MP 7,1 Expansion Cards (PCIe) for 2019 Mac Pro

[derekheeps]

I just bought , still awaiting delivery , a 2019 mac Pro 7,1 28 core with 768 Gb RAM .

This is to update from my 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 2.8GHZ 8 core .

Due to the new machine not having any Firewire ports I'm looking ideally for two PCIe cards - one to give me four FW-800 ports , ideally buffered from each other , so that I can connect my G-Technology G-RAID and G-Drive units of which I currently have around 25 daisy-chained off the one FW-800 port on the back of my Mac - the drawback of that is that to access a drive near the end of the chain I need to have all of them powered on - so if I can get a card with four buffered outputs I could have four shorter chains .

I also want FW-400 separately as I currently have three edit decks - JVC-BR-HD50 and Sony HVR-M15 , plus a PDW-F70 all of which connect via FW-400 for ingesting content and I currently plug and unplug from the front panel socket ; the front FW-800 socket is used for my G-Drive and G-Raid Mini portable drives .

I already have two eSATA cards for my G-SPEED eS arrays , of which I have five - one being the Sonnet Tempo card , and another being a HighPoint card that came with one of the Arrays , except I have to have them in separate computers as there aren't enough card slots to go round in the older computers ! I can't believe that Apple now sell computers with NO expansion slots !

I don't really want to start using thunderbolt adaptors for this as I want to keep the two top Thunderbolt ports to hopefully run external enclosures for my two Blu-Ray writer drives , I have yet to even look for enclosures , as the only other option is to keep one or more of my older mac Pros hanging on my network just to write discs ...

 

[derekheeps]

That wasn't so difficult - I just found two cards each giving two FW-800 ports and one FW-400 port , plus another with 3x FW-800 ports , giving a total of seven FW-800 ports and two FW-400 ports - all cards are mac compatible and were inexpensive .

 

[Bigwaff]

FYI, Sequoia last version of macOS with support for FireWire. CoreAudio support for FireWire was removed in Ventura.

 

[derekheeps]

I know in the advert the machine was shown displaying Catalina - not sure where that stands in the order of things . Certainly an advance on El Capitan where my existing machines are stuck . If need be I can put the PCI cards into one of my older Macs and access the drives over the network .

 

[bzgnyc2]

Due to the new machine not having any Firewire ports I'm looking ideally for two PCIe cards - one to give me four FW-800 ports , ideally buffered from each other , so that I can connect my G-Technology G-RAID and G-Drive units of which I currently have around 25 daisy-chained off the one FW-800 port on the back of my Mac - the drawback of that is that to access a drive near the end of the chain I need to have all of them powered on - so if I can get a card with four buffered outputs I could have four shorter chains .

I don't really want to start using thunderbolt adaptors for this as I want to keep the two top Thunderbolt ports to hopefully run external enclosures for my two Blu-Ray writer drives , I have yet to even look for enclosures , as the only other option is to keep one or more of my older mac Pros hanging on my network just to write discs ...

I would consider reversing that unless you don't have the half-length I/O card. The Blu-Ray writers can be connected using USB3 while Thunderbolt a better match to future high-density RAID and/or NVMe drives. Even at 16x, Blu-Ray should need <600Mbps and 2 of them < 1.2Gbps. USB 3.2 Gen 2 (the ports on the Mac Pro and most common in peripherals these days) gets up to 10Gbps.

I appreciate this new setup will be a great leap forward for you and would also look at using it as a bridge between legacy and next generation technologies. You have a lot of spinning disks there and they are getting up there in age. You may find that a 4-bay RAID with high-density enterprise disks could replace most or all of that chain for less than $50/TB. Thunderbolt/NVMe SSD running about 4x that but with orders of magnitude more performance and no moving parts.

 

[derekheeps]

I would consider reversing that unless you don't have the half-length I/O card. The Blu-Ray writers can be connected using USB3 while Thunderbolt a better match to future high-density RAID and/or NVMe drives. Even at 16x, Blu-Ray should need <600Mbps and 2 of them < 1.2Gbps. USB 3.2 Gen 2 (the ports on the Mac Pro and most common in peripherals these days) gets up to 10Gbps.

I appreciate this new setup will be a great leap forward for you and would also look at using it as a bridge between legacy and next generation technologies. You have a lot of spinning disks there and they are getting up there in age. You may find that a 4-bay RAID with high-density enterprise disks could replace most or all of that chain for less than $50/TB. Thunderbolt/NVMe SSD running about 4x that but with orders of magnitude more performance and no moving parts.

The machine I have bought does have the I/O card , although I have yet to take delivery .

I already have , in addition to all the FW-800 drives , FIVE G-Speed eS RAID arrays , each with 16Tb ( 4x 4Tb drives ) configured as RAID 5 so 12 Tb each ; in addition most of the FW-800 units are striped RAID arrays , but duplicated , of 4 or 8 Tb each , so somewhere well north of 120 Tb , not counting the G-speed arrays , or internal storage in the individual Macs which are typically 1Tb system discs plus Time Machine backups and a further pair of 1Tb discs forming a striped RAID in the 3rd and 4th slots used as working drives which are always exported out to the external drives after a project is completed , all of which has been built up over the last two decades . The drives are only powered up when required , so not sitting constantly spinning , but it would be good to split the one long chain up into smaller ones .

I do have redundancy and have replaced individual disks before , but I'm not about to spend a vast amount of money replacing rather than just maintaining when I have . The system is still expanding and when I do add a new to me enclosure I generally buy new internal discs and format them as striped arrays ; I always use Enterprise level drives anyway , because data is precious .

I have a SSD in my laptop , and also in my DTE video drives , because that extends battery life ; for my desktop machines energy consumption isn't so much of a consideration , nor is start up time , so spinning discs , which tend to be more reliable , remain a good choice .

I used to keep backup drives off site when there were just a few , keeping them in my mother's house in case of a fire or other disaster , but that became impractical ; I now have a tiny fraction in cloud storage , and original film negatives , transparencies of film reels in my storage container , which is regularly checked on .

 

[reader50]

This is not a good time to upgrade storage. Converting that 4x 4TB array into a single 16TB drive for example. Newegg used to list a 16TB ironwolf pro for $225 on sale. Today, that drive is $535. Exos version for $600. Even reburb or used versions start around $450.

A cheap FW card or two is a good solution for now. They'll buy time until drive prices return to sane levels.

I just lost a 10TB Hitachi used for TM backups. Looked at the prices for another drive ... and put an old 8TB archive drive back in service instead. I do have multiple backups - there was no need to get robbed today for a new drive at triple price.

 

[derekheeps]

This is not a good time to upgrade storage. Converting that 4x 4TB array into a single 16TB drive for example. Newegg used to list a 16TB ironwolf pro for $225 on sale. Today, that drive is $535. Exos version for $600. Even reburb or used versions start around $450.

A cheap FW card or two is a good solution for now. They'll buy time until drive prices return to sane levels.

I just lost a 10TB Hitachi used for TM backups. Looked at the prices for another drive ... and put an old 8TB archive drive back in service instead. I do have multiple backups - there was no need to get robbed today for a new drive at triple price.

Yep , I'm aware of where the prices are going .

At work , from which I retired last week , we had a significant number of Buffalo Terastations spread across two sites on our own LAN ; my boss looked after them as networking isn't so much my thing . These run 24/7 and we have replaced a few failed drives down the years .

Besides it isn't just the cost of the NAS units ; especially with half of them at a remote site in case of a fire or other disaster at either , you then also need a bunch of UPS's - even here at home for my own setup I have two APC UPS's , which weren't cheap , and factor in battery replacement , which one of mine is just starting to remind me of after replacing them last around four years ago , and there's another few hundred into the black hole . I tend to just power my drives off most of the time and fire them up only when I need them .

 

[bzgnyc2]

I already have , in addition to all the FW-800 drives , FIVE G-Speed eS RAID arrays , each with 16Tb ( 4x 4Tb drives ) configured as RAID 5 so 12 Tb each ; in addition most of the FW-800 units are striped RAID arrays , but duplicated , of 4 or 8 Tb each , so somewhere well north of 120 Tb , not counting the G-speed arrays , or

I do have redundancy and have replaced individual disks before , but I'm not about to spend a vast amount of money replacing rather than just maintaining when I have .

Agree and I would be the last person to suggest throwing away working equipment. I was trying suggest shifting to future-oriented technology as the need to add or replace storage comes up rather than extend the FireWire chains further. This system is a good bridge because it expands back to FireWire like are doing but it also supports TB3.

Not quite sure I understand your total storage situation but maybe that chain of 25 could eventually be consolidated into 2x 4-bay RAIDs connected via Thunderbolt? Then such a subsystem could plug right into whatever eventually replaces this Mac Pro (which I am guessing you won't do for at least another 5 years but expect it will have to be replaced at some point and that replacement will likely not support FireWire).

 

[derekheeps]

Who knows what the future holds ? I spent a good part of today looking at options after the owner of the Mac Pro I thought I had bought said the price ( asked by the vendor and paid by me ) didn't cover the cost of all the components in the package ; I did kind of understand as there were at least two similar machines for sale around the same price with far lower spec , and another 28 core machine with half the RAM and a lower grade graphics card for around half the price ( and that one was going to be my fall back as it was at least less money ) .

However I spent the first couple of hours this morning on the phone to every mac reseller I could think of in the country just to see if anyone still had any stock left of the 2023 Silicon Tower Mac Pro - but no one has any stock anywhere , nor are there any used Silicon Mac Pros for sale anywhere I can find ; except for one rack mount server type unit which won't sit nicely in my shelving unit beside my other older Mac Pros , which I don't yet know whether I will keep alongside the new one , or whether they can be discarded .

Then , a lens I had ordered from a seller in Japan ( Pentax SMC 43mm FA Limited ) arrived , but turned out to have an autofocus fault , after emailing the seller , he agreed I could take it to a trusted repair shop here in Glasgow for an estimate to repair ; they examined it while I waited and said it would be a straightforward repair - but they can't get the parts ! So that lens will be going back .

However , while in Glasgow , I popped into the Apple Store Glasgow , where a very helpful , and sympathetic , young man who had done a lot of video editing at college and had used AVID , checked on their system in front of me , letting me see his screen , and that there were no silicon Mac Pro towers anywhere in stock in the UK . I also went into John Lewis ( a major UK department store that is a big Apple reseller , and met with the same response - lots of sympathy , the young lady there knew her stuff and said the withdrawal of the Mac Pro left a big hole in the market and was pushing some users over to Windows , who didn't want to go in that direction but were left with no other option !

Anyway , I got home an hour ago , the vendor selling the Mac Pro I originally thought I'd bought had spoken to his customer ( the owner ) who agreed to sell it to me at the original price , less the two external 4Tb SSDs that had originally been included , but with the internal drives containing the OS , which is currently Catalina .

I have ordered three PCI cards which allow Firewire compatability ( one Belkin and two Startech - both brands known to me and both stated to be mac compatible ) so I will see what happens . This gives me seven Firewire 800 outputs , so I can shorten the chains to around five drives each , and means I can just power up the ones I wish to use at any given time .

Just as I was typing this , the doorbell went and I have just received the other two Pentax lenses I had ordered : the SMC 77mm FA Limited , and the SMC 31mm FA Limited , and after a very quick check these ones seem to be good , these are lenses I had hankered after for many years , although I had already bought all five of the DA limited lenses brand new in 2014 , along with my K-3 and K-01 , when I got a very substantial tax rebate ! Being just retired has allowed me to buy a few nice toys , without spending too much of my windfall !