May I have a sanity check on my m.2 SSD choice ?

[gjarold]

I have an early 2009 Mac Pro 4,1.

My goal is to have a *bootable* SSD that is as fast as possible and does not use SATA at all - straight pcie all the way through.

With that in mind, I am considering buying this card:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDPHW2ES2UP/

(OWC Mercury Accelsior E2, with no storage installed)

And then buying one or two of these m.2 pcie SSDs:

https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX300-525GB-Internal-Solid/dp/B01L80DH4G/

(Crucial MX300 525GB M.2 (2280) Internal Solid State Drive - CT525MX300SSD4)

Will this get me pcie speed all the way through without bottlenecking through a SATA interface ?

Anything I am missing here ?

Thanks.
[doublepost=1509743728][/doublepost]Hmmm... I see the spec sheet for the crucial CT525MX300SSD4 shows the exact same speed for the 2.5" form factor and the m.2 form factor, so that makes me think this is a SATA disk and not pcie:

http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/storage-ssd-mx300

So I guess I need a suggestion on a 500-ish GB m.2 part that is pure pcie ...

 

[AidenShaw]

My goal is to have a *bootable* SSD that is as fast as possible and does not use SATA at all - straight pcie all the way through.

Why?

Seriously, why?

How will it improve your life if you can shave 5 or 10 seconds off the time to reboot?

 

[gjarold]

OK, I found what I need - the Kingston HyperX Predator. AHCI part, etc.
[doublepost=1509746724][/doublepost]

Why?

Seriously, why?

How will it improve your life if you can shave 5 or 10 seconds off the time to reboot?

It's not about boot time ... those are two different requirements.

I require it to be bootable.

I also require it to be as fast as possible so I can very quickly load virtual machines on one disk (DVD ISO file on disk 1) into a virtual machine on another disk (VM created on disk 2). Very fast speed on both disks will let me spin up thee new, test VMs very quickly from install media....

 

[AidenShaw]

OK, I found what I need - the Kingston HyperX Predator. AHCI part, etc.

Isn't AHCI a SATA controller?

Never mind - I see that AHCI on a PCIe controller runs the SATA protocols - but at PCIe speeds instead of 3/6/12 Gbps SATA speeds.

 

[mikas]

I don't know about sanity, but I just ordered another of these 480GB HyperX Predators (~300€). First one has been working great in a Mac Pro 4.1. 3D files and 3D libraries load fast, and big point clouds too. Hotlinks and modules update at speeds not comparable to SATA2 speeds earlier.

I appreciate the speed. I don't care about boot times, because I do not boot my machines very often. Actually I don't ever shut them down without a reason. They sleep.

This new card will go to my upgraded HP Z400 though. It's got only SATA 2 speeds originally. I need some more storage speed there for the same reasons as in my Mac Pro, 3D stuff, for both big files updated regularly (sizes of upto gigabytes) and for large collections of little files (libraries).


edit. continuous speed is good (attached), but I believe it's the fast acces times, low latencies and high IOPS that makes this and of course all SSD's so usable.