NVME PCI-E adapters for 2009 Mac Pro

[James Murray]

Hi,

I have a 2009 Mac Pro with 5,1 firmware. It currently runs Mojave.

I also have four m.2 drives and I want to see if I can get an adapter to put them in the computer. I know the Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCI-E can support 4 m.2 drives and it's probably the fastest, but it's $400 and I can't afford that. What are some good alternatives? Is that that the only 4 slot m.2 PCI- card that works with an older Mac Pro? I was considering getting two 2 slot PCI-E adapters, but I only have one 16x PCI-E Slot available so if I do get two, one will have to go in a slower 4x slot. Plus I'm worried about overheating issues. Any recommendations?

 

[jbarley]

I was going to suggest this...
1.0TB OWC Accelsior 4M2 PCIe Card.
Which I use and am happy with, but now seeing the price difference since I purchased mine in January
I cannot recommend it.
Same size, same part number, just almost double the price, go figure

 

[James Murray]

I was going to suggest this...
1.0TB OWC Accelsior 4M2 PCIe Card.
Which I use and am happy with, but now seeing the price difference since I purchased mine in January
I cannot recommend it.
Same size, same part number, just almost double the price, go figure
View attachment 928582
View attachment 928583

Yeah that's more expensive than the Sonnet. Speed is not a big concern for me right now, as I'm probably going to upgrade to something like Sonnet at some point if the price ever goes down. For now I just want to be able to use my blades as a boot drive. I was just wondering if there was a cheap 4 slot pcie card like the asus hyper m.2 x16 card v2. That one's only 50$ but it doesn't work on Mac.

Just want to add all 4 blades are Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500 GB

 

[James Murray]

Ideally, I'm looking for something like this, but that works for a 5,1 Mac Pro and costs around the same:
ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 PCIe 3.0 X4 Expansion Card V2 Supports 4 NVMe M.2 (2242/2260/2280/22110) Upto 128 Gbps for Intel VROC and AMD Ryzen Threadripper NV

The cheapest 4 blade card on that list is the OWC ACCELSIOR 4M2 which is still out of my price range.

If there are no budget 4 blade options for mac, will something like this work on my mac 5,1?
Dual M.2 PCIE Adapter for SATA or PCIE NVMe SSD with Advanced Heat Sink Solution,M.2 SSD NVME (m Key) and SATA (b Key) 22110 2280 2260 2242 2230to PCI-e 3.0 x 4 Host Controller Expansion Card

This only supports 2 blades but if I can get two of them I'll be able to use all 4. Since these cheaper ones are slower does it matter which PCI-E slot I put it in?

I don't have a boot screen because I'm using a Sapphire Radeon 11265-05-20G Pulse RX 580 8GB GDDR5 Dual HDMI/ DVI-D/ Dual DP OC with Backplate (UEFI) PCI-E Graphics Card Graphic Cards

Is there a way to install Mojave on the OWC Accelsior 4M2 without having access to a boot screen?