Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
NVMe on MacPro 3.1 Success! (sort of...)
- Thread starter PaulB-UK
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Design, materials, construction, quality - it's a fine example of a premium product. If you see one, you will understand.
This may have been discussed to death already, so my apologies if I'm covering old ground.
I decided to treat my trusty old Mac Pro 3.1 running El Capitan to an internal SSD. Impatience, lack of research and possibly a tiny bit of stupidity led me to buy a 256GB Samsung NVMe PM961. (I now know I should have bought an AHCI card, but they don't seem to be for sale any more...) I also bought a generic M.2 PCIe adapter.
Fitted it, and... no surprises, it didn't work.
A bit more Googling led me to http://www.macvidcards.com/nvme-driver.html by JimJ740.
As per the FAQ, installed the kext to /Library/Extensions (along with setting the permissions...)
Again, nothing.
Loaded the kext manually. SUCCESS! The drive appeared and was dealt with by Disk Utility.
Flushed with success, I copied the kext to /System/Library/Extensions
After a reboot... Kernel Panic.
So, card out, reboot, delete the kext from /System/Library/Extensions.
Power down, card re-installed, machine booted fine, but no sign of the drive until I manually loaded the kext again.
Reboot again... Kernel Panic. Remove card. Boot fine. Shutdown. Install card. No sign of it until manually loading the kext.
Lesson learned: manually *UNload* the kext before shutting down.
So, there we have it. I have a working 256GB NVMe SSD, albeit I have to load and unload the kext for it, which isn't a major problem.
I then wondered why it was so slow (yes, it is plugged into Slot 2, the spare PCIe 2 slot).
More Googling led me to this fine forum, and after removing 16GB of ram to bring my total down to 48GB I now have quite impressive performance! (I'll add a speed-test screenshot later - on a different computer atm).
So, thanks to JimJ740 and others of this fine forum. 2 problems solved for the price of one
Cheers
Paul B.
i did the same thing before, bought a pm961 instead of sm951 ahci, i can find the drive in disk utility and finish first installation, but no supprise that it couldn't start my mac pro, i gave up at the first time when i found the knext trick, i dont trust it, congrad for your succes, but if you put your card on 1st and 2nd pcie position from top, you should have +1300mb/s, i dont know why, even same for sm951 ahci version, x16 doesn't help on M.2 ssd speed on mac pro. beside the boot, the speed difference between pm961 and sm951 is on write, the sm951 will have the same speed of read it"s 1400MB/s, but pm951 will have only 300MB/s, so if you need to write a lot of data, you will need a sm951 ahci, it's really fast
Did you tried doing a search for ROMTool + password? This was answered repeatedly.
You need to fine tune your search skills: #2458
Thanks. Made the instruction on this branch, but SSD is not present in system. What am I doing wrong?
[doublepost=1548479431][/doublepost]message is great "Your system ROM has been successfully flashed." but ssd in system is not present.
macOS Sierra 10.12.1
Mac Pro 3.1 (2008)
help ;(
[doublepost=1548479431][/doublepost]message is great "Your system ROM has been successfully flashed." but ssd in system is not present.
macOS Sierra 10.12.1
Mac Pro 3.1 (2008)
help ;(
Sierra only support 4KB/sector NVMe blades, High Sierra support 4KB/sector and 512B/sector NVMe blades.
Only Apple OEM drives and some very rare Toshiba and Intel ones are 4KB/sector.
Like I said, only High Sierra and Mojave will support 512B/sector, 95% of the retail NVMe blades on market today. This Kingspec is a 512B/sector one.
You can't. Sierra don't support 512B/sector drives. System Preferences sees the PCIe device, but you can't use it.
It's a OS level limitation, can't be overcome. Only 10.13 and 10.14 supports 512 bytes per sector NVMe drives.
If you need to use 10.12 and earlier, forget NVMe and buy an AHCI PCIe blade, like SM951-AHCI, Kingston Predator or Apple OEM drives like SSAUX or SSBUX.
High Sierra !
Before the install starts a bootrom upgrade is required . . then your bootrom will be upgraded to 140.0.0.0.
THEN ! You will be able to boot from M.2 NVME SSD's if you install an NVME PCie adapter.
How do you gonna install 140.0.0.0.0 into a 2008 Mac Pro?
[doublepost=1548485331][/doublepost]
Yes, read this threads:
10.13 macOS High Sierra (10.13) Unsupported Macs Thread
10.14 macOS 10.14 Mojave on Unsupported Macs Thread