MP 1,1-5,1 New SSD "feels" slow

[1970mgbgt]

Hi all,

Mid 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 Dual Quad core 2.4 Ghz with 96 GB memory and original Radeon HD 5770 graphics card, running Snow Leopard because there is some software I can't part with that will only run on that OS AFAIK.

I cloned my system onto a 2TB WD Blue SSD and took out the HDDs that were in the machine. A long time ago, I had bought an Apricom Velocity Duo 2X PCI card that I never used, so I put the WD on that and a Samsung 2TB 860. Having not read the fine print as usual, I didn't realize that in order for two drives to act as a big RAID on that card, they had to be identical. But the machine booted up slowly even with just one drive on it. I put the card in the #2 PCI slot on the MP, hoping to take advantage of it being a x16 slot. The System Profiler listed it as just an x2.

Thinking I was fundamentally missing something, I ordered an this OWC Accelsior S card:

OWC Accelsior S Storage Expansion With a Speed Boost

Accelsior S is the simple solution to add a high speed SATA 6G drive to silver Mac Pro towers otherwise restricted to 3G architecture.

eshop.macsales.com

and mounted the WD drive on it, hoping to see better speed. It didn't work, and the System profiler still lists the card as an x2 even though it is mounted in Slot #2, which is x16.

Can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong here? I know I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I've been working on Macs since 1988, and thought I knew my way around them.

PLEASE HELP!

Thanks, friends.

 

[tsialex]

Hi all,

Mid 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 Dual Quad core 2.4 Ghz with 96 GB memory and original Radeon HD 5770 graphics card, running Snow Leopard because there is some software I can't part with that will only run on that OS AFAIK.

I cloned my system onto a 2TB WD Blue SSD and took out the HDDs that were in the machine. A long time ago, I had bought an Apricom Velocity Duo 2X PCI card that I never used, so I put the WD on that and a Samsung 2TB 860. Having not read the fine print as usual, I didn't realize that in order for two drives to act as a big RAID on that card, they had to be identical. But the machine booted up slowly even with just one drive on it. I put the card in the #2 PCI slot on the MP, hoping to take advantage of it being a x16 slot. The System Profiler listed it as just an x2.

Thinking I was fundamentally missing something, I ordered an this OWC Accelsior S card:

OWC Accelsior S Storage Expansion With a Speed Boost

Accelsior S is the simple solution to add a high speed SATA 6G drive to silver Mac Pro towers otherwise restricted to 3G architecture.

eshop.macsales.com

and mounted the WD drive on it, hoping to see better speed. It didn't work, and the System profiler still lists the card as an x2 even though it is mounted in Slot #2, which is x16.

Can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong here? I know I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I've been working on Macs since 1988, and thought I knew my way around them.

PLEASE HELP!

Thanks, friends.

First thing, you wrote that it's slow, but did you measure/benchmarked? Did you made a clean install to check if it's not a problem with your install?

Second thing, a PCIe x2 connection is ~725MB/s with Mac Pro PCIe v2.0 slots, no SATA SSD will get even near that (the best SATA SSDs get around 550MB/s at burst from the internal cache), the interface itself is limited to 600MB/s including overhead.

Btw, installing a x2 card on a x16 slot won't change anything:

With more than 500 MB/s of throughput, the Accelsior S dual-lane PCIe 2.0 card delivers flexible storage expansion - with a speed boost - to your Mac or PC. Accelsior S is the perfect complement to OWC's Mercury family of high-performance SSD's, allowing for super fast storage expansion.

Dual lane is the marketing lingo for x2.

 

[1970mgbgt]

First thing, you wrote that it's slow, but did you measure/benchmarked? Did you made a clean install to check if it's not a problem with your install?

Second thing, a PCIe x2 connection is ~725MB/s with Mac Pro PCIe v2.0 slots, no SATA SSD will get even near that (the best SATA SSDs get around 550MB/s at burst from the internal cache), the interface itself is limited to 600MB/s including overhead.

Btw, installing a x2 card on a x16 slot won't change anything:



Dual lane is the marketing lingo for x2.

Thanks for your reply.

No, I didn't benchmark the performance. There is no software I could find that will do that in Snow Leopard. I wrote to Novabench about an earlier version of theirs, but haven't heard back.

Didn't think to do a clean install as I just cloned the existing boot HDD, but I have Snow Leopard Server on a thumb drive I could use to do that, if I can figure it out.

Is there a card that could utilize more of the inherent speed of the SSD? Or am I just spitting into the wind on that with this machine?

I suppose there is a way to adapt a blade SSD to the MP, but IIRC that involves some messing around with the bios or the like, doesn't it? And you have to run a different system? Or is it possible to have two systems to boot from - one old and one new - on the same machine, on two different drives?

 

[tsialex]

No, I didn't benchmark the performance. There is no software I could find that will do that in Snow Leopard. I wrote to Novabench about an earlier version of theirs, but haven't heard back.

Install a recent macOS version and test/benchmark it.

Is there a card that could utilize more of the inherent speed of the SSD? Or am I just spitting into the wind here?

You already have a more than adequate card.

I suppose there is a way to adapt a blade SSD to this machine, but IIRC that involves some messing around with the bios or the like, doesn't it? And you have to run a different system? Or is it possible to have two systems to boot from - one old and one new - on the same machine, on two different drives?

AHCI blades are supported by 10.6, but you only find used ones and for extremely stupid prices. Even if you find one NOS, you will have problems soon since 10.6 don't support TRIM - forget that, maintenance nightmare since you will have to backup and install something newer than 10.10.4 to manually force the TRIM procedure of the blade every time a slowdown happens.

Mojave firmware updates fully support booting from NVMe drives. NVMe is only supported after Sierra (4K/sector drives) or High Sierra (512 and 4K/sector drives). Moot point if you need 10.6, since you won't access the NVMe drives in anyway while booted from earlier macOS releases.

 

[1970mgbgt]

Thanks again. I guess the fact that time and technology march on must be faced, regardless of how much one feels an affinity for these older elegant machines. Ten years is a lifetime in computers.

 

[tsialex]

Thanks again. I guess the fact that time and technology march on must be faced, regardless of how much one feels an affinity for these older elegant machines. Ten years is a lifetime in computers.

Upgraded MP5,1s are perfectly capable Macs even today, but 10.6 is a 2009 macOS release that had it's last upgrade back in June 2011. Your problem is 10.6, not the MP5,1.

While you can still squeeze decent performance from a MP5,1, you can't do the same with Snow Leopard.

 

[1970mgbgt]

If there was some way to get Photoshop CS2 and CS5 to run on a later OS, then I would upgrade in a heartbeat. I don't know of any way to do that.

 

[tsialex]

If you are constrained by the software you run, you don't have much options.

One thing tho, if your "feels slow" is the time that takes to boot, won't change anything with RAID or AHCI blades, the time from the moment that you press the power button to the moment that you can type you password is most spent testing the RAM and enumerating the PCIe space than with the loading the OS from the HDD/SSD/RAID/etc.

POST is always bigger the more memory you have, since all the memory installed on your Mac Pro is checked at every power on.

 

[1970mgbgt]

That might explain some of it, since I just installed much more memory at the same time as the SSD. Didn't realize I'd be adding to the boot time that way. I chalked it up to having several HDDs installed, so I pulled them out, but it didn't make any noticeable difference.

How is it that the GPU can take advantage of the 16 lane slot but the SSD can't? I guess I don't have much of a grasp of how those PCI slots work.

 

[tsialex]

That might explain some of it, since I just installed much more memory at the same time as the SSD. Didn't realize I'd be adding to the boot time that way. I chalked it up to having several HDDs installed, so I pulled them out, but it didn't make any noticeable difference.

How is it that the GPU can take advantage of the 16 lane slot but the SSD can't? I guess I don't have much of a grasp of how those PCI slots work.

The PCIe x2 connection is not what limits your throughput. A x2 device always will be a x2 device installed on a x4/x8/x16 slot, it's not the slot that defines the lanes used in this case. Again, a PCIe x2 connection is ~725MB/s, SATA can theoretically transfer 600MB/s overhead included, real life ~550MB/s but only from the SSD cache and not from the NAND memory.

Most GPUs are x16, some low end are x8.

Time to read things is totally unrelated to throughput. A contiguous video file of several GB can achieve ~540MB/s being read from a 860PRO, maybe even from an EVO, but you can't achieve this throughput reading several thousand small files that macOS is made of. One thing is to read a multiGB file, it's totally different read hundreds/thousands of small files all over the place. The best SATA SSD/s will read random 4KB transfers at less than 45MB/s. Yes, less than 1/12 of the maximum announced throughput of 550MB/s.

You should read more about this, marketing spec sheets won't help you understand what you can achieve and what you should expect in reality.

 

[EDF]

If there was some way to get Photoshop CS2 and CS5 to run on a later OS, then I would upgrade in a heartbeat. I don't know of any way to do that.

What's wrong with using newer versions of the software to take advantage of newer hardware?