No high frequency noise deficit. It may be that my NAS noise is obscuring the high pitched whine you are hearing.
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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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No high frequency noise deficit. It may be that my NAS noise is obscuring the high pitched whine you are hearing.
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
Compared to the claimed OWC throughput in an x8 slot, this isn't enough for me to spend on better blades (i.e. 970 Pro) and accept the Sonnet fan. In an x16 slot, I just don't understand these numbers. I've actually also been wondering how the OWC gets their 6GB/s and to what extent it maintains that over large sustained writes, but it's occurred to me that perhaps they are actually relying on the x8 PCIe bottleneck so – spread across four blades – the load is serviced primarily off of the Aura P12 SLC caches.
Update on testing. Sonnet 4x4 w/ 4 x 2TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus drives set-up in RAID 0 through Apple Disk Utility for 8TB total.
I tried the card/drives in two slots (slot 5- x16 and slot 6- x8) to see how much difference there was in speeds. Results attached - Left side is the x16 and right x8 slot results.
Also, I'm getting an "attention" message to move the card from 3 to slot 6. What does the Pool A Allocation (See screenshot) at 50% mean?? Is the "not arranged in an optimal configuration because the card is a x16 and I have it in a.x8 slot? Is there any possibility of disk error or other problem or is the machine just warning me that it will be slower?
I tried the card/drives in two slots (slot 5- x16 and slot 6- x8) to see how much difference there was in speeds. Results attached - Left side is the x16 and right x8 slot results.
Also, I'm getting an "attention" message to move the card from 3 to slot 6. What does the Pool A Allocation (See screenshot) at 50% mean?? Is the "not arranged in an optimal configuration because the card is a x16 and I have it in a.x8 slot? Is there any possibility of disk error or other problem or is the machine just warning me that it will be slower?
Attachments
Thanks for posting this info. 👍
The "Attention" msg you attached indicates to move the card from slot 6 to 4. Slot 6 is x8 and slot 4 is x16. This makes sense since the Sonnet card is a x16 card.
Pool Allocation information...
Install PCIe cards in your Mac Pro (2019) - Apple Support
Learn about the PCIe slots on your Mac Pro (2019) and how to install additional cards.
Install PCIe cards in your Mac Pro (2019) - Apple Support
Learn about the PCIe slots on your Mac Pro (2019) and how to install additional cards.
I had the OWC and now I have 2 of the Sonnet cards with 2TB Samsung Evo Plus blades.
From my testing the OWC's performance is erratic. With Blackmagic Speed Test the OWC 8TB, RAID 0 SoftRAID was getting 4.5GB/s W and 5GB/s R - but NOT consistently. The OWC was all over the place: 4.5GB/s W then the Read would drop to 500MB/s for a second then up to 1,200MB/s then settle at 2,300MB/s. Then the Write would be 3,100MB/s, Read would be 500MB/s to 2,300MB/s again. Then the Write is back to 4,000MB/s and the Read is 5,000MB/s.
The Sonnet card consistently showed 3GB/s+ for a single Blade and ~7,400MB/s W and ~8,510MB/s R for an 8TB RAID 0 array using SoftRAID. The Sonnet and the Samsung blades NEVER showed the extreme drop that the OWC did - the Sonnet barely dropped at all.
I haven't pushed the cards just yet during normal use but I have been copying large amounts of data to them and while the Fan does come on at times, it's not very loud. The Mac is so silent that I hear the hum of my old Samsung Monitor over the Mac Pro AND the Sonnet. And that's just a PSU hum.
I returned the OWC, it's very inconsistent. You might not 'notice' the drop because even 500MB/s is still SSD speeds, but it's just not acceptable for a blade. It's possible this was isolated and I received a bad card but in any case the Sonnet speeds are definitely better. I don't plan on using these in a RAID config, so in theory I'll be getting the 12GB/s concurrent speeds when all the blades are running.
The price difference is just going to be a personal choice here but I was not impressed with the OWC card so I couldn't justify spending 'anything' on it.
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Um... yeah. So not an isolated case. I remember @eric.blair writing about trying different PCIe slots too because of a sleep issue. His overall logic tracks for me... I was definitely leaning towards the fanless OWC but not at the cost of doubly-confirmed performance stability issues.
I presume folks are talking about the pre-7,1 version of the OWC card, although I can't see that the 7,1 revision would improve these issues.
Yes, this was with the 2010-2012 MP Card. They told us it was just a 'fit' issue with the card - and I asked about it being a firmware difference and the support rep said NO, same firmware.
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Is your plan to run both Sonnet cards in the x16 slot or one in a x8 slot? I'm trying to plan for long term and want to leave slots 3/4 open for another graphics card and/or slot 5 for afterburner.
I guess my question is what is the best drive set-up for the price to take advanced of the x8 slot currently? Is there a cheaper option than the Sonnet x16 card but that still produces a consistent level of output in the 4,000MB/s-5500MB/s range? Sounds like the OWC is out.
Also, were your test results based on the Speed Test app or tracking an actual data copy?
Thanks!
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Is your plan to run both Sonnet cards in the x16 slot or one in a x8 slot? I'm trying to plan for long term and want to leave slots 3/4 open for another graphics card and/or slot 5 for afterburner.
I guess my question is what is the best drive set-up for the price to take advanced of the x8 slot currently? Is there a cheaper option than the Sonnet x16 card but that still produces a consistent level of output in the 4,000MB/s-5500MB/s range? Sounds like the OWC is out.
Also, were your test results based on the Speed Test app or tracking an actual data copy?
Thanks!
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i contacted them about the OWC Accelsior for the 2012 version working on the 7,1. In two separate replies i got different answers. The first answer actually stated "We have seen a power issue with the 2010-2012 Accelsior version in the 2019 model"
Then the second response indicated it was a fit issue recognized by their engineering team.
Thusly, I sent mine back without even installing it. I have the new one on the way with a 13 day delay due to them getting a new shipment in.
Then the second response indicated it was a fit issue recognized by their engineering team.
Thusly, I sent mine back without even installing it. I have the new one on the way with a 13 day delay due to them getting a new shipment in.
Can you do this with the Sonnet card or just the Highpoint? (Software Raid drives in two cards together)?
Is it possible to Softraid two Sonnet Cards together (4 x 2TB drives per card)?
Card 1 is RAID 0 = 8TB
Card 2 is RAID 0 = 8TB
Then, RAID Card 1 & 2 Together creating 16TB RAID 0 or 8TB RAID 10?
(Or is this only possible on the Highpoint card)?
Card 1 is RAID 0 = 8TB
Card 2 is RAID 0 = 8TB
Then, RAID Card 1 & 2 Together creating 16TB RAID 0 or 8TB RAID 10?
(Or is this only possible on the Highpoint card)?
I'm suspecting you can use either Disk Utility or SoftRAID to configure two Sonnet cards (each having 4x 2TB blades in each) to form a 8x 2TB RAID-0 to provide for a 16TB RAID-0. That's a lot of data that would need a decent backup in the event the 16TB RAID-0 failed and its data considered to be very important.
I think the only reason for doing this would be to have a very fast 16TB of data to be available.
For video editing it is becoming more and more necessary to deal with the ever increasing film/video footage taken at 8K and high frame count. For example, for a 1 hour shot using Arri Alexa (65) codec, UHD at 24 FPS will be around 1.6 TB and with ProRes 444 at 6K and 24 FPS it's 1.2 TB. Moving up to 8K and 60 FPS would more than double this number. So, as I said... larger and faster storage will be needed in future if not today for some people.
Plan for the future..... my rule of thumb is to take todays storage requirement and multiply it by 3 and be prepared to accommodate this in the near future.
FWIW: I'm going to be using a Sonnet as 2TB RAID 0 (4xSamsung 512GB 970+) for DaVinci Resolve & FCPX fast cache & optimised media prefs /filepaths. In my experience, RAID 0 can be unreliable while great for speed - this is coming from a set-up on a dual Xeon Dell 7190 + Dell Ultra PCIe there (the Dell has port bifucation). In the nMP I'm going to use the Sonnet for the fast cache but put my raw media (Film, Music, SoundLibs) on a RAID 5 set (5x2TB SSDs in a Thunderbay 6). Whichever, I've found it best to put the original media on separate disks to the RAID 0. The 0 also zeros quickly with SoftRAID, & easy for clean, later backups from the main drive(s) if you don't want all the temp files.
I have the stock Radeon Pro 580X because I'm using this for music so I have 3 x16 slots available (1 x16 left with the 2 Sonnet cards installed in 2 of the 4 x16 slots).
There are definitely other options as discussed throughout this thread. My experience with Sonnet (and for that matter Samsung SSDs) over the years has always been better than other vendors and the performance of these cards is just crazy so I'd rather stick with something I know I can trust. If the fans ever actually become an issue I would just deal with them later - but considering how loud my 2009 Mac Pro is, coupled with the sound card fan noise I've been dealing with, the new MP and these Sonnet cards is nothing in comparison.
The first Sonnet card will be Samsung Evo Plus 2TB x 4 and the second Sonnet will have 2TB x 2. I'm going to leave 2 blade slots open because I just don't need the extra space at the moment and I expect the Samsung cards to come down in price - or Samsung may even develop a 4TB single sided card in the next few years. These cards are housing Sample Libraries and they're backed up once a week to a regular HDD. I'm not using RAID because I just don't need it for my purposes and SoftRAID / Software RAID in general is not something I feel confident about.
I used Blackmagic Disk Speed Test for testing.
It will be very interesting to see if this 2019 card has the performance issues that the old card has.
I've been using Apple's RAID-0 for a long time and find it reliable for me. I've also used SoftRAID's RAID-0 as well with success. The only issue I find is that when I wish to revert any SoftRAID controlled disks/SSDs back to Apple's format using the SoftRAID's "Convert" option it leaves the disks/SSDs in a state unrecognizable by macOS and/or Disk Utility. It takes a lot of messing about to resolve this issue. Based on my recent use of SoftRAID that has given me no end of troubles, I now will be relying on Apple's Disk Utility for RAID-0. I keep SoftRAID around for other RAID setup such as RAID-5 because Apple's Disk Utility does not support other than RAID-0 and RAID-1.
I bought the sonnet 4x4 with 3 wd sn750 2tb sticks and so far so good. I’ve used soft raid for ages but since OWC acquired them, they seem to have slowed down on their development on APFS support and encryption support. On 5.8.1 soft raid keeps trying to reinstall the boot driver every time I open softraid.
3x RAID 0 on soft raid on HFS+ gives 6900 write and 6500 read on blackmagics short benchmark. Disk utility raid 0 was slightly slower.
3x RAID 0 on APFS on disk utility since softraid doesn’t support APFS was 5900-6000 on both read and writes.
I require encryptionon every piece of storage and turning on encrypted APFS reduces performance to Around 3500 on read and writes.
Fan noise is the same tone as the Mac Pro and even filling 5tb of test data couldn’t hear them ramp up, they are extremely quiet almost silent.
3x RAID 0 on soft raid on HFS+ gives 6900 write and 6500 read on blackmagics short benchmark. Disk utility raid 0 was slightly slower.
3x RAID 0 on APFS on disk utility since softraid doesn’t support APFS was 5900-6000 on both read and writes.
I require encryptionon every piece of storage and turning on encrypted APFS reduces performance to Around 3500 on read and writes.
Fan noise is the same tone as the Mac Pro and even filling 5tb of test data couldn’t hear them ramp up, they are extremely quiet almost silent.
My new beast is finally here and I ... have a problem. I had all these modifications ready for it and couldn't even bother to turn the thing on once before doing the mods. Heh. Its first stop was my kitchen island which is at the perfect height to work on a computer. There, it received its 2 x 2TB SATA SSDs (in the Promise enclosure), and the 2 x HighPoint SSD7101A-1 cards, both packed with 4 x 2TB NVMe drives. (Also added a Sonnet USB card and 64GB of RAM).
Anyway, thankfully, the machine booted with no issues and I did the work of getting the HighPoint driver and utility installed by disabling Secure Boot. Once that was done, I made a RAID0 volume on the first card just to do a test:
Pretty much in line with what others are seeing. I then destroyed that volume and created a RAID01 volume using the HighPoint utility. The results were again as expected: slightly slower writes but reads just as quick:
Again: the drop in write performance is expected since the controller is writing 2 copies of everything. That's going to cause a hit, no matter how good the controller is. But I can deal with 7.3GB/sec writes. Heh.
Now, for the sound. It's... obnoxious. I can hear it CLEAR AS DAY; but remember I actually have 2 of them in there. I've not found any digital/logical way to disable the fans. I didn't look to see which version of the PCB I have, but I'm guessing it's not 2.0.
Replacement Digi-Key fans are on their way, as are heatsinks for the switch and the NVMe drives. I may just settle for replacing the fans and leaving everything else as is. But we'll see.
Overall: quick. And noisy.
Anyway, thankfully, the machine booted with no issues and I did the work of getting the HighPoint driver and utility installed by disabling Secure Boot. Once that was done, I made a RAID0 volume on the first card just to do a test:
Pretty much in line with what others are seeing. I then destroyed that volume and created a RAID01 volume using the HighPoint utility. The results were again as expected: slightly slower writes but reads just as quick:
Again: the drop in write performance is expected since the controller is writing 2 copies of everything. That's going to cause a hit, no matter how good the controller is. But I can deal with 7.3GB/sec writes. Heh.
Now, for the sound. It's... obnoxious. I can hear it CLEAR AS DAY; but remember I actually have 2 of them in there. I've not found any digital/logical way to disable the fans. I didn't look to see which version of the PCB I have, but I'm guessing it's not 2.0.
Replacement Digi-Key fans are on their way, as are heatsinks for the switch and the NVMe drives. I may just settle for replacing the fans and leaving everything else as is. But we'll see.
Overall: quick. And noisy.
Everything looks good.....but shame about the fan noise.
- Do the fans run at a constant RPM ?
- I wonder if the RPM can be reduced ?
- Do fans run all the time, even when not in use ?
You definitely don't need heatsinks for the drives. With the 7,1 airflow and with the shroud removed from the Highpoint card, I couldn't get the temp of any drive above 114F under constant usage, which is plenty low. Idle temps are 82F at each card. I have Sabrent Rocket 2TB sticks FWIW. The PCIe switch is potentially another matter, but Highpoint is claiming that they will allow the fan to be disabled when installed in the Mac Pro. No word yet about how that will happen.