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Mac Pro, NVME , and windows 10
- Thread starter Cpoor
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I don't know conclusively, but I'd say no. The reason an NVMe drive isn't viable as a macOS boot option is that the Mac Pro EFI can't initialise it at boot, as it can't speak to the NVMe drive.
There are NVMe drivers floating around can enable the drive to work, but only after booting is complete. This is because the 3rd-party drivers are only loaded later in the boot process.
Presumably, similar to the project to boot from a PCIe USB3 adapter, drivers could theoretically be loaded Hackintosh-style in an initial bootloader pre-macOS, but I don't know anyone who's tested this. Also I guess this could allow for lower-level ZFS support (a la O3X), but again, this hasn't been documented here to the best of my knowledge.
However, I'm running Windows 10 on a MacPro5,1 on an AHCI SM951 just fine, albeit after some hurdles.
There are NVMe drivers floating around can enable the drive to work, but only after booting is complete. This is because the 3rd-party drivers are only loaded later in the boot process.
Presumably, similar to the project to boot from a PCIe USB3 adapter, drivers could theoretically be loaded Hackintosh-style in an initial bootloader pre-macOS, but I don't know anyone who's tested this. Also I guess this could allow for lower-level ZFS support (a la O3X), but again, this hasn't been documented here to the best of my knowledge.
However, I'm running Windows 10 on a MacPro5,1 on an AHCI SM951 just fine, albeit after some hurdles.
Also, note that in many cases an NVMe drive is not much faster than the PCIe AHCI version of the same drive.
NVMe's claim to fame is to be able to more efficiently deal with huge numbers of parallel IOs. Reading or writing a single file, no matter how large, just doesn't play to that strength.
