caldigit fasta-6gu3 & velocity solo 2 problem on 08 mac pro

[kinwah02]

Hello all, I have a problem with the caldigit fasta-6gu3 card I just purchased with the velocity solo 2 card on my 08 Mac pro. I have 2 SSDs on the velocity solo 2 as a boot drive but once I install the caldigital on the 2nd slot (1 & 2 are the only available...). Everything is running very slow on my boot drive. It takes ages to boot the mac and I wasn't even thought it won't boot at all...

I ran the disk speed test and my SSD/boot drive's speed dropped to 40MB write and 200MB read, and even the caldigit card is slow too. I did a test using a 7200HDD on the drive bay as the boot drive and things back to normal/fast on the caldigit. But this would make my velocity solo & SSD boot drive meaningless. So I'm guessing that related to the PCI slots or the velocity card with caldigit. Is it because the 08 mac pro is too obsolete to deal with these two cards at the same time? due to the PCI slots 1 & 2 or their 1.1 version issue?

many many thanks for reading and hope you could help giving me some helps!!

 

[hfg]

You may have a problem using any slot other than the one adjacent to the graphics card on a 2008 Mac Pro as the top 2 slots are only PCI-1.1. Are you running RAID-0 on the boot SSDs from the Solo x2 card? Perhaps you could put the CalDigit card in slot-2 and put your boot SSD in two of the disk trays (you probably won't notice the SATA-II on a boot/system disk). I put a pair of SSDs up in the spare optical bay on my 2008, and then ran the 2 extra motherboard SATA ports up into that bay to run them in RAID-0 for boot (using a molex-to-dual SATA power cable adapter).

From the 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 Users Guide:
About PCI Express Cards
Your Mac Pro comes with a high-performance PCI Express graphics card, which
contains the graphics processor unit (GPU) and provides the computer’s display ports.
The graphics card is installed in slot 1.
You can install additional PCI Express graphics and expansion cards. Before installing a
card, refer to the table below and check its specifications to make sure it can operate in
your Mac Pro.
Important: Combined maximum power consumption for all four PCI Express slots must
not exceed 300 watts (W).
Slot Type Bandwidth
4 PCI Express 1.1 4-lane
3 PCI Express 1.1 4-lane
2 PCI Express 2.0 16-lane
1 (double-wide) PCI Express 2.0 16-lane

 

[Tesselator]

Just to address this one small part of your concerns;

Is it because the 08 mac pro is too obsolete to deal with these two cards at the same time? due to the PCI slots 1 & 2 or their 1.1 version issue?

This wouldn't be a problem except during times when one or more of them were under heavy load. Given a typical system profile I don't see that happening during boot time and unless you were being careless I don't see how that could happen when you benchmarked the drive either.

The math to profile the bandwidths of those two cards in order to see if the PCIe buss speeds were capping you (bottleneck) is just simple addition and subtraction.

 

[kinwah02]

sorry that I actually put it this way

4 PCI Express 1.1 4-lane
3 PCI Express 1.1 4-lane --- Caldigit
2 PCI Express 2.0 16-lane --- velocity solo 2 - 2 SSDs
1 (double-wide) PCI Express 2.0 16-lane ---- 5770

I tried both the 4/3 lane and the problem still exists.
so now, I have to take the caldigit out to get my boot drive on velocity solo 2 back to fast speed...

 

[hfg]

You might find this thread of interest:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1574797/


-howard

 

[kinwah02]

thanks very much for the link. Now, I have a better idea.
I'm now connect the boot drive/ssd on one of the two extra sata ports and get back to 90MB write and 200MB read. I still have 1 840 pro 512 on the velocity x2 and strange with the caldigital installed at the same time.

the 840 pro 512 remains the 490MB write and 500MB read in every case. Last time, it was connected on the extra port of the velocity and now, it's directly on the velocity. So I'm wondering is it the problem with the boot drive/840pro 256??