If I build a Mac Pro 2019 with two Apple 1TB SSDs, will they mount as two separate 1TB discs or as a single 2TB hard disc?
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MP All Models Mac Pro 2019 onboard SSDs question
- Thread starter Alain Briot
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Thank you. If I go with the Promise Pegasus internal enclosure and 8GB disk will it mount as a separate hard disc ?
Also, the Promise Pegasus internal enclosure accepts two 3.5-inchSATA hard drives. Do they both have to be 8GB or can I add a 12GB to the built in 8GB?
Finally, If I add a second hard drive to the Pegasus enclosure, will they mount as a single hard disc or as two separate Hard discs?
Also, the Promise Pegasus internal enclosure accepts two 3.5-inchSATA hard drives. Do they both have to be 8GB or can I add a 12GB to the built in 8GB?
Finally, If I add a second hard drive to the Pegasus enclosure, will they mount as a single hard disc or as two separate Hard discs?
Yes.
You can put whatever capacity drive you want in there. Having two different sized drives will limit what you can do with them from a redundancy perspective, of course. But if you want them to be two independent drives, then sure. It'll work fine.
Thank you. Much appreciated. What I want is a 20TB internal hard disc. Can I set up the Pegasus enclosure with an 8TB and a 12TB drive so that the two disks show up as a single 20TB disk?
How are you going to "build" this?
The onboard SSD isn't an actual SSD. The T2 chip contains the SSD controller (and encryption), and the "SSD" cards are dumb FLASH cards with little logic.
If you order the 2019 with a 2TB drive, it will have two 1TB FLASH cards - which the T2 will merge into a 2TB drive.
You can't buy an NVMe SSD and add it to the stock 1TB (which will actually be two 512GB cards).
Last I checked, Apple's Disk Utility supported JBOD. That should allow you to concatenate the 8TB and 12TB drives together into a 20TB volume. But you won't have any redundancy with it at all.
What do you mean by redundancy?
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I would build it with a 1TB SSD to use as the Startup disk and the Pegasus enclosure with 8TB and 12TB disks to use as data storage.
Yes.... Use Disk Utility option 3 in the attached screen shot....
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You mean "build" as in "build to order", OK.
Redundancy uses RAID-1 to keep a copy of each file on each disk - if one disk fails, all the files are safe on the surviving disk.
Consider getting two 12 TB disks - then you can stripe them (RAID-0) for better performance with large transfers.
Thank you. I understand redundancy now
Getting two Hard discs of the same size is a great idea. It would make sense to get two 8GB disks since the pegasus enclosure comes with an 8GB disk installed in it by Apple.[automerge]1577914294[/automerge]
Thank you for the screenshot. Would the two hard disk drives have to be formatted with APFF? I read that using APFF on hard disk drives is not recommended?
Slightly different question. What happens if I put a SSD boot drive on a PCIe in the new Mac Pro? It’s Mojave. I’m getting the new Mac tomorrow. My current 5,1 uses this as its application and OS drive. I’m assuming it won’t boot because it’s not Catalina. Also it’s probably the wrong type of SSD? I’m not clear on the various types.
This SSD card will work in the Mac Pro 2019. It comes without an SSD so you can add your own SSDs on it: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m2-4x4-pcie-card.html
There are a lot better disks around than the 8TB one that comes with the J2i. Personally, I'd put the 8TB on eBay (lots of people are looking for a second 8TB) and put a pair of 12 TB Seagate Exos X14 drives in it. Or, if 16TB is enough, get a pair of Exos 16TB drives and run them in RAID-1 to protect from a drive failure.Thank you. I understand redundancy now
My X14 12TB drives get about 245 MB/s on sequential read/write. In a RAID-0 stripe, that would be about 490 MB/s sequential.
FWIW, my current sweet spot for bulk disk storage is eight 12TB Exos drives in RAID-6 (72TB usable), on a hardware RAID controller with battery backup for the 2 GiB cache, and using 48 Gbps SAS/SATA links to external bays.
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Thank you! I take it this won’t work? Aquacomputer KryoM.2 Evo PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter for M.2 NGFF PCIe SSD, M-Key with Passive Heatsink https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0742LW4WB/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_yXsdEbHEHPRD0
Good idea about putting the 8GB on eBay.
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Which drive enclosure and RAID controller do you use ?
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This will work just fine with a single ssd blade.
It's also one of the recommended PCIe adapters here.
PCIe SSDs - NVMe & AHCI
This is a general info thread for blade SSDs that can be used in the Mac Pro. This is a WikiPost so anyone with the proper credentials may edit it. NVMe SSDs can be used as a boot drive in the MP5,1 and MP6,1 with the latest firmware installed (beginning with version 140.0.0.0.0 for MP5,1 and...
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Thank you. Good to know! But it will not boot in Mojave? I suppose I can upgrade it to Catalina and it would boot fine. But I don’t want to particularly. Things are working on it now. I’m a little confused when people say you can’t go earlier than the OS the computer came with.
Mojave won't boot with a 2019 Mac Pro. Official support for MP7,1 starts with 10.15.1. You can't even boot 10.15.0 with a 2019 Mac Pro.
Not with your SSD/M.2 adapter, will be a lot slower than the T2 storage.
For my home workstations, I use Broadcom MegaRAID SAS 93xx 12 Gbps SAS/SATA RAID controllers (https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/raid-controllers/). Note that MegaRAID was originally an LSI brand, but Avago bought LSI, then the Avago name was changed to Broadcom - but "MegaRAID" stayed the same.
For enclosures at home, I use simple Sans Digital enclosures (e.g. http://www.sansdigital.com/tr8x12g.html ) which connect eight SAS/SATA hard drives to eight SAS/SATA lanes from the controller. SAS/SATA support switched topologies, so that hundreds of drives could be daisy chained from each connection (and obviously sharing bandwidth).
I should start my own thread. Apologies for going of topic on your thread Alain! I just tok possession of the Mac Pro 2019. It'd be very convenient - of course - to just take some of the SSDs in my older 5,1 bays. Does anyone know whether the Samsung 860 is compatible? Assuming it's not? Apple requires I purchase different SSD?