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MacPro 3,1 apricorn SSD TRIM FUSION

rotarypower101

rotarypower101

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 28, 2007
264
3
Portland Oregon
I could probably just leave the title as it is a succinct expression of what I want to do.

Is this OK?
Are there any hangups to doing this?

This is for a MacPro 3.1 early 2008, setting it up to installing Mavericks when released.

I will be fusioning a SSD (samsung 840?!?) to a seagate 4TB

TRIM will still be OK?

Still able to Boot from this under these parameters?

Is there a thread that covers these factors and explains the dos/dont’s and pitfalls?


What is the difference between the:
Apricorn Velocity Solo VEL-SOLO-X1
And the
Apricorn Velocity Solo VEL-SOLO-X2

The MP 3,1 has “two PCIe x4 expansion slots and two PCIe 2.0 x16 expansion slots (in the default configuration one PCIe 2.0 x16 slot is occupied by the graphics card).”

Will it be beneficial to make sure and get the X2 under this scenario?


Any good threads on the topic to lead me in the correct direction?
 
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I have no idea how the Apricorn cards will perform as part of a Fusion drive, but differences between them are here:
 

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The differences are:

x1 is a PCIe I card and will run at SATAII speeds
x1 Boots in all Mac Pros

x2 is a PCIe II and will run at full SATAIII speeds
x2 only boots 3,1 and up Mac Pros

However, in a 3,1 machine, the x2 needs to be installed in either slot 3 or slot4. Slots 1 & 2 are only run at PCIe speed I.

Don't know the answer to your first question, even if something like that is feasible, why would you want to do it?

Lou
 
flowrider said:
Don't know the answer to your first question, even if something like that is feasible, why would you want to do it?

Lou
Click to expand...

The reason I would like to do a fusion drive (perhaps ignorant to my options that could be a better solution) I keep my iTunes music/files in the iTunes Media folder letting iTunes organize and sort the music files as it deems necessary.

This MacPro is used as a file sever and hub for many many iOS devices TV ipods iPhones as well as personal computers storage for large files.

I only have a 64GB SSD for the OS, the music library alone far exceeds this storage, and so I must have a mechanical HD store the bulk iTunes files on a secondary mechanical drive that is logically mapped back to the OS drive.

For no other great reasons than I dislike the idea of the OS being linked all over the place for all the large files, as well as there being two distinct drives for the OS, it seemed logical to me to let the OS pick up and handle this oddity that exists in my system...




Would there be some logical reason to avoid this seemingly perfect solution to the issue I presented?

Is there some downside to fusion drive I have not considered?
 
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pastrychef said:
You have it reversed. The Velocity X2 card should be in either slot 1 or 2. Slot 1 is the double wide slot.
Click to expand...

Mr. Doughnut - You are RIGHT. I don't usually make mistakes like that, my face is a deep shade of Crimson:eek:

Lou
 
Scouring around for information, I still dont see anything explicitly confirming that it is OK to Fusion a SSD and mechanical HD through this apricorn card.

Is there any issue with fusion drive being as this card is accessed through the PCIe slot?


Does anyone know if fusion drive will work properly under these conditions?


The best thread I found on the apricorn was this:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1418445/
 
Why go Fusion?

If you really want to protect the files on your server, it is probably best you simply put in a Crucial or Samsung SSD drive on Bay 1 as a boot drive, a bootable hard disk on Bay 2 which should serve as a clone of Bay 1 (use Carbon Copy Cloner on a schedule) and then you can stick two 4TB hard drives on Bay 3 and Bay 4 of your MacPro. I would probably write to the hard drive on bay 3 and then clone it on bay 4 nightly. It is highly unlikely you will ever lose all your data (perhaps a day's worth at the most if you back up your data on a nightly schedule). Pretty cheap route I think (about $600 for a 1 TB SSD drive, less than $200 per hard drive for Bay 2, 3, and 4), and you will have a rock solid server. The Apricorn velocity route is novel, and quite interesting, but you are not running an enterprise server, and at about 250 Mb/s transfer speed you can achieve by inserting a SSD on a standard drive bay, I doubt you will ever notice the difference between an Apricorn set up vs. a standard drive bay setup. Also, the idea of a fusion drive bothers me. You now have two instead of one point of failure. The failure of the hard drive of the SSD portion will render your whole set up useless.

Anyhoo, my two cents, from someone who has played and tweaked with a MP 3,1 for the last five years.....

MP 3,1
2.8 octocore
16gb ram
Eight 1 TB Crucial SSD's in RAID 1+0 setup
Eight 3 TB Seagate barracudas in RAID 1+0 setup
NVIDIA Titan overclocked 6gb card
 
Thank you for the concern, I think I have the backup and redundancy of my systems taken care of, in triplicate on truly important data.

The fusion drive is not for backup purposes, but rather simplification of logical drives, as well as the happy side effect of having a extra native 3.5 bay free up via the PCIe card.

I have been running a SATAII SSD in bay 1 for some time, but looking to see if i can increase "performance" or rather feel of the system.

The idea and exercise here was to push the snappiness, smoothness and user experience, for lack of a better phrase, closer to the levels of the newest machines while this machine is still capable of doing so.

Not that this machine is a slouch, but I suspect this will be the last real thing to make this machine feel relevant.


I think I have many of the performance upgrades for smooth system performance, but I still get odd system hangs and slowness in what I would consider simple tasks.

For example when I browse, save, manage safari bookmarks, I constantly get beachballs and hangs in safari.

Granted I have a lot of bookmarks and folder structures...but my iPhone has these copied to it, and it has no issues managing these tasks of the exact structure.
 
Does the fusion drive system decrease the performance of the SSD in any way, and if so any speculation on if/how much of a hit the performance is seen from blending a mechanical drive to a SSD?

I am sure if there is a performance hit, for me it would probably be worth the simplification it affords.

Under my assumption why would there even be a noticeable performance hit? It would seem to be just backend management of what I currently run;a SSD OS, with the bulk data mapped to a mechanical drive, but done in such a way as to increase the usability of the system via optimizations.
 
SSD in MAC PRO 3,1

I bought on ebay 2 Bay SSD SATA III PCIe 2.0 Controller Upgrade kit For Apple Mac Pro 1,1-5,1. Installed in first PCI slot. Used two Samsung 840 Pro's 248G in RAID 0. In this setup. Result: All for bays are with HHD-s, as PCI card is with SSD-s bootable. No wires, mess as ssd-s attaches on the card. Added USB3 card and 16G of RAM. Recommend to all.

Gman
 
rotarypower101 said:
I could probably just leave the title as it is a succinct expression of what I want to do.

Is this OK?
Are there any hangups to doing this?

This is for a MacPro 3.1 early 2008, setting it up to installing Mavericks when released.

I will be fusioning a SSD (samsung 840?!?) to a seagate 4TB

TRIM will still be OK?

Still able to Boot from this under these parameters?
Click to expand...

I have a Mac Pro 5,1, Apricorn Velocity X1 card, Samsung 830, and one terabyte a HDD. The drives are set up together as a Fusion drive, which I am using as my boot drive. I am running 10.8.5, with trim turned on via Trim Enabler. Everything has worked fine so far, although I am using a time machine backup just to be sure.
 
lssmit02 said:
I have a Mac Pro 5,1, Apricorn Velocity X1 card, Samsung 830, and one terabyte a HDD. The drives are set up together as a Fusion drive, which I am using as my boot drive. I am running 10.8.5, with trim turned on via Trim Enabler. Everything has worked fine so far, although I am using a time machine backup just to be sure.
Click to expand...

Perfect!
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I couldn't see any reason why it wouldn't, but why not ask first, and utilize the resources available to find out.

Thanks again!
:)
 
Mavericks install refused on Apricorn Velocity Solo x2

I have had a Apricorn Velocity Solo x2 - Performance SSD Upgrade Kit Desktop since March 2013 with 256GB Samsung SSD and was very happy with it until today.
Mavericks refuses to install on it directly.
I may consider doing a CCC copy SSD back to hard drive, then install on hard drive and then CCC back to SSD, but that looks link a long route.
 
TRIM is the OS dependent version of garbage collection. It is more efficient because the operating system knows when the system is idle and can zap all the "dirty" sectors at once.

However all SSD's made in the last 3 years or so have internal garbage collection that runs refardless of the operating system. It's slower because it doesn't want to affect performance and has no idea when the system is being used. But it will do the same thing as TRIM over time.

This is why people were able to run SSD's in hardware RAID0 for several years now with no support for TRIM, yet the drives still work as expected.

----------

I really wish the Velocity was more like the Sonnet and had an additional full SATA+Power plug on the back. It's nice that it has the additional SATA port but honestly I probably won't use it because I don't want the wires. For $50, though I have been very happy with it compared to spending $20 on a SATA controller with the same ASM1061 chip. The $30 is worth the cleanliness of the install.
 
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