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Kedbear

macrumors member
Dec 15, 2019
79
55
No, I suggest leaving the shroud ON but simply take off the front plate near the fan. It's held on with a few screws. That keeps the heatsinks on the cards and PLX switch, but allows air to flow through the shroud from the Mac Pro's fans. Make sense?

EDIT: See this post I made earlier for a picture of the shroud removed, showing the plate on the end that's held in with some screws. Remove that plate.

Hi. Yes this is what i meant when i said 'take the front of the shroud off' but thanks for clarifying, i'll try the same technique!
 

Virtuoso

macrumors regular
Feb 21, 2008
172
48
Seattle
OK, they may be PCI 4, but they appear to be slower than the Samsung EVO Plus drives. It's not just the bus speed...card design, etc. matters a lot. With my HighPoint card I'm getting 12GB/s with four Samsung 970 EVO Plus cards in RAID 0, using the HighPoint software and APFS.
They were very fast individually on the PC, where I was getting close to the advertised max of 5GB/s - I wonder if there's anything I can do to tune it better? I used the default HighPoint values for block/stripe size.
 

Adult80HD

macrumors 6502a
Nov 19, 2019
701
837
They were very fast individually on the PC, where I was getting close to the advertised max of 5GB/s - I wonder if there's anything I can do to tune it better? I used the default HighPoint values for block/stripe size.

I presume they were in a PCIe 4 setup there? There could be a lot of things going on, including incompatibility with the PLX switch on the HighPoint card, maybe some thermal throttling? What do the drive temps look like?
 

Virtuoso

macrumors regular
Feb 21, 2008
172
48
Seattle
I presume they were in a PCIe 4 setup there? There could be a lot of things going on, including incompatibility with the PLX switch on the HighPoint card, maybe some thermal throttling? What do the drive temps look like?
With the fan running, 89F/32C so not very high. I didn't have any throttling issues on the PC and they didn't have any additional cooling there either. Maybe I'll swap them back to the PC and get some Samsungs instead.
 

Virtuoso

macrumors regular
Feb 21, 2008
172
48
Seattle
Was it an AMD-based PC with PCI-E 4? Because at PCI-E 3, there's no way you were getting single-disk performance at 5GB/sec.
Yes - PCIe 4.0, which is why I bought those specific drives. I'm quite happy with 8GB/s for the write speed, but I wonder why the read is 6.6GB/s with 3 drives when @Adult80HD is getting 12GB/s with 4?
 

Adult80HD

macrumors 6502a
Nov 19, 2019
701
837
Yes - PCIe 4.0, which is why I bought those specific drives. I'm quite happy with 8GB/s for the write speed, but I wonder why the read is 6.6GB/s with 3 drives when @Adult80HD is getting 12GB/s with 4?

The Samsung drives are fast. In fact I found an article comparing them to a list of PCIe 4 drives and it outperformed most of them on many of the tests. As with most things, there's a lot more to performance than one simple number like bus speed.

 

flowrider

macrumors 604
Nov 23, 2012
7,321
3,003
I bought a 7103 from Amazon. They had an open box at a good price. I'm running two Samsung 970 pros, a 970 Evo and an SM951. I don't plan on raiding them. Speeds are about what they were with my I/O Crest card, but now I have an MT PCI slot. I guess the I/O Crest us up for sale if any one is interested. I think I'll keep my Wings PX1.
 

avatar1349

macrumors member
Feb 25, 2009
59
14
Netherlands
You can't have more than around 5900MB/s on a Mac Pro 5,1 with 4 SSDs, you are limited to PCIe 2.0 x16 real world speeds.

You can get around 12000MB/s with 4 SSDs on a PCIe 3.0 x16 system.



Yes, Amfeltec Squid or HighPoint SSD7101A.
Bom Dia tsialex

Just got and installed the HighPoint SSD7101A-1 and quiet impressed with the results.No racing fan (don't even hear it) and the temp of the NVMe's a max of 36° . read/write (for me) above expectations
Not using the NVMe's for intense video editing
Will add 2x 970 EVO Plus next month

Obrigado tsialex, for your continues info and experience regarding the cMac Pro
 

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tsialex

Contributor
Jun 13, 2016
13,454
13,601
Bom Dia tsialex

Just got and installed the HighPoint SSD7101A-1 and quiet impressed with the results.No racing fan (don't even hear it) and the temp of the NVMe's a max of 36° . read/write (for me) above expectations
Not using the NVMe's for intense video editing
Will add 2x 970 EVO Plus next month

Obrigado tsialex, for your continues info and experience regarding the cMac Pro
Nice to read that everything went fine. ?

Did you got the V2.00 PCB? two or three fan connector, connected to the 2-pin or 3-pin header? New firmware?

I'm trying to find anything that differentiate the new firmware cards to the old ones, nothing yet.
 

avatar1349

macrumors member
Feb 25, 2009
59
14
Netherlands
Nice to read that everything went fine. ?

Did you got the V2.00 PCB? two or three fan connector, connected to the 2-pin or 3-pin header? New firmware?

I'm trying to find anything that differentiate the new firmware cards to the old ones, nothing yet.
No, I'm afraid not; its still v1.00, unles the doc is old. I noticed that in this card the PCIe switch is de-lidded. Haven't checked out the HighPoint website yet for firmware updates, but I got the GUI HighPoint install file, gonna install that and see if it tells me anything.
This is the readme file referring to my card, so the firmware version info might not be correct
 

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tsialex

Contributor
Jun 13, 2016
13,454
13,601
No, I'm afraid not; its still v1.00, unles the doc is old. I noticed that in this card the PCIe switch is de-lidded. Haven't checked out the HighPoint website yet for firmware updates, but I got the GUI HighPoint install file, gonna install that and see if it tells me anything.
This is the readme file referring to my card, so the firmware version info might not be correct
PCB version is easy to check:
s-l1600-jpg.879009
 
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tsialex

Contributor
Jun 13, 2016
13,454
13,601
Ok tsialex, I'll check that out later; got the card installed and just wanna play around with it a bit ... lol But I'll make some close-ups tomorrow from the card so you get an idea ... lol
Check what the fan type is and where it's connected to:

SSD7101A-1 v2.00 fan.jpg
 
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avatar1349

macrumors member
Feb 25, 2009
59
14
Netherlands
Thx! It's the first time I saw a PLX switch without the lid. Your card seems rather new, maybe you already have the new firmware?
Where would I get a possible new firmware? On the HighPoint site?
This is the box it came in it
was send thru UPS from Germany
 

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tsialex

Contributor
Jun 13, 2016
13,454
13,601
Where would I get a possible new firmware? On the HighPoint site?
This is the box it came in it
was send thru UPS from Germany
HighPoint asks for you to send the card back to them, their explanation is that they can only do the firmware upgrade with their lab. Really strange, but it's what HighPoint is doing.
 

bsbeamer

macrumors 601
Sep 19, 2012
4,313
2,713
HighPoint asks for you to send the card back to them, their explanation is that they can only do the firmware upgrade with their lab. Really strange, but it's what HighPoint is doing.

It was the same thing when Apricorn was still upgrading the firmware of Velocity Solo x2 and Duo x2 cards. Update was free for the user, just needed to ship them the card(s). Believe the firmware update could not actually be performed with macOS (easily) and therefore they wanted to do it themselves since they are the ones who had to support it.

Easy way around all of this for HighPoint would be to just label the cards being sold the right way, but that’s clearly asking too much.
 

avatar1349

macrumors member
Feb 25, 2009
59
14
Netherlands
HighPoint asks for you to send the card back to them, their explanation is that they can only do the firmware upgrade with their lab. Really strange, but it's what HighPoint is doing.
To say the least; they probably want to keep the firmware in their "own ball park" Sounds a bit paranoid ... lol. btw, did a speedtest with the 970 EVO Plus and the values are slightly higer then with 970 Pro. I thought that, because the 970 Pro is MLC, that would be higher?
[automerge]1579215829[/automerge]
 

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avatar1349

macrumors member
Feb 25, 2009
59
14
Netherlands
HighPoint asks for you to send the card back to them, their explanation is that they can only do the firmware upgrade with their lab. Really strange, but it's what HighPoint is doing.
tsialex, Just got 1 more question: Using the HighPoint NVME Manager software the data under "System Report/NVMExpress dissapears, cuz HighPoint installs a preboot part. Is it advise-able to use the highpoint software or is it just a cosmetic thing?
 

tsialex

Contributor
Jun 13, 2016
13,454
13,601
tsialex, Just got 1 more question: Using the HighPoint NVME Manager software the data under "System Report/NVMExpress dissapears, cuz HighPoint installs a preboot part. Is it advise-able to use the highpoint software or is it just a cosmetic thing?
If you gonna use RAID, HPT driver and RAID works better than AppleRAID. If not, no need to use it at all.
 

Kedbear

macrumors member
Dec 15, 2019
79
55
If you gonna use RAID, HPT driver and RAID works better than AppleRAID. If not, no need to use it at all.

I've just received a new 7101a. pcb2, 3 pin fan and firmware flashed. I'm on a mac pro 2019. I'm using 4x 2tb samsung 970 evo plus, they have the latest firmware. I formatted all the cards in mac os to apfs to check they were all ok. Then via highpoint software i formatted to RAID 0 8TB but afterwards it did not show up on the mac desktop, so i went into disk utility and formatted to APFS. After this it showed up. I get write speeds around 7000MB/s and read speeds around 8500MB/s. Does this sound correct? Am i now using the Apple raid setup or am i still using the highpoint raid setup? Thanks
 

jasonmvp

macrumors 6502
Jun 15, 2015
422
345
Northern VA
Then via highpoint software i formatted to RAID 0 8TB but afterwards it did not show up on the mac desktop, so i went into disk utility and formatted to APFS. After this it showed up. I get write speeds around 7000MB/s and read speeds around 8500MB/s. Does this sound correct? Am i now using the Apple raid setup or am i still using the highpoint raid setup?

The appropriate steps once you have the HighPoint drivers installed:
  1. Configure the RAID volume in the HighPoint web-based utility. Once this is done, MacOS will no longer see the four drives, it will only see one: the 8TB volume.
  2. Open Disk Utility to put a filesystem on the new volume. This doesn't do any sort of RAID work with the device, it just puts a filesystem on the volume you created with the HighPoint controller.
  3. Use it.
When completed, you'll be using the HighPoint hardware RAID not Apple's software RAID. And it sounds like that's what you did. The speeds are bit slower than I would expect; did you put an encrypted APFS filesystem on the volume? Or a standard, unencrypted one?
 
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