2013 Mac Pro SSD Upgrade?

[sethkj]

Hello all,

I'm sure this has been posted before but wasn't able to find my answer - apologizes if this has been repeated in advance.

I just bought a 2013 Mac Pro from Apple, the base model with 256GB SSD installed in the machine. I love the computer, however, want to upgrade to get more storage space. I checked OWC and saw the Aura, but wanted to see if there's a different methods other Mac Pro owners are using.

I thought about doing a thunderbolt enclosure SSD or traditional hard drive. I want to move all my home folder information on that drive and leave the 256GB SSD for OS X and Windows Bootcamp.

Would I notice a big drawback if I use a external drive with thunderbolt connectivity? Please let me know. I really don't want to shell out another $400 for an upgrade to get more storage space.

Or.. should I take the Mac Pro back and get a custom built 2010-2012 Mac Pro with a 12-Core?

Thank you!

Sincerely,
Seth

 

[r6mile]

As long as your SSD is fast enough, there is very little difference between an internal connection and Thunderbolt. The trick here is that the new Apple SSDs are much faster than SATA SSDs so I would say get the fastest PCIe SSD. Others will know more but here my 2 cents.

 

[pat500000]

Hello all,

I'm sure this has been posted before but wasn't able to find my answer - apologizes if this has been repeated in advance.

I just bought a 2013 Mac Pro from Apple, the base model with 256GB SSD installed in the machine. I love the computer, however, want to upgrade to get more storage space. I checked OWC and saw the Aura, but wanted to see if there's a different methods other Mac Pro owners are using.

I thought about doing a thunderbolt enclosure SSD or traditional hard drive. I want to move all my home folder information on that drive and leave the 256GB SSD for OS X and Windows Bootcamp.

Would I notice a big drawback if I use a external drive with thunderbolt connectivity? Please let me know. I really don't want to shell out another $400 for an upgrade to get more storage space.

Or.. should I take the Mac Pro back and get a custom built 2010-2012 Mac Pro with a 12-Core?

Thank you!

Sincerely,
Seth

 

[sethkj]

Thanks all,

After considering and had a budget, I figured it was best to return the Mac Pro to Apple and get an older Mac Pro (2010 - 2012). I really like the fact that I can upgrade and it's expandability in an older Mac Pro, whereas, in a 2013, you can just upgrade the SSD, CPU and RAM.

And I returned the unit because Windows 10 didn't like the thunderbolt drive. After being on the phone with Apple for more than 3 hours they couldn't come to a conclusion other than to swap the unit out for another one.

 

[kohlson]

Search on this site -- there are several recent discussions about upgrading MP 4,1 (2009) and 5,1 (2010) to really nice units, with PCI SSD, upgraded graphics, USB3 and CPUs. You'll need to know whether you want fewer, faster cores (like a 6-core 3.33) or dual 4-core (12-cores altogether).

 

[jaajaarule]

Thanks all,

After considering and had a budget, I figured it was best to return the Mac Pro to Apple and get an older Mac Pro (2010 - 2012). I really like the fact that I can upgrade and it's expandability in an older Mac Pro, whereas, in a 2013, you can just upgrade the SSD, CPU and RAM.

And I returned the unit because Windows 10 didn't like the thunderbolt drive. After being on the phone with Apple for more than 3 hours they couldn't come to a conclusion other than to swap the unit out for another one.

I installed Windows 10 (using bootcamp) on the mac pro 2013 (12 core cpu and 64gb ram) but the performance was horrible (at least for the programming tasks that i use). I am not sure what was the reason but it was super slow. (5 minutes vs 11 minutes for the same java compile job).
Any suggestion?