pull down menu in the left upper margin of Disk Utility, Select Drive (not partition)
5. Name: I named the drive "Macintosh HD Optane"
6. Format: APFS
7. Scheme: GUID Partition Map

Note: The picture below shows the setup for my Samsung drive.

 

[rxs0]

Drive Specs in Mac OS Catalina:

 

[rxs0]

Install Mac OS Catalina on new SSD:
1. Restart.
2. Press both command + R keys at same time as system restarts.
3. Reinstall macOS, Reinstall new copy of macOS

 

[rxs0]

Select Startup Disk:
Go to System Preferences, then Select Startup Disk
Click on botton left "lock", Click on lock to make changes.
This will unlock selection of greyed out disks.
Select Startup Disk and reboot.

 

[rxs0]

Benchmarks: AJA System Test Lite

 

[rxs0]

Benchmarks: Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

 

[rxs0]

Benchmarks: Amorphous Disk Mark

 

[rxs0]

System Stability:
Absolutely no problems so far.

 

[Romanesco]

Oh wow, this is worse than the stock and much worse than the 970 EVO Plus.

 

[tsialex]

Oh wow, this is worse than the stock and much worse than the 970 EVO Plus.

Most of the time you are doing 4K transfers, just a very low percentage of all disk access is QD32 sequential. Optane advantage is low latency and very good 4k transfers.

 

[Pressure]

Oh wow, this is worse than the stock and much worse than the 970 EVO Plus.

It's also using the wrong set of benchmarks for this drive. You will find the latency to be much lower and the drive is tuned for heavy writes. The sequential read and write speeds are mostly useless as a benchmark for real life use. Just look at the 4Kib Q1T1 results.

This is an enterprise / server grade SSD using Intels 3D Xpoint memory.

 

[gabrielefx]

is the cooling passive or active?

 

[rxs0]

is the cooling passive or active?

Passive, only heatsink, no fan. Completely silent.

 

[rxs0]

I will be running the ATTO hard drive benchmark for mac soon.
Thanks

 

[worldburger]

Fascinating. Is there any way to utilize under OS X the 16 or 32GB NVMe Optane variants as they're intended to run in conjunction with Apple's shipped SSDs?

 

[7572994]

Wow, great to know that it works. What is the best scenario for the Optane? Does it make sense to get a 480 GB and set it as a scratch drive for Premiere CC and Adobe After Effects? Or is it better to use it as the media drive, where all pictures, graphics and soundfiles for my productions are stored? Will it speed up the work with Lightroom catalogs for example - if stored on the drive?
And could there be problems in updating the system or something else, when using it as primary boot drive? Do you think that the Optane 900 will work as well? Sorry for my many questions, but it is such an interesting topic, and I was exactly looking for that.

 

[PhotodocFL]

What am I missing? This 1.5TB Intel Optane costs ~$2,200.
Why buy that when an 8TB 4M2 Accelsior SSD from OWC costs ~$2,000

 

[h9826790]

What am I missing? This 1.5TB Intel Optane costs ~$2,200.
Why buy that when an 8TB 4M2 Accelsior SSD from OWC costs ~$2,000

The Optane SSD has significantly better 4K random read QD1 than normal NVMe.

Wow, great to know that it works. What is the best scenario for the Optane? Does it make sense to get a 480 GB and set it as a scratch drive for Premiere CC and Adobe After Effects? Or is it better to use it as the media drive, where all pictures, graphics and soundfiles for my productions are stored? Will it speed up the work with Lightroom catalogs for example - if stored on the drive?
And could there be problems in updating the system or something else, when using it as primary boot drive? Do you think that the Optane 900 will work as well? Sorry for my many questions, but it is such an interesting topic, and I was exactly looking for that.

For video editing, normal NVMe may works better than Optane SSD (or makes no difference).

 

[7572994]

Isn’t 4K random read QD1 important for a scratch disk or Lightroom catalog, where a lot of small files need to be read? I would love to hear from someone who has experience in that work area with an Optane?

 

[h9826790]

Isn’t 4K random read QD1 important for a scratch disk or Lightroom catalog, where a lot of small files need to be read? I would love to hear from someone who has experience in that work area with an Optane?

For video editing, I believe sequential speed is much more important. Otherwise, the old flash RAID 0 HDD array will be hopeless for video editing. Which obviously wrong.

I haven't use LR for quite a few years now, not sure if it's that IOPS limiting now. Even it has lots of small files to read, but if the SSD is not the bottleneck (e.g. CPU is the bottleneck, and normal SSD is already fast enough for those small files read), then further upgrade to Optane should has little to no effect.

 

[7572994]

I guess you stored your media files on the RAID 0 and not the scratch disk? Big video files (I work with 4k 10 bit material, RAW) making sense on a raid, and even the final rendering to an "normal" SSD. But on the scratch disk are a lot of little video and audio previews, when applingy effects or color corrections and rendering the sequence. When opening a project, all these files need to be loaded and after applying different effects often a re-rendering is necessary. So thats the scenario, where my question is directed to.
[automerge]1592590047[/automerge]
@ rxs0
So you are running OS from your Optane, are you experiencing a faster booting, opening of software?