MP 7,1 Suggestions for best bootable PCI NVMe card for 2019 nCMP 7,1 Mac Pro

Why do you need/want a boot drive that large? For best performance/practice you only keep your OS and apps on a boot drive, maybe user folders. Everything else goes on other drives, especially on an expandable system such as a Mac Pro.

 

The card pictured on the keynote was the Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card FUS-SSD-4X4-E3 and it's not a particular good card, several restrictions like the size and format of the blades.

I wrote about it on the Blade thread:

• Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card FUS-SSD-4X4-E3: Supports four single side 80mm M.2 blades. Uses PLX PEX8747 switch. Heatsink with a fan over the blades and PCIe switch. Needs a GPU with pre-boot configuration support. Do not buy it if you need to boot Windows from the blades or will upgrade to a PC later, this card can't boot Windows.

 

Start here #771, we discussed it for some time.

 

All Highpoint cards are bootable with a MP5,1. It's not the card firmware that makes it boot, but the Mac Pro BootROM infrastructure. This has some particularities.

My SSD7101-A boots from day one, but RAID booting is software dependent. Mojave don't have any official support from booting from an APFS array. Apple started to change things with Catalina DP3 and seems Catalina will finally have official support to boot from an APFS array.

With High Sierra you just need to use HFS+ and you can use a bootable 4-blade HFS+ array - use startosinstall to install.

With Mojave, to have correct support you boot from one blade and use the other three as a data array. If you make a 4-blade APFS array, you can't update macOS - software updates don't work at all.

 

It's bootable, every macOS release has it's quirks and limitations - only High Sierra supports everything.

Since it's a very complex subject, they play safe.

--- Post Merged, Jul 13, 2019 ---

Yes, you can. No one tested with drives bigger than 4TB that I know of.

 

I recently received the SQUID Carrier Board™ PCI Express Gen 3 Carrier Board for 6 M.2 or NGSFF (NF1)
PCIe SSD modules, with x16 PCI Express upstream Adapter.

I am currently running this board in a windows box.

http://amfeltec.com/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-6-m2-or-ngsff-nf1-pcie-ssd-modules

I intend to test this system (with 6 Samsung 970 EVO 2TB NVMe SSD drives) in the 2019 Mac Pro computer when available. I will order the new Mac Pro as soon as it is available. I don't know if this will be bootable in RAID 0 on the new Mac Pro. I will update you with the results.

Thanks.