Edit: After looking at screen shots others have posted, I just realized my link speeds are only reporting as 2.5 GT/s.. Which would perfectly explain why my speeds are half of what I was expecting. I have the blade installed in slot 2. The adapter card is just a cheap one I got from Fry's for $15. It says on the box it's a x4 card. Could it be the adapter card? Or do I have a bigger problem? Maybe something in the BIOS is configured incorrectly. I have a true 5,1 machine. Mid 2010, came with the dual 2.93 Xenons. Am I in the right slot? I thought 1 and 2 were x16 slots, and the others were x4..
Wow, well that was an exhausting 20 hours! Thanks for all the great information, tutorials, and resources! You guys are awesome. So, I currently have my Mac Pro 5,1 (mid-2010) booting and running on a Samsung 960 Evo NVME SSD. I am on High Sierra Version 10.13.5 (17F77), and Boot ROM Version MP51.0087.B00.
I followed the instructions on the Google Doc sheet and they seem to be working perfectly, although there were a few hiccups along the way due to me being a noob. Yesterday, I was on Boot Rom Version 84. I flashed my ROM with the updated EFI Firmware, and it worked great! I was booting and running on the NVME drive. But, my speeds were slow! Like 600-700 MB/s... I thought they were supposed to be much faster, at least it seems like others are getting much faster speeds. So, I started looking around and noticed my Disk was formatted as Mac OS Extended, and not APFS. I couldn't figure out how to reformat without doing a clean install, every time I tried recovery it would keep the same file system. I couldn't think of anything else that it could be, so I went ahead and did it. Anyways, it make the rom hack obsolete, and I was back to square 1. I only have 1 Sata SSD that was in my PC. Long story short I cloned that drive to an old spinner laying around, then wiped it, put it in the mac and did a fresh high sierra install on the SSD. I couldn't for the life of me get a spinner drive to format in APFS. Once I got that set up I was able to once again flash the rom following the steps in the drive doc. I was a little weary because it seems like people have been having mixed results on boot rom version 87, but what the hell.. I then put in the NVME drive and restored to that drive from the Sata SSD that I had just installed. It worked! I powered off, took out the sata drive, and am now able to boot and run great with only the PCIe NVME 960 Evo in a x4 adapter.
So, once again, THANK YOU! Now, one question for you brilliant people. My speeds STILL seem to be slow.. Do I have a defective blade? Is this not slow, and I'm just ignorant? I'm still getting around 700 MB/s on all the tests I run. The drive is in APFS format.. I can't figure it out. Any help would be appreciated. See attached photos.
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