It's pretty clear to me the 6 slot squid with 6 2TB sticks, or maybe the HighPoint 7120 with 4 U.2 drives with 15.36TB drives will be the high watermark in throughput and capacity.
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MP All Models Bootable PCI SSD Cards/Drives for Mac Pro (NVMe M.2, U.2, EDSFF E3.S, etc.)
- Thread starter ZombiePhysicist
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It's pretty clear to me the 6 slot squid with 6 2TB sticks, or maybe the HighPoint 7120 with 4 U.2 drives with 15.36TB drives will be the high watermark in throughput and capacity.
What are you going to do with the 7103, send it back?
Is there any possibility of first testing it as a bootable RAID...? Of all the cards mentioned here, I think this is the only one with any chance of supporting it.
HighPoint's product spiel for it emphasises that it is a bootable RAID solution, and it sounds hardware based, though I think it is actually some hybrid solution that uses the CPU. It should still boot without requiring drivers. They also specifically say they don't support macOS. (Though they said that about the 7101A-1, and that is probably the most performant card for the Mac.)
Just an idea. Not having the Mac Pro yet might complicate things. It'd be good to know one way or the other if there were any M.2 based bootable RAID options for the Mac Pro 7,1.
Yep, it's already boxed up and waiting for UPS to pick it up. Amazon already has the replacement on the way. I'm not terribly interested in testing bootable RAID solutions; sorry.
Yep, the Squid has my attention too. I’m just trying to find actual performance data to compare all three (Squid, Sonnet, OWC) on the 7,1 Mac Pro specifically.
My approach to having the Sonnet/Samsung combo providing a bootable image is as follows....
Purchased four Samsung EVO Plus blades; 3x 1TB and 1x 2TB.
1) Using the 2TB blade I use Disk Utility to partition it into 2x 1TB
2) Using one of the 1TB partitions I format it as APFS
3) Using the remaining 1TB of the 2TB blade I format it as HFS+
4) Now using Disk Utility I RAID-0 the four 1TB blades to give me a $TB RAID-0 storage space.
5) I can now clone my internal 1TB Apple SSD to the APFS setup in 2) above.
So I end up with...
- 1TB bootable APFS single blade
- 4TB RAID-0 across the 4 blades
That's certainly clever. I wonder how the performance of that will hold up. I suspect it will be lower than just 4 straight up RAID sticks, but could be way faster than just 3 sticks by itself. Maybe somewhere in between. Have you run a benchmark on the bootable and raid portions yet? Could you share with the group?
I expect the 4x 1TB RAID-0 in my configuration To be as good as have 4 individual 1TB blades. I can't think of a reason for them to be different, except that the 2TB blade split-into-two may have a larger cache than for a 1 TB blade. Note that the bootable 1TB ABFS portion n is unused unless a clone is boing made to it... plus this bootable image is simply being maintained for backup (and sitting there in a dormant state) if the primary boot image on the internal Apple SSD is damaged in some way. I do not intend to run the system from the Sonnet/Samsung unit. No matter, I will post back some results when I have my MP7,1 delivered that is a month away.
So far folks using the sonnet are only getting about half the speed of 4 indivual blades (around 6-7GB/s). I could see performance on your 2TB stick going down a bit if something happens to access the other partition at the same time. If you set it up where that doesnt happen much, then you may well get the same performance as just 4 fully raided sticks. I'm curious to see your real world throughput.
Not to rain on parades and I totally get keeping what one can on a boot volume. Its my preference too on a MacBook pro. That said raiding for capacity or speed Raid 0 is always dangerous if there is failure you loose the volume and or your data. Please consider Raid 10.
9to5 mack tested the Sonnet PCI card with 4 sticks and was getting around 6-7GB/sec throughput. Theoretical max for the Sonnet should be 12-14GB/sec. So even a vanilla 4 sticks in a raid on the sonnet, at least for that person, was only getting about half the performance you might expect.
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
Putting the R(edundant) back into RAID, where's the fun in that!
I don't know what the statistics are, but indeed, having a storage device composed of and solely dependant on 4x the normal item suggests a higher chance of failure. If doing it that way, a comprehensive backup plan would be even more advised than the usual essential recommendation.
But I don't think anyone here has actually planned or implemented a boot volume RAID of whichever type. None of the hardware talked about - Sonnet, OWC, 7101A, etc - will do it. The drivers to support the RAID don't load until the system boots, so the RAID can't boot the system.
The only one remotely possible is the HighPoint SSD7103 but that may or may not be Mac Pro 7,1 compatible.
The HighPoint 7103 is compatible with the Mac Pro 7,1
I have this card with a 4TB Sabrent NVMe blade, and an ADATA 2TB NVMe blade in there.
All works absolutely fine.
Is this discussion only in the context of the 5,1 or does it also relate to using it in the 7,1? Thanks.
At the time, MP5,1. But most points are valid for MP7,1 too.
Why did you get the 7103 rather than the 7101? Just curious since I’m considering returning the 7101 and getting the 7103.
So, today I got my Highpoint 7101A-1 and four Samsung 2TB EVO Plus NVMe drives. It's working fine in my Mac Pro 7,1 after I figured out one problem that held me up for a bit. All of the software loaded fine and the Mac even saw the drives, but the RAID manager software would not work, so I couldn't create a RAID set. To make it work, I had to disable Secure Boot by starting in Recovery Mode. After that, everything was fine. Made the RAID set, formatted, and then changed the icon because I don't like the dumb default icon Catalina gave it. 
I didn't run any performance benchmarks, and right now I decided not to use it as a boot volume: I'm just going to use the built-in drive for booting and my apps, and I put my photo library on the NVMe RAID 0 set I created. One question though: Would Lightroom work faster if it was also installed/run off of the RAID set? I've never used a setup like this before so I'm in the dark about that.
Before anyone chimes in, the whole thing will be backed up to an external TB3 Promise array, so no worries on data loss.
Some observations: The fan is definitely annoyingly loud. I prepared for that and I have the replacement fan on the way from DigiKey. I'll swap it out when it arrives. It took the beautiful near silence of the Mac Pro and added an annoying mosquito-like whine. Looking at the heatsink setup it occurred to me that one could probably cut/file off the front end near the fan, remove the fan and let the wind tunnel arrangement of the Mac Pro do the cooling with no fan at all. I don't have a way to measure the temps of the blades if I did that, so not sure if that would be wise/safe? I'll see what the quieter fan is like before I try that. I also ordered some cheap copper heatsinks recommended in post #242 in this thread; I might end up installing those as well. I feel that if the Mac Pro fans push enough air to cool that Xeon they should be able to easily cool those NVMe drives as well.
Overall I'm really happy with this, it was blazingly fast copying files internally. The expandability of the new Mac Pro was the prime reason I bought one; I had one of the original Intel Mac Pro 1,1 models and loved it, but when it got long in the tooth they had moved on the trashcan and I just couldn't bring myself to buy something so limited. I spent the last five+ years using just my MBP's and dealing with the shortcomings. It's nice to have an expandable/upgradeable Mac Pro again.
I didn't run any performance benchmarks, and right now I decided not to use it as a boot volume: I'm just going to use the built-in drive for booting and my apps, and I put my photo library on the NVMe RAID 0 set I created. One question though: Would Lightroom work faster if it was also installed/run off of the RAID set? I've never used a setup like this before so I'm in the dark about that.
Before anyone chimes in, the whole thing will be backed up to an external TB3 Promise array, so no worries on data loss.
Some observations: The fan is definitely annoyingly loud. I prepared for that and I have the replacement fan on the way from DigiKey. I'll swap it out when it arrives. It took the beautiful near silence of the Mac Pro and added an annoying mosquito-like whine. Looking at the heatsink setup it occurred to me that one could probably cut/file off the front end near the fan, remove the fan and let the wind tunnel arrangement of the Mac Pro do the cooling with no fan at all. I don't have a way to measure the temps of the blades if I did that, so not sure if that would be wise/safe? I'll see what the quieter fan is like before I try that. I also ordered some cheap copper heatsinks recommended in post #242 in this thread; I might end up installing those as well. I feel that if the Mac Pro fans push enough air to cool that Xeon they should be able to easily cool those NVMe drives as well.
Overall I'm really happy with this, it was blazingly fast copying files internally. The expandability of the new Mac Pro was the prime reason I bought one; I had one of the original Intel Mac Pro 1,1 models and loved it, but when it got long in the tooth they had moved on the trashcan and I just couldn't bring myself to buy something so limited. I spent the last five+ years using just my MBP's and dealing with the shortcomings. It's nice to have an expandable/upgradeable Mac Pro again.
So, today I got my Highpoint 7101A-1 and four Samsung 2TB EVO Plus NVMe drives. It's working fine in my Mac Pro 7,1 after I figured out one problem that held me up for a bit. All of the software loaded fine and the Mac even saw the drives, but the RAID manager software would not work, so I couldn't create a RAID set. To make it work, I had to disable Secure Boot by starting in Recovery Mode. After that, everything was fine. Made the RAID set, formatted, and then changed the icon because I don't like the dumb default icon Catalina gave it.
I didn't run any performance benchmarks, and right now I decided not to use it as a boot volume: I'm just going to use the built-in drive for booting and my apps, and I put my photo library on the NVMe RAID 0 set I created. One question though: Would Lightroom work faster if it was also installed/run off of the RAID set? I've never used a setup like this before so I'm in the dark about that.
Before anyone chimes in, the whole thing will be backed up to an external TB3 Promise array, so no worries on data loss.
Some observations: The fan is definitely annoyingly loud. I prepared for that and I have the replacement fan on the way from DigiKey. I'll swap it out when it arrives. It took the beautiful near silence of the Mac Pro and added an annoying mosquito-like whine. Looking at the heatsink setup it occurred to me that one could probably cut/file off the front end near the fan, remove the fan and let the wind tunnel arrangement of the Mac Pro do the cooling with no fan at all. I don't have a way to measure the temps of the blades if I did that, so not sure if that would be wise/safe? I'll see what the quieter fan is like before I try that. I also ordered some cheap copper heatsinks recommended in post #242 in this thread; I might end up installing those as well. I feel that if the Mac Pro fans push enough air to cool that Xeon they should be able to easily cool those NVMe drives as well.
Overall I'm really happy with this, it was blazingly fast copying files internally. The expandability of the new Mac Pro was the prime reason I bought one; I had one of the original Intel Mac Pro 1,1 models and loved it, but when it got long in the tooth they had moved on the trashcan and I just couldn't bring myself to buy something so limited. I spent the last five+ years using just my MBP's and dealing with the shortcomings. It's nice to have an expandable/upgradeable Mac Pro again.
What fan did you choose in reference to Airflow, Noise and current?
What fan did you choose in reference to Airflow, Noise and current?
I ordered the fan from DigiKey recommended in this post on the HighPoint 7101A thread.
I have the 7101 in a new Mac Pro and it is completely silent. I bought the DigiKey fan and some heat sinks based on the posts about noise. Haven’t needed to modify the 7101.
How good is your hearing though? It's a very high-pitched whine so if you have any high-frequency hearing loss it would be unnoticeable. Either that or you got lucky, because it's commonly noted how annoying the fan is and mine is certainly not silent. Compared to typical PC noise, it's OK, but compared to the Mac Pro without it, it's annoyingly loud.