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Manzana

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 19, 2004
612
13
Orange County, CA
Installed on Mac Pro 5,1 with Mojave 10.14.6
QNINE PCIe card
on slot 4. using it to boot.
read/write speeds using black disk magic are around 1,500

seems people are getting about double this so is it my PCIe adaptor?

by the way, not a gripe...it's fast enough. just interested in how this works.
 

Manzana

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 19, 2004
612
13
Orange County, CA
ok good to know. I would need to upgrade to a pricier adapter and it seems I would have to use slot 1/2 as well, which are both occupied on my system by a RX 590.
So I will be quite happy with 1,500 read/write speeds as it is about 5x faster than the SATA SSD I had.
 

crjackson2134

macrumors 601
Mar 6, 2013
4,822
1,948
Charlotte, NC
ok good to know. I would need to upgrade to a pricier adapter and it seems I would have to use slot 1/2 as well, which are both occupied on my system by a RX 590.
So I will be quite happy with 1,500 read/write speeds as it is about 5x faster than the SATA SSD I had.

It’s not really an adapter issue. It's the maximum limit of your PCIe Slot in standard use. However, there are carrier boards that have a switch on them that can multiplex the data across all 16 lanes of a single Slot. This increases the total data throughput of the device it carries (SSD's usually).

You can put your GPU in Slot 2, and this will open up Slot 1 for use by one of these high end carriers. It will however block Slot 3 since the GPU requires 2 Slots (+). Slot 4 will still be available for MOST other uses.

This is exactly the setup I have I use at the moment. PCIe Slot 4 in my system contains a USB 3.0 card.
 
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Manzana

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 19, 2004
612
13
Orange County, CA
You can put your GPU in Slot 2, and this will open up Slot 1 for use by one of these high end carriers. It will however block Slot 3 since the GPU requires 2 Slots (+). Slot 4 will still be available for MOST other uses.

Ok this is so simple and yet so genius! If down the line we ever get the ability to boot raid 0 i will most definitely go with one of these adapters and 2-4 blades.

I pretty much only need the 3 slots. Video card, NVMe and USB.
 
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Manzana

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 19, 2004
612
13
Orange County, CA
Oh man, totally forgot my video card takes up more than 2 slots, enough so that when I put it in PCIe slot 2 it partially covers slot 4...bummer!

I can still return RX 590 to micro center, problem is I really like it! Decisions decisions.
 
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