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eSata 6G PCIe Cards

M

Mr Ski 73

macrumors regular
Original poster
Dec 11, 2007
237
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I have a OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD as my boot drive, I am running Lion (so cant RAID twin drives) on a 6 core 2010 Mac Pro

Would adding an eSata 6G card enable me to run this at 6G/s rather than the throttled 3G which I get from connecting to the internal connections? I have read various reports and this then gets more confusing my referring to lanes.

If anyone has done this how do you run a cable back through the mac pro to the optical bay area where my drive is located?

Thanks in advance for any views.
 
Make sure your PCI card is bootable or it is worthless for your SSD. Most PCI based SATA 6G cards do not boot OS X. (Things may have changed)
 
Thanks. I see what you mean about being bootable. I was looking at the Sonnet Tempo Sata 6gb/s but I am not sure this is supported
 
Mr Ski 73 said:
If anyone has done this how do you run a cable back through the mac pro to the optical bay area where my drive is located?
Click to expand...
If Apple did not change the mechanical layout of this specific area in the 2010 MP compared to it's 2006 ancestor, there should be a small opening in the "back" of the optical bay (if you look at it from the open side after removing the sideplate, it is the area towards the other - non-removable - sideplate). It is lined with some black protection and could be a tight fit (biggest problem is to squeeze the connector itself through), but should be doable. There is however a chance that Apple also changed this sector while redesigning the CPU/Ram area in the younger MP's, so my description may be moot...

Routing the cable from a PCIe card should follow general rules: Try to mechanically fix the cable to suitable points within the housing, in order to prevent cable abrasion (and perhaps annoying noises) from constant movement.
 
I do not have a specific card to recommend. However, I would not use the Sonnect Tempo you mentioned or any PCI-e 2.0 x1 cards for SATA III SSD's if you actually want to take advantage of their performance.

PCI-e 2.0 has a throughput maximum of 500MB/s per lane. While a good SATA III SSD will exceed that 500MB/s let alone having them in a performance RAID setup, such as RAID 0. I assume you want to RAID because you mentioned it.

Also SATA III has a theoretical throughput of 6Gb/s (768MB/s). Exceeding PCI-e 2.0 x1 with a single port let alone many. For any decent SATA III card I would expect them to require a PCI-e x8 connection or PCI-e 2.0 x4 connection. For true hardware RAID cards I would expect PCI-e 2.0 x8.

Looking at Newegg it does not seem many companies are even producing SATA III cards. Let alone good cards not just the gimmicky x1 cards. Really to take advantage of those drives in a Mac Pro you are going to have to wait until a good card for the Mac hits the market.

Also Sonnet only mentions booting compatibility in Windows. Though it does make me wonder if it is just an issue of not passing OS X's validating process. If using a boot loader like Chameleon would allow booting into OS X. As it does on a hackintosh.
 
yauzers619 said:
I have two Velocity Solos in my MacPro 2010 and I can confirm it boots OSX.

One of the Solos is booting Lion, while they other is booting a Windows Bootcamp partition.
Click to expand...

Hi,

I've been wanting to buy the Velocity Solos. Has anybody noticed a big difference in performance with it? And has anybody had any probems with it?
 
yauzers619 said:
I have two Velocity Solos in my MacPro 2010 and I can confirm it boots OSX.

One of the Solos is booting Lion, while they other is booting a Windows Bootcamp partition.
Click to expand...

How did you get Win7 to see the card? Well I can see the ATA controller in Device manager but it cant find drivers for it.
 
mrh63061 said:
This card is bootable and will save a bay when it comes to your boot drive.
http://www.apricorn.com/products/desktop-ssd-hdd-upgrade-kits/velocity-solo-mac.html
Click to expand...

yauzers619 said:
I have two Velocity Solos in my MacPro 2010 and I can confirm it boots OSX.

One of the Solos is booting Lion, while they other is booting a Windows Bootcamp partition.
Click to expand...

One of the issues with the Velocity Solo is that it's a single lane card... which will be a bottleneck. The previously mentioned Caldigit card is a 4-lane card but suffers from the inconvenience of having to use an external connector.

It would be nice to see someone offer a dual SATA3 connection internally on a x4 interface that boots natively and ideally with software RAID0 support for $50. :D :p
 
seer said:
How did you get Win7 to see the card? Well I can see the ATA controller in Device manager but it cant find drivers for it.
Click to expand...

My god I have wasted a lot of google cpu looking for an answer on this.... I can only assume you have one Windows version of the Solo and one Mac version?

I can't see any reason else why my mac version cant be installed properly under windows. Seems odd though that the card is seen in Device manager as generic interfaces, but with the little warning symbol on them. If I use windows update to search for the drivers, it just says I already have the latest version.

Can you confirm this theory in any way yauzers619 ??
 
I'm currently using a RocketRaid2314 (old 4 port eSATA II card) .. not really relevant to this discussion but it has AWESOME error reporting. The WebGUI emails me whenever there's a read error which has informed me well in advance of drive failures many-a-time (Funny, SMART doesn't seem to catch ANYTHING). In addition, it is highly configurable and allows me to turn off Native Command Queuing, write-ahead, read-ahead, etc. It also doesn't have problems with sleep (apparently others do?)

I'm not super happy with this card and wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but I was wondering if anyone's used a card by a different manufacturer with similar error reporting?
 
Mr Ski 73 said:
I have a OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD as my boot drive, I am running Lion (so cant RAID twin drives) on a 6 core 2010 Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

Not meaning to hijack your thread and bootable 6G PCIe, but... you can RAID0 twin SSDs on Lion and boot from it, because that's exactly what I've been doing since Lion was released; no problems. 12-core, 2010 Mac Pro.
 
^^^ Yep. For the price of an 8x lane solution card you could also have twice the SSD storage in a RAID0. I bought ATTO card and it went back because I could just get a 2nd SSD for same price. Boot speed is nothing to write home about on 3G vs. 6G. Lots of money for little gain. I mean it would be nice to have all 6G but it is nicer to have double the SSD:)
 
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