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Booting SATAIII SSD from Mac Pro 4,1

R

Raunien

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 3, 2011
541
66
Hi everyone,

I recently came into possession of a cMP 4,1 early 2009. I have a Samsung 830 SSD that I would like to put into this machine and have it run at full speed as well as boot from this drive. I'm not looking to do any raid configurations.

Obviously, the machine's sata ports are limited to SATA II speeds. However, I was wondering if this PCIe card would allow me to boot from this ssd drive as well as have it run at full speeds.

Here is the card in question.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005B0A6ZS/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=tonymacx86com-20

Finally, I'm not sure what the speeds of PCIe 2.0 is. I've heard that the PCIe tops out at 5Gb/s? So if anyone knows, can you comment on this and whether it will limit the speed of the drive?

Thank you so much guys!

BTW, this is my first mac pro so I'm very excited.

----------

http://www.ebay.com/itm/SSD-Supersp...ple-Mac-Pro-2008-2009-2010-2012-/130830674778

I'm wondering if this would also work? It also says speeds up to 550mb/s.

Where as this http://www.ebay.com/itm/SSD-Upgrade...otable-SATA-III-PCI-Express-2-0-/130696186620

only works up to 400mb/s
 
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There isn't a 2.5" SSD drive in existence that can top out a x16 slot and only a RAID can saturate a X4 slot at the moment. You are good to go.
 
I've got an early 2009 cMP, although I've flashed it to 5.1, installed a W3680 CPU, and added a bunch of other stuff. Still, the MOBO is the same as yours.

I recently added an Apricorn Velocity DUO PCIe card and mounted a Samsung 840 SSD, fairly similar to your 830 in specs. It's getting the read/write speeds you see below. I can easily boot from this drive, although I'm using it for high-speed scratch space for Photoshop and Premiere.


840SpeedTest.jpg
 
Is there anything cheaper than the Apricorn Velocity?

Also what does flashing to 5,1 mean?
 
I can also highly recommend the Apricorn Velovity DUO X2. Great upgrade for your MP 4.1 and 'future proof' when you want to add a SSD to dual boot or in the event afterall you want to go the RAID0 route for some extra read write speeds, with no spaghetti inside with extra sata and power cable.
 
Thanks all,

Btw, just out of curiosity was 500$ for a 4,1 2.66 ghz quad core mac pro a good deal?
 
Raunien said:
Is there anything cheaper than the Apricorn Velocity?

Also what does flashing to 5,1 mean?
Click to expand...

The Apricorn Velocity is one of the cheapest as far as I know and fully tested. You can check out this article about flashing your 4,1 firmware to 5,1 HERE Flashing to 5,1 enables you to use Westmere Xeons and faster ram speed at 1333Mhz.
 
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