Curious what would be max SSD speed in a Mac Pro 3,1

[pullman]

Thank you Alex. So far it feels like a very solid setup. I remember reading about that as being the benefit of hardware RAID too. I'm a bit surprised that SoftRAID seems to be the hot thing these days in when it comes to RAID. But I'm very pleased with how it worked out. It took a while to rebuild the computer because I also created a new home folder. I had used the same one, on a separate drive, since Leopard and it had swelled to 105GB (not counting photos, movies and music which I have on other drives). Today when I finished setting up the home folder, with exactly the same applications installed on the system, the home folder was 35GB. I wonder what those other 70GB were...Out of an abundance of caution I kept a backup of the old home folder though.

I'm very pleased with how the Tempo performed with the two SSD in RAID 0. I tried that with the Intel 520s but couldn't reach the max of the card, clearly because of how those drives perform. With modern SSD technology it seems one hits the ceiling of that card. But the random performance disappointed too much for me to waste an SSD only to have fast sequential performance, which I don't need.

I was also surprised to see how the Intels performed. I was very happy with them for a long time - also because of their use of MLC - but technology has moved forward quite a bit it seems. I picked the EVOs this time in part because of Samsungs pretty extreme reliability numbers. I think they will last a long time.

This leads to pl1984's question about how the system feels. I haven't used the system too much yet to know how much faster it feels. Certainly the boot is extremely fast at 16 secs from bong to desktop and applications launch faster, including Photoshop which I use a lot. I hope that together with the 64GB of RAM that should be coming next week I'll have an overall snappier performance when I edit photos. But we shall see.

Again thank you both for having helped me with this.
Philip

Hi Philip,

I think you have chosen the best scenario for your situation. The way I grew up with the early Raid systems in the industry, -the original thought behind it was always to keep the pressure from the main CPU and offload HDD controlling tasks to an additional external chip, - in this case to the hardware controller on the tempo pro card in order to free up more power for other tasks.
A SATA 3 connection speed wise usually is around 550MB/sec. This is about the performance you would have in case of a single SATA SSD drive on a single slot PCIe card such as the regular Tempo or an Accelsior S card. According to your provided Benchmarks, you have 908MB/sec Seq Read speed, -> that means your hardware raid controller is doing 450MB/sec on top of a standard single non raid0 set up. I think this is pretty good, especially on a MP 3.1.

Surprising to me was the slow Intel 520 read speed. This shows clearly, how fast the SSD chip architecture has developed over the last 4 years. This is stunning for me and it shows how important it is to go with an upgraded SSD.
I have two Samsung 840 SSD in my rig for multiple years now, and they are very solid drives. I think Samsung, in general, is the best possible brand you could go when it comes to SSDs with a SATA interface. Very well done, I think you will be fine for years to come with the 860's

How does the system feel after the upgrade? The benchmarks show a marked improvement but has that translated into increased productivity / user experience?

 

[brian.tully]

Hey there. I've recently tried to speed up my old Mac Pro 3,1 and had this very same question. Unfortunately it looks like I may have made the wrong decision as I wound up going with the OWC Mercury Accelsior S adapter and Mercury Extreme® Pro 6G (2TB) drive bundle. I can only get up to 500 MB/s read/write so I am astonished that some of you have gotten so much higher. Is it because of the size of the drive (2TB) that causes the poor performance? I understand that I am limited by the SATA connector and the Mac Pro 3,1's PCI bus speed, but I'm really surprised some of you have achieved much faster speeds.

Anyone know if there's a way to patch the 3,1 so that it can use something like the OWC Accelsior 1M2 or
OWC Accelsior 4M2? https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/mac-pro/2009-2012