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Mac mini (late 2014) 1.0 TB SSD: how many PCIe lanes?
- Thread starter mikeboss
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The SSD in the mini is using 2x PCI-e, but if somebody were to take it out and test it in a Mac Pro, I wonder if it would use 4x then?
I wonder if the SSD itself is slower, or if it's just a limitation from the chipset in the mini...
I wonder if the SSD itself is slower, or if it's just a limitation from the chipset in the mini...
Good question. I think it could be a limitation of the mini, and would work at 4x speeds. I do have both a FD-enabled Late 2014 mini and a Late 2013, but not the inclination to take the mini apart to test such a theory.
I took a 1TB PCIe SSD out of my 2014 mini (3.0 i7/16GB/1TB) and stuck it into one of my nMPs.
Guess what. It operated at 4 lanes.
You'll find the 1TB doesn't fit in the Macbook Air. It's wider than the 512GB. Well, it can fit in the 13" if you hack apart some of the plastic on the battery chassis.
Nope, the MacBook Air isn't wide enough, because of the tapering end.
However, it'll work at 4 lanes on 13" and 15" rMBPs. They're wide enough because they don't have a tapering end.
I have this computer with sixteen gigs of ram and I love it. It was expensive, but I do a lot of photo work with large files from my Canon 6D and my Mini is blazing fast. 44,000 pictures in iPhoto open in the blink of an eye. I don't regret the purchase at all.
Glad to hear that as my Mac Mini with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD is arriving this week. Coming from a mid-2007 iMac I'm hoping to notice a a big difference. It was really slow the last few years and after installing Yosemite the hard drive died.
Bump.
2015 rMBP SSDs are starting to surface on ebay. The ones with jaw dropping benchmarks.
Those are supposedly based on samsung sm951, a pcie 3.0 ssd. (vs the xp941 pcie 2.0 of 2013-2014 Macs)
Would they work in 3.0 mode on the late 2014 Mini? Are the haswell Mini pcie lanes supposed to be 3.0 lanes?
Two 3.0 lanes would still be better than two 2.0 lanes. Hell, they'd be as fast as four 2.0 lanes.
2015 rMBP SSDs are starting to surface on ebay. The ones with jaw dropping benchmarks.
Those are supposedly based on samsung sm951, a pcie 3.0 ssd. (vs the xp941 pcie 2.0 of 2013-2014 Macs)
Would they work in 3.0 mode on the late 2014 Mini? Are the haswell Mini pcie lanes supposed to be 3.0 lanes?
Two 3.0 lanes would still be better than two 2.0 lanes. Hell, they'd be as fast as four 2.0 lanes.
All Haswell Minis only have 2 PCIe lanes, just like the Haswell iMacs. Only rMBPs have 4 lanes (both Haswell and Broadwell. Late-2013 and mid-2014 Haswells have 4 lanes, but only if there's a 1TB SSD inside).
The iMacs and Minis only have 2 lanes enabled, because the other two lanes are taken by two extra USB ports and an Ethernet port.
If we look at the 2015 15" rMPB
- it's still Haswell
- or, to be even more specific, it's still got the same chipset, PCH, CPU, whatever as the 2014 model
But it's now powered by a pcie3.0 4x ssd (sm951) instead of a pcie2.0 4x ssd (xp941).
If you look at benchmarks here, they are always equal or better than the Broadwell 2015 13" rMBP (which indeed is 3.0, being the latest and greatest Broadwell platform and all):
http://barefeats.com/rmbp15.html
And in one test it goes just above the 2000MB/s absolute limit for 4 pcie2.0 lanes.
We can pretty confidently say it's working in pcie3.0 mode.
So, one could infer that
- every Haswell mac ever was already pcie3.0 capable, from the get go (since no changes were made from 2014 to 2015 haswell 15" rMBP, yet the 2015 works in 3.0 mode)
- but it FELL BACK to 2.0 speeds because the 2013-2014 SSD itself (xp941) was NOT a 3.0 spec pcie ssd
So, if all the above is right, there's an added value in buying a 2015 SSD (sm951) for 2013-2014 Macs. Especially if you're limited to 2 lanes like on the mini, because:
two lanes at 3.0 speed are nearly TWICE as fast as two lanes at 2.0 speed
- it's still Haswell
- or, to be even more specific, it's still got the same chipset, PCH, CPU, whatever as the 2014 model
But it's now powered by a pcie3.0 4x ssd (sm951) instead of a pcie2.0 4x ssd (xp941).
If you look at benchmarks here, they are always equal or better than the Broadwell 2015 13" rMBP (which indeed is 3.0, being the latest and greatest Broadwell platform and all):
http://barefeats.com/rmbp15.html
And in one test it goes just above the 2000MB/s absolute limit for 4 pcie2.0 lanes.
We can pretty confidently say it's working in pcie3.0 mode.
So, one could infer that
- every Haswell mac ever was already pcie3.0 capable, from the get go (since no changes were made from 2014 to 2015 haswell 15" rMBP, yet the 2015 works in 3.0 mode)
- but it FELL BACK to 2.0 speeds because the 2013-2014 SSD itself (xp941) was NOT a 3.0 spec pcie ssd
So, if all the above is right, there's an added value in buying a 2015 SSD (sm951) for 2013-2014 Macs. Especially if you're limited to 2 lanes like on the mini, because:
two lanes at 3.0 speed are nearly TWICE as fast as two lanes at 2.0 speed
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So this ssd is under the SATA controller and not under the NVMExpress is that right? Apparently if you install a 970 evo (using an adapter) it will appear under NVMExpress but also 2 lanes at 5GT/s ... it doesn’t perform much better.
I expected 4 lanes and it to hit 1 GB/s but this is the max i'm getting on my Mac mini 2014 1TB ssd blade. (Don't know how many lanes it has)
It does state link width 2x (maybe that indicates how many lanes?)
