MP 1,1-5,1 Install 10Gb ethernet in 2010 cMP

[AfterglowMP]

Is it feasible to consider installing 10Gb/s ethernet PCI card in my MP 2010 5,1 (upgraded 6 to 12 core 3.33 ghz, High Sierra, 32gb RAM) so I can keep using it for some older apps as well as connect it to a new M1 Mac Studio as a HDD enclosure (couple of internal drives are in Raid 0)? I'd probably use internal drive in Mac Studio for my primary work of editing 4K video in Premiere and DaVinci as well.

There's the Sonnet card and there's also this Startech10gb ethernet card PCIe 10 GbE Fiber Network Card Open SFP+ - Network Adapter Cards

Thanks

 

[MarkC426]

Have a read here:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/what-are-the-options-for-10gbe-on-mac-pros.1959937/

 

[AfterglowMP]

Thanks for pointing me there. I'd read this a while ago without being any the wiser. I'm just looking for a simple fast way to network a MP 5,1 to a new Mac Studio.

One interesting new info was about the adapter that takes USB3/3.1 and converts to ethernet signal: New USB 3 to 5-GbE LAN-adapter. Qnap QNA-UC5G1T: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/qna-uc5g1t The reviews online are very poor, very low speeds apparently.

I should go back and check the Sonnet.

Why can't USB work as networking connection anyway?

 

[Thessman]

You can go this way if you need to transfer a lot of files once.

Transfer files between a Mac with Apple silicon and another Mac

On a Mac with Apple silicon, use Mac Sharing to connect to another Mac and transfer files.

support.apple.com

 

[AfterglowMP]

You can go this way if you need to transfer a lot of files once.

Transfer files between a Mac with Apple silicon and another Mac

On a Mac with Apple silicon, use Mac Sharing to connect to another Mac and transfer files.

support.apple.com

Thanks but the real goal is to set up the cMP 5,1 as a defacto hard drive enclosure to connect to one of the newer Mac Studios for video editing. I'm hoping someone will have tested something like the Sonnet 10Gb/s card that fits in the cMP's PCI slot and can send via ethernet 5-10gb/s of data to the Mac Studio's ethernet port.

 

[Thessman]

you could also use port aggregation for 2Gbps, but that probably is also not enough? or if you happen to have firewire to ethernet adapters you could go up to 3.6 Gbps.

 

[DrEGPU]

Thanks for pointing me there. I'd read this a while ago without being any the wiser. I'm just looking for a simple fast way to network a MP 5,1 to a new Mac Studio.

One interesting new info was about the adapter that takes USB3/3.1 and converts to ethernet signal: New USB 3 to 5-GbE LAN-adapter. Qnap QNA-UC5G1T: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/qna-uc5g1t The reviews online are very poor, very low speeds apparently.

I should go back and check the Sonnet.

Why can't USB work as networking connection anyway?

It mainly has to do with the way USB works. Basically a “real” nic won’t have a usb controller/bus in between it and the rest of the system.

 

[MediaGary]

Longtime lurker, first time poster here!

I have a 2010 cMP 12-core 3.33, 96GB in which I've run a 10GbE SolarFlare SFN5122F PCIe (with fiber SFP+) from HiSierra through Catalina. I had also used an Aquantia AQN107 10Gbase-T PCIe card that was plug-n-play up through Catalina.

Then, things soured in Big Sur, when the Aquantia card was deprecated by Apple. I used a flashed Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt card in slot-4 and tried the QNAP QNA=T310G1S and the Sonnet Solo10G SFP+. I had returned the QNAP because I was disappointed in the performance (~5Gbps) compared to how well the SolarFlare card worked (~8Gbps). After trying the Sonnet product (~6Gbps) I returned it because it didn't seem like much of a value, and certainly physically felt hotter than the QNAP. [My laser thermometer was lost at the time, so I don't have numbers. I have since found it.]. The Sonnet got returned too.

I briefly tested the 10GbE connection of the AKiTio Thunder3 Dock Pro in the M1 Max Studio that I had for about a month, and it seemed to offer ~7Gbps performance in informal testing. [The M1 Max Studio got returned because (long story) it would not properly wake from sleep, probably because of the Sabrent external boot drive. Yay, Costco!] Back to Ethernet issues I am awaiting another flashed Alpine Ridge card, and will use the AKiTio Dock w/10GbE until the Apple M2 product line has something I want.

Take note, that when using the 2010 cMP as an SMB server, its performance never gets better than about 200MByte/s (<2Gbps) even directly presenting a shared NVMe drive on the network, whereas, as an SMB client, it'll do ~8Gbps. I'm not sure why. Because of that, and power consumption, I use old HP Z220 convertible mini-towers running Win10 Pro as the "servers" on the network. They all have the SolarFlare SFN5122F cards and are quite stable. Two of them have motherboard RAID, and the third has SAS drives with an Areca RAID controller.

Whew! Hope that helps.

 

[AfterglowMP]

Longtime lurker, first time poster here!

I have a 2010 cMP 12-core 3.33, 96GB in which I've run a 10GbE SolarFlare SFN5122F PCIe (with fiber SFP+) from HiSierra through Catalina. I had also used an Aquantia AQN107 10Gbase-T PCIe card that was plug-n-play up through Catalina.

Then, things soured in Big Sur, when the Aquantia card was deprecated by Apple. I used a flashed Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt card in slot-4 and tried the QNAP QNA=T310G1S and the Sonnet Solo10G SFP+. I had returned the QNAP because I was disappointed in the performance (~5Gbps) compared to how well the SolarFlare card worked (~8Gbps). After trying the Sonnet product (~6Gbps) I returned it because it didn't seem like much of a value, and certainly physically felt hotter than the QNAP. [My laser thermometer was lost at the time, so I don't have numbers. I have since found it.]. The Sonnet got returned too.

I briefly tested the 10GbE connection of the AKiTio Thunder3 Dock Pro in the M1 Max Studio that I had for about a month, and it seemed to offer ~7Gbps performance in informal testing. [The M1 Max Studio got returned because (long story) it would not properly wake from sleep, probably because of the Sabrent external boot drive. Yay, Costco!] Back to Ethernet issues I am awaiting another flashed Alpine Ridge card, and will use the AKiTio Dock w/10GbE until the Apple M2 product line has something I want.

Take note, that when using the 2010 cMP as an SMB server, its performance never gets better than about 200MByte/s (<2Gbps) even directly presenting a shared NVMe drive on the network, whereas, as an SMB client, it'll do ~8Gbps. I'm not sure why. Because of that, and power consumption, I use old HP Z220 convertible mini-towers running Win10 Pro as the "servers" on the network. They all have the SolarFlare SFN5122F cards and are quite stable. Two of them have motherboard RAID, and the third has SAS drives with an Areca RAID controller.

Whew! Hope that helps.

Wow, good on yer for posting not lurking.

When you talk about SMB Server and SMB Client, is the server sending info out from MP to Mac Studio while the client is taking it in?

I see the AKiTio Thunder3 Dock Pro has esata which I have a PCI card for in the cMP. Is this a potential way to connect the 2010 MP with the Mac Studio? That is, esata out of 2010 Mac Pro to Akitio, then ethernet from Akitio to Mac Studio with speeds of 5gb/s plus?

I apologise but I really don't have much understanding of networking issues.

Thanks

 

[MediaGary]

When you talk about SMB Server and SMB Client, is the server sending info out from MP to Mac Studio while the client is taking it in?

Data moves bi-directionally, but the Server is presenting the disk drive onto the network as a 'network share'. So, my finding was that when the cMP was reading/writing to drives in my Win10-based servers, the data rates were good/acceptable, but when the cMP was acting as the sharing device, putting its drives on the network, data rates to/from the Win10 client machines were poor.

I never tried my Mac Studio talking to the cMP because the plan was to have the Mac Studio replace the cMP. The new plan is to pop an RX 6800 into the cMP and wait.

 

[kinless]

Thanks but the real goal is to set up the cMP 5,1 as a defacto hard drive enclosure to connect to one of the newer Mac Studios for video editing. I'm hoping someone will have tested something like the Sonnet 10Gb/s card that fits in the cMP's PCI slot and can send via ethernet 5-10gb/s of data to the Mac Studio's ethernet port.

Just installed Sonnet's Solo 10G PCIe Card in my 5,1 (running High Sierra 10.13.6) last week. Turned on the machine and it worked right out of the box. House is wired with Cat 5e and I also just installed a new 8-port 2.5Gb switch for faster networking. The System Report network type now shows 2500Base-T so looks like I'm in business. I can't speak to 5 or 10Gb connections at the moment but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Yeah the Sonnet is more expensive than most others but for the plug-and-play without having to deal with drivers is worth it to me.

 

[AfterglowMP]

Just installed Sonnet's Solo 10G PCIe Card in my 5,1 (running High Sierra 10.13.6) last week. Turned on the machine and it worked right out of the box. House is wired with Cat 5e and I also just installed a new 8-port 2.5Gb switch for faster networking. The System Report network type now shows 2500Base-T so looks like I'm in business. I can't speak to 5 or 10Gb connections at the moment but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Yeah the Sonnet is more expensive than most others but for the plug-and-play without having to deal with drivers is worth it to me.

Would it allow networking between my MP 5,1 and a new Mac Studio ethernet port?

 

[kinless]

Would it allow networking between my MP 5,1 and a new Mac Studio ethernet port?

I don't see why not. The ethernet port, whether built-in or PCIe, is just a conduit. I'm able to tap in to my MacBook Pro through my home network using the Sonnet. If you want to plug-in directly from Mac to Mac, that is also possible to do.