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SSD Drive for Mac Pro 4,1/5,1
- Thread starter ilegal31
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FWIW, I've used lots of different SSDs over the years and had a good experience with all of them. I just read the reviews and pick the ones that fit my budget at the time. Currently that means a couple of Samsung 840 Evo drives, one for OSX and one for Boot Camp Windows.
I use 2.5 to 3.5 caddies for the drives so that they happily use the normal drive bays. That means they're using SATA II which limits them to 300MB/s. However, to me at least, the big benefit of SSD is not the transfer rate but the fact that random access is instantaneous.
Some people are keen on SATA III cards so that they can get 600MB/s. Personally, I'd rather have extra SSD drive space than spend £100 on one. I can happily put up with a gig of data taking 4 seconds to move instead of 2.
Also, if you need ultimate performance, a lot of people are making a big fuss about the Samsung SM951. You need an adapter that uses a PCIE slot for it and the combination is expensive. But it's very, very, very fast. To me at least, it looks a much better deal than a SATA III card.
I use 2.5 to 3.5 caddies for the drives so that they happily use the normal drive bays. That means they're using SATA II which limits them to 300MB/s. However, to me at least, the big benefit of SSD is not the transfer rate but the fact that random access is instantaneous.
Some people are keen on SATA III cards so that they can get 600MB/s. Personally, I'd rather have extra SSD drive space than spend £100 on one. I can happily put up with a gig of data taking 4 seconds to move instead of 2.
Also, if you need ultimate performance, a lot of people are making a big fuss about the Samsung SM951. You need an adapter that uses a PCIE slot for it and the combination is expensive. But it's very, very, very fast. To me at least, it looks a much better deal than a SATA III card.
All SSD's except these with Sandforce controller.
For SATA 6G: CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro card (all SATA drives bootable, plus two USB 3.0) with Crucial SSD's or Samsung 850 Pro. The Samsung EVO drives have some issues.
Or Apple PCI SSD from eBay with Syntech adapter: http://www.shopsintech.com/product_info.php?products_id=942&osCsid=ef2539da21c0fe266650a6d7e3478b29
This thread might be useful: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...the-09-macpro-bootable-ngff-pcie-ssd.1685821/
For SATA 6G: CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro card (all SATA drives bootable, plus two USB 3.0) with Crucial SSD's or Samsung 850 Pro. The Samsung EVO drives have some issues.
Or Apple PCI SSD from eBay with Syntech adapter: http://www.shopsintech.com/product_info.php?products_id=942&osCsid=ef2539da21c0fe266650a6d7e3478b29
This thread might be useful: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...the-09-macpro-bootable-ngff-pcie-ssd.1685821/
knowing which Mac Pro and just what it is setup to do would help.
Any of the blade-type PCIe-SSD will make excellent fast devices, do not require a controller but use an adapter only (no firmeware or driver req'd) and capable of 1000-1500MB/sec - something that even two SSDs in RAID0 cannot lay claim to.
I would also say it is better to not have more than one using SATA II drive bays. A Samsung EVO 850 1TB might get you started, move to Apricorn SATA III in one of the open PCIe slots.
I had the blade types and in RAID. There was no noticable improvement over SATA 3 unless someone editing 4K videos, or many layers of HD videos, or high traffic server. I sold all the blades and now prefer larger capacity cheaper Evo 850 drives mounted on Sonnet Tempo Pro.
I have had an older OCZ is my 4,1 for a couple of years. I took advantage of an unused connector in the optical bay (I have only one optical drive). I found the 2.5-inch to 5.25-inch adapters to not work very well (and relatively expensive), so it's just fastened to the bottom of the installed drive using duct tape.
jut installed first ssd in my old 1.1 (converted to 2.1), OWC 3G SSD with sled adapter, no use in buying a 6G as it can't go faster then 3g anyway
pleased for now, on 10.10.4 and trim native activated, compared to my old hdd ... fast indeed..
pleased for now, on 10.10.4 and trim native activated, compared to my old hdd ... fast indeed..
I purchased a sled exactly like the factory sled, except that it's designed for 2.5" drives rather than 3.5" drives. It was cheap, works perfectly and looks like a factory part. It was about $15 so it wasn't DIRT cheap, but well worth it for a factory like part.
I like Samsung SSDs.
I have to ask why you want to avoid trim. It's like saying "I want to avoid more RAM", or "Please give me ISA slots, I want to avoid PCIe".
If you already owned an ancient SSD that has known faulty firmware and doesn't function correctly with trim activated (an older OWC SSD comes to mind) I would understand, but since you are SSD shopping for a new drive your motives elude me.
(scratches head)
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Hello,I like Samsung SSDs.
I have to ask why you want to avoid trim. It's like saying "I want to avoid more RAM", or "Please give me ISA slots, I want to avoid PCIe".
If you already owned an ancient SSD that has known faulty firmware and doesn't function correctly with trim activated (an older OWC SSD comes to mind) I would understand, but since you are SSD shopping for a new drive your motives elude me.
The reason to avoid trim is because the heavy job that I do in video, design and post leaves residues "Data" in the HD, and I had Ben using ONYX for several years to maintain my HD healthy and it does a pretty good job, ONYX does interfere if you are not careful so I don't want to bother with having to reinstall the OS y something goes wrong.
I would avoid installing anything on a performance production system - really, even those monitoring apps and found having two cooks checking the drive status was... too many.
So I can see not wanting something like TRIM if it affects work (I would think audio would be one field where SSD is a huge improvement as are scratch and cache and system) but where there "might" be some affect from SSD TRIM. So what I would do is boot from another drive on a regular basis and have TRIM and run DU on your production SSD(s) though - you need TRIM. And it helps in your case to allow extra free unused SSD page blocks and over-provisioning. You can't turn off Background Garbage Collection. And it is not as efficient. TRIM tells the SSD via the OS what cells to mark as no longer used which is a big help.
How about try with and without? again if you had trouble in the past. Also SSDs have more of their own built in cache memory, better controllers (2011 era was terrible with the move to SATA III). And now with PCIe-SSD NGFFs. Huge IO queue depth, near-zero latency seeks, 1400MB/sec to handle whatever you throw at it. And almost double what RAID0 SATA III was offering for previous years, with problems / overhead of RAID0 setups.
Samsung just release the 2TB version of the 850 ))
))
Only two you should be looking at are eithe Samsungs or Intels. Both have the lowest failure rates. If you do end up buying an SSD, make sure to install TRIM Enabler: https://www.cindori.org/software/trimenabler/
If you're going to be running on El Capitan, you won't need Trim Enabler, Apple has finally pulled it's head out of it's ass and made way for trim support for 3rd party drives after about 6 years of waiting. Better late than never, I suppose.
If you're going to be running on El Capitan, you won't need Trim Enabler, Apple has finally pulled it's head out of it's ass and made way for trim support for 3rd party drives after about 6 years of waiting. Better late than never, I suppose.
Trimforce was added in 10.10.4. Don't even have to wait until El Capitan.
Agree!!! I'm using the OWC accelsior product (yes I know that a few here do not like OWC) for over 2.5 years before it crapped out on me - they replaced it under warranty and now I'm back in the saddle. Use the PCI-e version SSD blade drive as the Boot drive - you'll get quick startup and OS reaction time making one almost forget how slow the original processors are in the older 2009 Mac Pro. If you set it up this way then the 4 HD bays can instead be filled with run of the mill 2TB HDD for data storage only - don't need speed in the bays anymore as the PCI-SSD is doing all the heavy lifting for of your applications (if there is adequate space to do so). Suggest buying as large a drive as one can afford in order to have the scratch disk space on it as well. And if you ditch the Mac Pro later - the PCI-e blade SSD can be kept and housed in a separate PCI-e box as an external Hard Drive.
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