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Bootable SATA III (6Gb/s) PCI Express card?
- Thread starter rk25123
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http://www.sonnettech.com/product/computercards/index.html
What about the Sonnet Tempo SSD Cards. Rather then using the Optical Bay, can place directly on the card.
They are even Thunderbolt compatible if you end up going down that route.
Downside is no USB3 compared to the card in the thread, however not sure if you need USB3 as you only mentioned 2 SSD's.
What about the Sonnet Tempo SSD Cards. Rather then using the Optical Bay, can place directly on the card.
They are even Thunderbolt compatible if you end up going down that route.
Downside is no USB3 compared to the card in the thread, however not sure if you need USB3 as you only mentioned 2 SSD's.
How about this one ? anyone try ?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-2-Bay-S...sk_Controllers_RAID_Cards&hash=item3a827b80f2
If you're not using both at the same time (OS X and Windows), any bootable PCIe card will do. But honestly, you're not going to gain much over just connecting them to the existing SATA connectors. Most Operating System and Apps I/O is random in nature and well below the SATA2 ceiling.
This is a single lane card and will bottleneck even a single SSD... again, better off just sticking with the SATA2 backplane.
In my research, this appears to be the best solution for anyone who might want to run a pair of SSDs in RAID0 as it has a 4 lane bus so shouldn't throttle performance. I'm not aware of anyone who has actually tried this though as it's fairly new.
I am currently running a Sonnet Tempo Pro in my Mac Pro 5,1 with a pair of 512 GB SSDs in RAID-0 for my photo library (large files) and it performs very well in that application.
Although I do also have it configured to boot OS X with the OS X environment on the RAID-0 array, I really don't see any performance benefit with booting or running OS X files there as compared to the same OS X system installed on a single SSD running on the Mac Pro SATA-II backplane.
Benchmarks obviously show a tremendous speed difference, but actual performance with OS X system access seems to be the same. There is a very noticeable improvement with my photo library located on the RAID-0 SSD on SATA-III PCIe.
I have been unable to boot Windows from this card however, either as the only SSD on the card, or with the second SSD having OS X (which does boot in this configuration). Others users posting here seem to be having the same issues with Windows and PCIe ("external drive") cards.
-howard
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Yeah, sorry, I had forgot you and scottrichardson both had these and they performed very well on benchmarks. But as you say for an OS Apps drive it won't make much difference... Media files are another story. My 3x SSD array did wonders for my large photo libraries and RAW to TIFF conversions into NIKs tools.
There is definitely something throttling the Accelsior... Perhaps the SATA to PCIe bridge or the x2 bus interface or something.
With this SYBA controller from you link you'll end with about 200MB/s per drive using 4 SSDs on one card. You'd need at least 2 such cards. Even if they use max bandwidth of PCIe 2.0 x2 connector, one card would be suitable for no more than 2 SATA III SSDs (such as 840 Pro).
From reviews I've read on newegg, this card tops out 350MB/s per drive with 2 SSDs connected and about 200MB/s with 4.
Could you post some benchmarks as you have this card installed? It would be interesting to see them.
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From Corsair Force GT 180GB i got 210 write and 360 read. Better than 185 / 210 from SATA 2 on Mac Pro + I saved internal ports for HDDs.