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Sonnet Tempo & dual SSDs - worth it in 2019?

M

MVMNT

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Was wondering, what with the advent of NVME support in Mojave now, is the 6Gb/s Sonnet Tempo card worth looking at any more for SSD setups in a cMP?

I'm running on High Sierra still, and happy to do so for the time being, but I wondered if going forward a Sonnet dual SSD card is a worthwhile investment, at the right price?

Cheers
 
MVMNT said:
Was wondering, what with the advent of NVME support in Mojave now, is the 6Gb/s Sonnet Tempo card worth looking at any more for SSD setups in a cMP?

I'm running on High Sierra still, and happy to do so for the time being, but I wondered if going forward a Sonnet dual SSD card is a worthwhile investment, at the right price?

Cheers
Click to expand...
No, unless you get it almost for free.
 
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MVMNT said:
I thought as much - The one i've seen is sub $100, but that's not almost free. Thanks T.
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With around $130~$140 you can get a 512MB HP EX920 + a AquaComputer kryo2 EVO, this combo will get throughputs of a little less than 1500MB/s. You can get it even cheaper, but you should get a decent blade and a decent adapter with a big heatsink.
 
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Only way it's worthwhile is if you need 4+TB of SSD storage in addition to PCIe NVMe.

I'm running two 512GB Samsung m.2 drives plus 4x 2TB Micron 1100 SSD's in RAID 0. One Samsung m.2 960 Pro is for OS+Apps. Other Samsung 970 Pro m.2 is working data/scratch. The RAID 0 array is for moving projects quickly between storage and active.

The 8TB SSD array has two drives on a Sonnet Tempo Pro and two drives on the onboard SATA. By splitting the RAID array across the Sonnet and onboard, I can get 900MB/s writes and 1.0GB/s reads. If I put all the SATA SSD's on the onboard, it would be capped around 600-700MB/s.
 
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Personally would proceed with caution on SATA SSDs via PCIe at the moment. Several are running into random issues with Apricorn products OCCASIONALLY not booting correctly with 140 firmware. These have either Marvell 9182 (Solo X2) or Marvell 9230 (Duo X2) chipset for SATA controller. Believe the Sonnet Tempo used Marvell 9182 and unsure if the issue would also present with those PCIe adapters.
 
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bsbeamer said:
Personally would proceed with caution on SATA SSDs via PCIe at the moment. Several are running into random issues with Apricorn products OCCASIONALLY not booting correctly with 140 firmware. These have either Marvell 9182 (Solo X2) or Marvell 9230 (Duo X2) chipset for SATA controller. Believe the Sonnet Tempo used Marvell 9182 and unsure if the issue would also present with those PCIe adapters.
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I don't have problems with the Sonnet booting . But I agree it is a good option for a raid scratch disk only, even though the speed is much inferior compared to a NVME. Still direct pcie speed of NVME is around 1500 whereas the raid 0 on the Sonnet is 960.
 
The SONNET Tempo SSD Pro PLUS is a bargain at $100 but I'm pretty sure you're looking at the Tempo SSD Pro which is nothing special and I wouldn't pay $100 for one of those.

The PRO PLUS does 960MB/s but the Pro model only does ~670MB/s

Unfortunately - the PRO PLUS model seems to have been discontinued at this point :/
 
zedex said:
The SONNET Tempo SSD Pro PLUS is a bargain at $100 but I'm pretty sure you're looking at the Tempo SSD Pro which is nothing special and I wouldn't pay $100 for one of those.

The PRO PLUS does 960MB/s but the Pro model only does ~670MB/s

Unfortunately - the PRO PLUS model seems to have been discontinued at this point :/
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From memory

TempoSSD does ~670MB/s

TempoSSD Pro does ~960MB/s, but no eSATA ports

TempoSSD Pro PLUS ~960MB/s and has eSATA ports

And Sonnet official page now only has TempoSSD, no more Pro or Pro PLUS.
 
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i just bought 2x 120gb SSD for 26$ each
i will be putting them in RAID; for under 60 bucks for 2 SSD's why the hell not?
 
I own a Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus, for a long time it was forgotten on the shelf but after some disappointing tests with the Angelbird Wings X2 I decided to put it back in my MacPro (2012 model, upgraded to single X5690 and 24 Gb of 1333 MHz RAM) and after some speed tests I choose to keep it as my main Mojave system disk.
The configuration is as follow:

Slot 4: Sonnet Tempo Pro Plus with 2 Crucial MX500 512 Gb each, configured in Raid0 via standard Disk Utility and formatted as HFS+ (trimforce enabled)
Slot 3: Inateck USB 3.0 4 port USB host controller
Slot 2: empty
Slot 1: Sapphire Pulse RX580 8 Gb Vram (Orinoco framebuffer)

Boot time: 20 seconds from chime to Mojave desktop
Transfer rates: 790 Mb/s Write and 980 Mb/s Read (much faster than Wings X2 in hardware RAID0 mode)
Very responsive system, I am really happy about this configuration, however everything it's come to a price:

- Mojave was trasferred (via Carbon Copy Cloner) from a bootable APFS disk to the HFS+ soft RAID0 on Sonnet card since it is not possible to install natively and boot OSX 10.14 on a soft Raid0 array, therefore the Recovery partition is lost.
- The measured write/read speed is slow if compared to a NVMe drive (1400 Mb/sec) but the boot time is greatly reduced (on a Samsung 970EVO I measured 35 seconds from chime to desktop) in the real world the difference is almost unnoticed.
- Having a RAID0 array makes mandatory to have a Time Machine dedicated disk because the failure of one SSD means the loss of everything on the array.
- I don't know if future OSX 10.14 updates will install since the boot volume is now an HFS+ soft raid and not a solid APFS one

For some reasons the Crucial MX drives works as a charm on the Sonnet and not so good on the Angelbird card, I suspect the integrated "garbage collecting" of the Crucial SSDs interferes in some way with the Wing X2's hardware, maybe a "dumb" SSDs without this feature would work better.

To be honest I would prefer to have an hardware RAID0 array instead the one I created thru Disk Utility because if APFS was intended to be used with Mojave, using the HFS+ format is not optimal, I can't install it natively and I can't have a Recovery partition to boot from.

Anyway I found the Sonnet Tempo Pro (plus) solution still very good and usable and if high velocity write/read tasks are not needed I can reccomend it strongly, I don't feel any nostalgia about my previous NVMe 970EVO drive.

Hower if it is possible (using other hardware) to further reduce on the MacPro 5.1 the boot time below the 20s (chime to desktop) please let me know how to and I will be more than happy to upgrade 🙂
 
bsbeamer said:
Personally would proceed with caution on SATA SSDs via PCIe at the moment. Several are running into random issues with Apricorn products OCCASIONALLY not booting correctly with 140 firmware. These have either Marvell 9182 (Solo X2) or Marvell 9230 (Duo X2) chipset for SATA controller. Believe the Sonnet Tempo used Marvell 9182 and unsure if the issue would also present with those PCIe adapters.
Click to expand...
I have an Apricorn PCIe with two Samsung EVO's on RAID 0. I am still stuck with High Sierra but considering getting a new GPU and upgrading to Mojave/Catalina.
Do you know if Apricorn has any issues with the latest OS on a MP 5,1?
 
gugy said:
I have an Apricorn PCIe with two Samsung EVO's on RAID 0. I am still stuck with High Sierra but considering getting a new GPU and upgrading to Mojave/Catalina.
Do you know if Apricorn has any issues with the latest OS on a MP 5,1?
Click to expand...

Still getting these random issues with SATA SSD drives via PCIe adapter not showing in Mojave, same as in High Sierra. Truly is random. Can not do anything to reproduce.

When the issue presents, drive is 90%+ accessible via other methods in finder, but will not mount on desktop, shortcuts do not work, and some apps cannot properly access. Shutdown and reboot nearly always fixes the first time. Two or three have had to do that two times in a row to work correctly.

It is not a bad drive and nothing related to the drive itself. It’s either the adapter or OS. Majority of the time it’s perfectly fine. I’d avoid RAID with Mojave, especially via SATA PCIe SSD because of this.
 
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bsbeamer said:
Click on TECH SPECS and you'll see "Power Mac® G5 (with PCIe slots)" listed.

Technically it SHOULD be compatible. You might have better luck in the vintage forum for real use scenarios.
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Yeah, I have seen their website. Was interested in real-life usage. (There is a report on Youtube confirming it works, but wanted to get more opinions on whether it makes sense. It is not a very cheap thing to buy it without a solid justification.)
 
barracuda156 said:
Yeah, I have seen their website. Was interested in real-life usage. (There is a report on Youtube confirming it works, but wanted to get more opinions on whether it makes sense. It is not a very cheap thing to buy it without a solid justification.)
Click to expand...
Again, I'd look more towards vintage forums for Power Mac G5 specific usage. Very rare to see G5 users on this forum these days.

Everyone's price/budget is different, but I've seen this card for under $75 on sale. There is at least one being sold on eBay right now for not much more than that. Occasionally there are sales around the holiday season from Sonnet, but prices have been holding fairly steady on brand new hardware for the last 3+ years with supply constraints.

Another option is to just buy from a retailer with a good return policy and test it out. If you're just trying to use it for storage/working SSD space vs. bootable I think you'll have better luck.
 
got tempo pro ssd for around 50 euro lucky on ebay, and it is a very useful card on the macpro (besides issues with card disabling bootpicker on the macpro 5,1) since it makes sata ssd so much faster, and gives you more storage option.
if you care for bootpicker in times of OC, you could buy tempo fusion, which does not have the problem of tempo pro or tempo.

edit: also the tempo pro plus seems to suffer of the bootpicker-issue
 
mrkapqa said:
got tempo pro ssd for around 50 euro lucky on ebay, and it is a very useful card on the macpro (besides issues with card disabling bootpicker on the macpro 5,1) since it makes sata ssd so much faster, and gives you more storage option.
if you care for bootpicker in times of OC, you could buy tempo fusion, which does not have the problem of tempo pro or tempo.

edit: also the tempo pro plus seems to suffer of the bootpicker-issue
Click to expand...
For info, this TempoSSD card only affect the native Apple boot manager. OpenCore boot picker is not affected. I can boot from my TempoSSD via OpenCore boot picker.

Be careful the Fusion card is not bootable. It looks similar to the TempoSSD card, however, it's a completely different product actually.

If only install data drive onto the TempoSSD card, even the native Apple boot manager can work, the bug will only be triggered when there is a boot drive installed onto the card. In fact, by doing NVRAM reset / SMC reset with an empty TempoSSD card, it's possible to clear that bug ( I tested this on my cMP). However, the problem usually will come back within 1-2 reboot. Therefore, not worth to spend time on it.
 
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