Maybe not that good, as i tried using the XPF-helper-disk and it simply didn't work. Booted from the "helper" instead.
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OWC Accelsior S
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The card's secret has been uncovered: it uses two Marvell 88SE9182 PCIe 2.0 ×2 controllers - one for each SSD - behind a PLX PCIe bridge.
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Interesting chart under the "performance"-tag!
Comes up wit some astonishing (but in the end expected) facts, concerning the Quad:
- With a single disk, gains of the x4- over the x2-card are small, as limited by the disk's speed.
- With dual disks the x2-card can gain almost nothing over a single disk setup, limited by the bus
Comes up wit some astonishing (but in the end expected) facts, concerning the Quad:
- With a single disk, gains of the x4- over the x2-card are small, as limited by the disk's speed.
- With dual disks the x2-card can gain almost nothing over a single disk setup, limited by the bus
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I was hoping the Tempo SSD Pro might use one mythical four-lane controller to get past the two-lane cards even if using a single SSD. Not that it matters anymore.
Likely, as the normal limit given by the PCIe 2.0 bus should be around 2GB/s minus overhead, but i get over 3 out of a single 970EVO plus.
But this shouldn't matter that much for the Quad. The card seems to work fine with AHCI-blades too. But it's own chip, PLX 8747, is recognized by the system as "NVMe controller" which i doubt to be "seen" in Powermacs at all.
But maybe someone wants to give it a try themselfs? (not my auction) 😉
Quad G5 has:
- two x4 slots: ≈800 MB/s
- one x8 slot: ≈1600 MB/s
- one x16 slot: ≈3500 MB/s
You should be able to use some x8 or x16 M.2 cards with a PCIe gen 2/3/4 switch to convert x4 gen 2/3/4 to x8 or x16 gen 1 but it might have issues?
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/fastest-nvme-external-enclosure-with-m1.2272255/post-30835748
The PCIe SSD thread lists PCIe cards:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/pcie-ssds-nvme-ahci.2146725/
Or an external expansion chassis?
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/external-pcie-expansion-non-tb3.2180900/post-27390865
Regarding the Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus, it has a PCIe 2.0 x4 switch and two Marvell PCIe 2.0 x2 controllers so each SATA SSD should be able to get full speed (≈540 MB/s) in a PCIe 1.0 x4 slot.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/amfeltec-x16-pcie-with-4-ssds-5900-mb-s.1936311/post-26166849
Other PowerMacs have PCI or PCI-X slots of various speeds up to 1067 MB/s but it's difficult to find PCI to PCIe adapters that can do more than 133 MB/s.
See "PCI Speeds" and "PCI Adapters" at https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...l-work-in-a-beige-power-macintosh-g3.2303689/
- two x4 slots: ≈800 MB/s
- one x8 slot: ≈1600 MB/s
- one x16 slot: ≈3500 MB/s
You should be able to use some x8 or x16 M.2 cards with a PCIe gen 2/3/4 switch to convert x4 gen 2/3/4 to x8 or x16 gen 1 but it might have issues?
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/fastest-nvme-external-enclosure-with-m1.2272255/post-30835748
The PCIe SSD thread lists PCIe cards:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/pcie-ssds-nvme-ahci.2146725/
Or an external expansion chassis?
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/external-pcie-expansion-non-tb3.2180900/post-27390865
Regarding the Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus, it has a PCIe 2.0 x4 switch and two Marvell PCIe 2.0 x2 controllers so each SATA SSD should be able to get full speed (≈540 MB/s) in a PCIe 1.0 x4 slot.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/amfeltec-x16-pcie-with-4-ssds-5900-mb-s.1936311/post-26166849
Other PowerMacs have PCI or PCI-X slots of various speeds up to 1067 MB/s but it's difficult to find PCI to PCIe adapters that can do more than 133 MB/s.
See "PCI Speeds" and "PCI Adapters" at https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...l-work-in-a-beige-power-macintosh-g3.2303689/
Yes! Could be some interesting experiment, to just plug the SM951 into this thing...
..., get this into the lowest PCIe and see if the 951 can run to it's full potential of about 2.000 read and 1.200 write, even in a G5.
But "in real life" both of the faster slots are blocked by the 7800 GTX. And i am quite happy with the ~ 800 r/w it delivers even on a x4. Finally t's ridiculously fast for such an old machine. The only very small thing, still missing, is botting capability. But one can not have it all.
On the other hand, i also found some usefull purpose for the "too slow" Accelsior, this whole thread is for: I just put it into my second Mac Pro, a single CPU 5,1, where it serves as a backup for the NVMe. In this one it brings the SSD to it's limits of ~ 500 / 500 even on a x2-slot and boots fine. So even in this much more "modern" machine, this is twice of what onboard SATA can offer.
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What beast is this?
Damn it, you are going to make me buy more Macs I've already owned with more expensive PCI-E cards just to play around with this.
You guys are worse than my kids.🤣
I wonder how noisy that tiny fan is.
It’s not just you. I really wish I had a cMP now. Argh…
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Sorry, i really didn't want to buy this! 😚
...but, looking at the price point, just couldn't resist. They have been on Aliexpress for a very short time for 167 € (equals $) with free shipping. But at least in this case the investment was of exeptional real everyday productive value.
It is basically some kind of clone of the HighPoint 7101a. Same chipset and very similar PCB-layout. I use it in the second x16 slot of my main working machine, a 5,1, where it shows some still serious numbers.
For a single 970EVO plus (which boots fine)...
...and for two of them in Raid 0.
I wonder too! ...but cannot report, as i just removed it! 😁I wonder how noisy that tiny fan is.
The 5,1's expansion card fan blows right into the back of this thing...
...so i decided that this screaming 3$ part should not be neccessary. And it seems to work fine. I got temps around 55ºC for all of the SSDs even on hot summerdays. At the moment they are all far below 50. Shouldn't be any problem.
Read it all but was left a bit confused as discussion wondered so much in different technologies. But, can I use normal SATA SSDs with the Accelsior S in a G5 (late 2005, Powermac 11,2) or do I need to source an AHCI SSD -drive? I have plenty of modern SATAIII -drives from Samsung, Crucial and even one from OWC, it would be nice if one of those can be used.
And another question, I got the feeling that the answer is no but just to be sure: is there a way to make the G5 boot from the drive attached to the Accelsior or is that something that just cannot be done?
Sorry, if it got a bit confusing on the way.
No! Accelsior S works with any usual SATA-SSD, regardless if SATA II or III as they are backwards compatible. But it should be III to reach the max expected troughput of ~ 400MB/s, as II is limited at around 300. Should not be much of a problem as allmost all even cheap SSDs are SATA III today.
AHCI only matters in regards of M.2-formfactor SSDs.
See above: No problem! But for Accelsior as well as M.2-AHCI-drives: They will not boot in PPC and need at least Leopard to work at all!
At state of the moment: No!
There is some work at XPostFacto to get the "Helper-Disk"-function to hand the booting over to the AHCI-volume in the process. But at the moment it does not work and, at least to my personal experience, using XPF with a New World Mac and Leopard (which it was never made for!) does more harm than good. So i would suggest to avoid it.
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Thank you for clearing that up. So, I will need 2 SSD's - one to boot from and an another to the Accelsior S.
Can I transfer the Applications and User -folders out of the boot drive to the second SSD in Leopard to take advantage of the faster transfers Accelsior provides? Never tried it but it seems at least in High Sierra I can specify the location of the User-folder, same in Leopard? I guess the moving applications to another drive is just matter of drag and drop?
Can I transfer the Applications and User -folders out of the boot drive to the second SSD in Leopard to take advantage of the faster transfers Accelsior provides? Never tried it but it seems at least in High Sierra I can specify the location of the User-folder, same in Leopard? I guess the moving applications to another drive is just matter of drag and drop?
Not sure about the User-folder(s) and what happens, if these (with all the appllication-support data in the librarys-folder) are seperated from the boot-drive.
But for the rest: Yes! That's exactly what i do! I have all the productive apps as i. e. ADOBE on the fast drive, as well as the related project data. And it feels quite a bit "faster" and more responive than before.
In HS you just go to the System Prefs, Users and right click (or ctrl+click) a user, choose Advanced options and then you can enter a path to the user-folder. Reboot.
It seems the procedure is pretty much same in Leopard by the instructions in Amethyst1's link. 👍🏻
Seems do be pretty easy to do...
...but is it worth it after all? Would depend on how the usage of administrative data is ditributed between the /User/Library- and root level /Library-Folder, which has to stay on the boot-drive. Not so easy to see trough, as some of the bigger packages, namely ADOBE, have lots of support files in both of them.
I'd assume real life speed gains would be barely noticeable if existing at all.
If you store all or at least most of the files you work with in the
/Users/YourUserName folder, then it’s probably worth it. If you store your files somewhere else, you may not see much, if any, benefit. Same goes for the /Applications folder — store your software somewhere else and you can leave it on the boot drive.
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Well, if I would use the G5 as my main machine then I guess it would be worth it. Don't know about the administrative data but the size of my email -folder (inside the Library folder) alone is 29.7GB. And the size of my user folder is in total 261GB. Most of my files are in other drives though so that is only a fraction of the total anyway. But, the G5 will not be my main machine so its not all that critical.
Yeah, like most people with only one internal drive do.
Yes, exactly!
But in this way i never "adopted" the OSX-advised way of organizing data. I never ever stored my project-/customer-/media-data inside the user-/home-folder nor did i put the majority of the software used into the "applications"-folder. Only the very few which have to be in there to work properly went there. All the rest has allways been in organized other locations...
...and now, for the Quad, sits on the fast storage. So the only data randomly and frequently accessed once the OS is booted up are the system-files themselfs as well as the support-, prefs- and temp-files of the running apps, located in the various Library-folders.
Illustrates nicely, how different people use things! 😁
This is exactly one gig more in size than my complete user-folder on my actual main working machine!
Emails are only stored for the last ten years with very few exceptions and with many mailboxes for customers i do not work for anymore completely removed and archived away. But apart from that, in particular the size of that folder shouldn't matter in regards of performance, as the waste majority of it's contents will never be accessed ever again. 😉
As I started using Linux before OS X, the latter's concept of "conveniently" storing everything on one partition feels a little strange to me too. I mean, the BSDs ironically are even more into the use-a-separate-partition-for-almost-anything concept!
Since i completely switched to SSDs, aside from what's automatically created by newer OSes/filesystems, i do not use "partitions" at all anymore. There's some much more simple concept. It's called "folders"! 😝
The next step in escalation in my case are physical disks. I. e. on my Pro, i have everything, meaning system, apps and the complete user data, organized in folders, on the single partition of a 1TB NVMe SSD, the boot-drive. This is daily cloned to another one for redundance. Also there is a 2TB Raid 0, which holds all the media-collection, videos, music, photos, which is also daily cloned to some 2TB SATA SSD. And the last 1 TB SATA, that's in the box, hosts my Win 11 install on it. That's it so far!
As SSDs (unlike HDDs) have no "fast" or "slow" sectors anymore, i newer really got the point of partitioning them at all.
If you run more than one OS natively from a single drive, partitioning is still a must.