MP All Models Bootable PCI SSD Cards/Drives for Mac Pro (NVMe M.2, U.2, EDSFF E3.S, etc.)

[ZombiePhysicist]

I ordered the 16TB HDD from B&H after they alerted me it was in stock about a week ago. I have it ready for my 2Ji and the MP7,1 when I received it Feb 7-13, 2020.

I wil partition this 16TB into 3; one 8TB for backing up the Promise stock 8TB, one 4TB for Time Machine, and one 4TB for backing up my Sonnet's 4TB RAID-0 data...

• Internal Sonnet SSD M.2 4x4 PCIe x16 lanes card
  • Populated with four Samsung EVO Plus SSD/Flash blades (1x 2TB and 3x 1TB blades)
  • Holding a 1TB backup clone of the internal SSD on the 2TB Samsung blade.
  • Provides a 4x 1TB RAID-0 giving approximately 5000 to 6000 MB/sec data rates. (Example: transferring a 100GB file from kernel buffer file cache will take ~17 to ~20 seconds)

Nice, did you get the Seagate Exos? That's a great drive. I have one now for TimeMachine. I've had horrible luck with the Toshiba 14TB drives. 2 in a row went dead.

I'm looking for the Micron 9300 Pro 15.36TB drive. I have it on order from 2 different places, but both show delivery around January 7, which sucks as my machine should be here on the 26th or so.

 

[bxs]

Nice, did you get the Seagate Exos? That's a great drive. I have one now for TimeMachine. I've had horrible luck with the Toshiba 14TB drives. 2 in a row went dead.

I'm looking for the Micron 9300 Pro 15.36TB drive. I have it on order from 2 different places, but both show delivery around January 7, which sucks as my machine should be here on the 26th or so.

Yes, got the 16TB Seagate Exos for a decent price. 👍

 

[OkiRun]

Nice, did you get the Seagate Exos? That's a great drive. I have one now for TimeMachine. I've had horrible luck with the Toshiba 14TB drives. 2 in a row went dead.

I'm looking for the Micron 9300 Pro 15.36TB drive. I have it on order from 2 different places, but both show delivery around January 7, which sucks as my machine should be here on the 26th or so.

Is this an internal drive or can it be used an an external drive too? Thanks for any guidance.

 

[giggles]

Youtuber Dave Lee used this simple adapter in his video

Rivo PCI-E Riser PCIe M.2 PCIe SSD to PCIe Express 3.0 x 4 Adapter Card - Supports M2 NGFF PCI-e 3.0, 2.0 or 1.0, NVMe or AHCI, M-Key, 2280, 2260, 2242, 2230 Solid State Drive, 2018 Edition

Rivo PCI-E Riser PCIe M.2 PCIe SSD to PCIe Express 3.0 x 4 Adapter Card - Supports M2 NGFF PCI-e 3.0, 2.0 or 1.0, NVMe or AHCI, M-Key, 2280, 2260, 2242, 2230 Solid State Drive, 2018 Edition

www.amazon.com

I’ve seen a dual version of this that has 1 nvme + 1 sata (m-key)...sata is just given power, whereas data is done via a SATA cable..could be connected to the motherboard sata port..

9to5mac reviewed the Sonnet..

 

[bsbeamer]

Again, I’d really suggest that no one puts a cheap NVMe adapter in a $6K+ workstation. If it doesn’t INCLUDE a heatsink, it’s a cheap adapter.

 

[theatwar]

I've purchased and installed two Sonnet SSD M.2 4x4 PCIe x16 lanes cards for my Mac Pro(4 x 2TB Samsung EVO Plus SSD blades per card).

I’m still trying to decide between JBOD and RAID 0 for my setup, and wanted to get some advice from the experts on the forum (I don’t have much experience with RAID anything).

Some details:

Everything I do will get backed up up to spinning drives every night, as well as get backed up in the cloud via Backblaze — so I’m not worried about losing data if the Sonnets crash, but obviously taking time to recover is never ideal.

I have the Sonnets setup as JBOD right now, and I’m already seeing a huge leap in speed based on my previous SSDs that were in my old Mac Pro 5,1.

I was getting 300-500 MB/s for the old setup using OWC Mercury Accelsior E2 PCI Express SSDs and 2.5” Samsung 870 Pro SSDs, and with the SSDs setup as JBOD in the Sonnets, I’m getting 3000MB/s.

So my question is would it be worth it to set up the drives using RAID 0, based on the kind of work I do?

I do a ton of design work in Photoshop, and a ton of intensive motion graphics/animation work in AfterEffects.

Currently I have one of the 2TB SSDs set as a scratch disk, I have one of the 2TB SSDs set as a backup of my system disk (including photos and music), and then I’m using the rest of the blades to hold a giant library of stock footage elements that I use in my AfterEffects projects, as well as a large amount of prerendered footage that I’m using my various in-progress AfterEffects projects.

I also have a large amount of big Photoshop files and one of the blades will also hold in-progress renders coming out of AfterEffects.

But everything is split up between the 2TB SSDs, which are not RAID-ed together.

It would be more convenient to for me to use RAID 0 between some of the SSDs (I wouldn’t have to split up my stock footage libraries between various 2TB SSDs, for example), and from what I understand, I’d see a potentially big speed jump in transferring large files. But would I also see a big jump in terms of AfterEffects performance if I used RAID 0 for this setup?

Or would using RAID 0 not be worth it in terms of the risk to the drives?

Sorry for the lengthy message and thanks for reading/weighing in.

 

[bxs]

I've purchased and installed two Sonnet SSD M.2 4x4 PCIe x16 lanes cards for my Mac Pro(4 x 2TB Samsung EVO Plus SSD blades per card).

I’m still trying to decide between JBOD and RAID 0 for my setup, and wanted to get some advice from the experts on the forum (I don’t have much experience with RAID anything).

Some details:

Everything I do will get backed up up to spinning drives every night, as well as get backed up in the cloud via Backblaze — so I’m not worried about losing data if the Sonnets crash, but obviously taking time to recover is never ideal.

I have the Sonnets setup as JBOD right now, and I’m already seeing a huge leap in speed based on my previous SSDs that were in my old Mac Pro 5,1.

I was getting 300-500 MB/s for the old setup using OWC Mercury Accelsior E2 PCI Express SSDs and 2.5” Samsung 870 Pro SSDs, and with the SSDs setup as JBOD in the Sonnets, I’m getting 3000MB/s.

So my question is would it be worth it to set up the drives using RAID 0, based on the kind of work I do?

I do a ton of design work in Photoshop, and a ton of intensive motion graphics/animation work in AfterEffects.

Currently I have one of the 2TB SSDs set as a scratch disk, I have one of the 2TB SSDs set as a backup of my system disk (including photos and music), and then I’m using the rest of the blades to hold a giant library of stock footage elements that I use in my AfterEffects projects, as well as a large amount of prerendered footage that I’m using my various in-progress AfterEffects projects.

I also have a large amount of big Photoshop files and one of the blades will also hold in-progress renders coming out of AfterEffects.

But everything is split up between the 2TB SSDs, which are not RAID-ed together.

It would be more convenient to for me to use RAID 0 between some of the SSDs (I wouldn’t have to split up my stock footage libraries between various 2TB SSDs, for example), and from what I understand, I’d see a potentially big speed jump in transferring large files. But would I also see a big jump in terms of AfterEffects performance if I used RAID 0 for this setup?

Or would using RAID 0 not be worth it in terms of the risk to the drives?

Sorry for the lengthy message and thanks for reading/weighing in.

IMO you will be fine configuring this 4x 2TB blades as RAID-0. The blades are reliable and more so than spinning disks these days. If were me, I wouldn't hesitate making them RAID-0 with 8TB of storage space. I would advise you develop and use a good backup method for it, just in case if you consider the RAID-0 data important to you..

 

[atonaldenim]

I just ordered a Sonnet M2 4x4 PCIe card and 4 x 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus for my Mac Pro 7,1.
But I am debating getting this 4 x 4TB Sabrent instead as I could use the extra space - https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Rock...la-838585227790&ref=&adgrpid=80571461181&th=1

Will this combination work/supported? Any downsides to the Sabrent? I'm' sure the Samsung are better, but would prefer the 4TB size.

Sabrent Rocket is a fine SSD, high TBW, a bit slower than a 970 EVO in sustained writes. I have the 1TB version, assuming the 4TB version is similar.

It uses the Phison E12 controller which I posted about here with performance comparisons. The difference between the Sabrent Rocket and the Samsung 970 Pro is sustained write speed. In a large file copy the 970 Pro will sustain write speeds close to 3,000 MB/s for the entirety of the copy. All its flash chips are fast ones.

The Sabrent Rocket, 970 Evo, and most other NVMe blades like surely whatever OWC is selling, will start out fast near 3,000 MB/s in a large file transfer, but after a certain number of GBs copied it will slow down to somewhere between 1,000-1,500MB/s for the rest of the file. These drives have a mix of fast chips as cache and the rest are slower chips. Sabrent Rocket has less of that fast cache than 970 Evo, but most NVMe SSDs that aren’t the 970 Pro work the same way.

The Sabrent Rocket will perform similar to the Patriot Viper in this test:

If writing very large files isn’t an important part of your workflow then the Sabrent Rocket is a fine SSD generally. If you do often write large files of many GBs per file then the 970 Pro would be the way to go.

To comment on this amusing thread in general, the quality and performance of the SSD blades is very important, and that’s one reason why I personally would never buy a PCIe NVMe RAID from OWC pre-populated with OWC brand blades for a new Mac Pro. There are better quality options out there.

Also the x8 PCIe lane limit of the OWC card seems like a total mismatch with the maximum performance philosophy of the new Mac Pro. One fast NVMe 3,500 MB/s blade can almost fully saturate 4 lanes of PCIe 3.0. So 8 lanes would be nearly saturated with 2 blades. With 3 or 4 blades, an 8 lane card would be artificially limiting the blades up to half the speed of what they are capable of.

If I had $6k-$20k+ to drop on a new Mac Pro I wouldn’t put anything less than a x16 card like the Highpoint 7101 with Samsung 970 Pro blades in it.

(Aside from the interest in 4TB Sabrent blades @moab1 which is perfectly reasonable. The Sonnet card is also a fine choice.)

Cheaping out on NVMe data storage in a new Mac Pro seems a little like putting cloth seats and a cassette deck in your new Ferrari. If the only thing stopping you from getting the Highpoint 7101 is fan noise, it’s a simple 2-pin fan cable, just unplug the fan. Now you have a fanless card! Or do what I do on my I/O Crest card in my Mac Pro 5,1 and add an inline resistor cable which slows the fan down to a more pleasing noise level.

(You really should cool 4 NVMe blades & controller chip, but many basic PCIe NVMe adapters don’t come with fans or heatsinks at all, so it’s pretty standard that users are expected to provide their own NVMe cooling solution. If the Highpoint’s included fan is too loud for your application, you’re not required to use it.)

 

[AidenShaw]

IMO you will be fine configuring this 4x 2TB blades as RAID-0. The blades are reliable and more so than spinning disks these days. If were me, I wouldn't hesitate making them RAID-0 with 8TB of storage space. I would advise you develop and use a good backup method for it, just in case if you consider the RAID-0 data important to you..

I agree, especially since you also have backups.

The main factor for me is whether you want one big 8TB volume, or four 2TB volumes. Another factor is that TRIM isn't supported for many RAID configurations. Overprovisioning (e.g. creating a 7 TB volume instead of an 8TB volume, and *never* touching that last TB) can alleviate much of the problems from not having TRIM.

 

[theatwar]

Thanks all for the input!

I back up my files every night with Carbon Copy Cloner to external spinning drives, plus I have a cloud-based backup for everything using Backblaze, so I'm not worried about losing data if things crash.

Would folks recommend using Raid Assistant inside Apple's Disk Utility software to create the RAID 0 volumes? Or should I be using a different 3rd party RAID software (recommendations?)

And should I be keeping one of the SSD drives as a separate scratch disk for After Effects/Photoshop, or would I be ok just creating a "scratch disk" folder within one of the two RAID 0 volumes?

I agree, especially since you also have backups.

The main factor for me is whether you want one big 8TB volume, or four 2TB volumes. Another factor is that TRIM isn't supported for many RAID configurations. Overprovisioning (e.g. creating a 7 TB volume instead of an 8TB volume, and *never* touching that last TB) can alleviate much of the problems from not having TRIM.

 

[bxs]

Thanks all for the input!

I back up my files every night with Carbon Copy Cloner to external spinning drives, plus I have a cloud-based backup for everything using Backblaze, so I'm not worried about losing data if things crash.

Would folks recommend using Raid Assistant inside Apple's Disk Utility software to create the RAID 0 volumes? Or should I be using a different 3rd party RAID software (recommendations?)

And should I be keeping one of the SSD drives as a separate scratch disk for After Effects/Photoshop, or would I be ok just creating a "scratch disk" folder within one of the two RAID 0 volumes?

• Use Apple's Disk Utility's File->RAID Assistant... as it's a stable method IMO. I use it all the time.
• Using a "Scratch" folder will be perfectly fine. Although you may want configure CCC to ignore backing up the Scratch folder... as you wish.

 

[jasonmvp]

Heh. Amazon screwed up, but fortunately I don't yet have my Mac so I can deal with it. I ordered two HighPoint SSD7101A-1 cards from them, and they arrived today. However, apparently they decided to sub one of HighPoint's SSD7103 cards in. Doh.

 

[theatwar]

Another quick question -- when using Disk Utility/RAID Assistant to format my RAID 0 array for my 8TB Sonnet (which as described in detail in my earlier posts will be used for complex AfterEffects and Photoshop projects and large stock footage video files), which "chunk size" would folks recommend? Looks like the default is "32K", but would there be benefits to increasing this size?

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Another quick question -- when using Disk Utility/RAID Assistant to format my RAID 0 array for my 8TB Sonnet (which as described in detail in my earlier posts will be used for complex AfterEffects and Photoshop projects and large stock footage video files), which "chunk size" would folks recommend? Looks like the default is "32K", but would there be benefits to increasing this size?

im kind of surprised at how slow the sonnet is. Shouldn’t it be getting somewhere from 12-14GBs end it seems to get about half of that per this 9 to 5 article:

The Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card adds insanely-fast SSD speeds to Mac Pro

The Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe SSD makes it possible to add four M.2 SSDs to the Mac in a RAID 0 setup for ridiculously fast PCIe storage.

9to5mac.com

with 4 4xlanes that each could do 3.5GBs, something seems lost in translation?

 

[joevt]

im kind of surprised at how slow the sonnet is. Shouldn’t it be getting somewhere from 12-14GBs end it seems to get about half of that per this 9 to 5 article:

The Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card adds insanely-fast SSD speeds to Mac Pro

The Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe SSD makes it possible to add four M.2 SSDs to the Mac in a RAID 0 setup for ridiculously fast PCIe storage.

9to5mac.com

with 4 4xlanes that each could do 3.5GBs, something seems lost in translation?

SoftRAID may give better results. Compare Disk Utlity (7467 MB/s) #212 and SoftRAID #214 (11141 MB/s) in a Hackintosh PCIe 3.0 x16 slot.

Since performance is so bad with Disk Utility and the x4 card, consider Amfeltec's x6 card. The extra 2 slots will definitely fulfill the x16 slot's potential.

 

[moab1]

I just installed the Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe card and 4 x 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 into my new Mac Pro 2019.
Installed into Slot 5
Configured as APFS (Case Sensitive) each drive.
Then RAID 0 all 4 drives together to create a single volume (non boot drive)
APFS (Case Senstive), 64kb chunks, GUID.

Here's my first speed test (attached).
Does this speed look correct? A single drive was about half that, but thought I'd get faster than 6300 write speeds with 4 in a RAID 0.

The Sonnet card makes a little bit of noise. nothing major, but compared to the completely silent Pro, it is evident.
Is the fan necessary given the Pro's fans? Could it be removed easily or would that not be advised?

 

[AdamSeen]

I remember reading in this thread that someone spoke to sonnet and suggested the fan might not be needed being inside the wind tunnel that is the Mac Pro. But without some load tests, preferably with an infrared camera, there’s no conclusive answer to that yet.

I’m waiting on the answer to that question, because otherwise I’d prefer to get the OWC model (assuming they fix the software issues)

 

[giggles]

I predict (hope?) in the coming months/years we’ll see new pcie products explicitly designed for the 7,1 “wind tunnel” thermal design..

Maybe even a 6 x m.2_blades deisgn
- 4 m.2 pcie slots in hardware RAID (in order to have an easy bootable raid0 8TB apfs drive)
- 2 m.2 sata slots to be connected directly to the motherboard sata ports via a simple 7-pin data-only sata cable (no power needed, as the power would come from the pcie slot)

or something like the Sonnet Tempo but with 2x u.2/SFF-8639 2.5” drives (instead of SATA) in hardware RAID

and a reinforced pcb, and a cool metal shroud kinda like the Afterburner card

come on Sonnet/OWC/etc., take notes!

 

[moab1]

I just redid my RAID 0 with SoftRAID instead of Disk Utility and am getting roughly the same results. Hmmm...
This seems no faster than the OWC 8TB solution that is cheaper and could fit on an 8x slot (no fan and save 16x slots). Thoughts??

 

[eric.blair]

I just redid my RAID 0 with SoftRAID instead of Disk Utility and am getting roughly the same results. Hmmm...
This seems no faster than the OWC 8TB solution that is cheaper and could fit on an 8x slot (no fan and save 16x slots). Thoughts??

Definitely faster than the OWC, and I posted earlier on inconsistencies with the OWC speeds: the card slows way down randomly, back up maybe and then way down again. Sure I suppose I may have received a faulty card, but I haven’t had great luck with OWC SSDs in the past (and a friend has replaced the OWC SSD in her MacBook Pro three times due to failures). But, I have always had great success with Samsung SSDs and Sonnet. I’m assuming the fan can be disconnected on the Sonnet but then you could be sacrificing blade life. In any case, to me the OWC is a much larger gamble and the speeds I was seeing when it wasn’t slowing down were around 6GB/s ‘maybe’... average around 4.5-6.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Has anyone confirmed the following two things:

A) are the multi-blade (i.e., Sonnet) cards bootable (I think they are, but not sure I've seen it explicitly stated)
B) if you RAID multiple sticks on the multi-blade cards, are the RAID'd sticks bootable?

 

[giggles]

Has anyone confirmed the following two things:

A) are the multi-blade (i.e., Sonnet) cards bootable (I think they are, but not sure I've seen it explicitly stated)
B) if you RAID multiple sticks on the multi-blade cards, are the RAID'd sticks bootable?

What I understood
- software RAID (Apple Disk Utility or SoftRAID): not bootable
- hardware RAID: bootable
- software JBOD: ??????

Now if someone made a list of hardware RAID multi-m.2, multi-u.2 and multi-sata pcie addons..

 

[AdamSeen]

It looks like 8500mb/sec is the limit with raid 0. It’s only when you have them as separate drives can you reach 12,000mb/sec with concurrent transfers. Probably limited by internal chipset.

With the fan issue, if you take off the shroud and blower you’re left with an exposed heatsink which could be enough to cool the blades down in the Mac Pro. However, would need to see the temperatures of the chipsets on the card itself to confirm it’s fully workable.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

What I understood
- software RAID (Apple Disk Utility or SoftRAID): not bootable
- hardware RAID: bootable
- software JBOD: ??????

Now if someone made a list of hardware RAID multi-m.2, multi-u.2 and multi-sata pcie addons..

How do you do a hardware raid on the Sonnet or the HighPoint?
[automerge]1577313662[/automerge]

I just redid my RAID 0 with SoftRAID instead of Disk Utility and am getting roughly the same results. Hmmm...
This seems no faster than the OWC 8TB solution that is cheaper and could fit on an 8x slot (no fan and save 16x slots). Thoughts??

I don't see the point in having the card and wasting a 16lane slot on it if it's overall throughput is the same as the OWC 8lane card.

 

[dpzim]

I'm still looking for a "no excuses" exercise that will set an upper performance baseline in this space. I'm thinking the upper bound is a Sonnet M.2 4x4 with 4 970 Pro. In a perfect world, I'd then see it compared against an OWC Accelsior 4M2 at 4x1TB blades and both JBOD and RAID 0. I know it isn't directly comparable, but the OWC is fanless and I'm willing to consider the fixed blades and x8 limitations if I know how far off the baseline I'm straying to eliminate the fan — but I need that baseline first.