MP 1,1-5,1 Optimise for 4k editing

[AfterglowMP]

While I wait for more M1 Macs to roll out - hopefully something a little more substantial for editing than MBP with 16gb - I'm still toiling away on my 2010 5.1 MPc 3.33ghz 12 core, 40gb RAM with El Cap. The system drive is PCIe Samsung card which I installed in 2015 and the media is loaded on 2 x 2TB HDD RAID 0 and GeForce GTX 980Ti 6gb. Mostly it works well with HD footage and some 4K edited in Premiere 2018.

Recently the Mac started shutting down without warning with a black screen before cycling through to the restart grey screen then re-opening. The crashes recurred more and more frequently. After usual safe boot, zap NVRAM, testing RAM and GPU card exercises, I rebooted with the back HDD drive and stability returned.

Seems like the predictions about PCIe card integrity deteriorating are right. Mine's now had 6 years of hard labour. Is it possible I can completely wipe it and re-install system?

I'm also going to upgrade to High Sierra as I've been given a newer faster GPU card that won't run on El Cap.

I'm happy to opt for a new PCIe card that has good speed and is stable maybe like OWC 1.0TB Accelsior 4M2 PCIe SSD for 2019 Apple Mac Pro. Any suggestions welcome but I've gotta keep it basic because I tried reading through the PCIe wiki but was hopelessly lost.

If I were to install SSDs instead of the HDDs in the RAID 0 would I get a boost in editing there?

Thanks everyone

 

[amstel78]

I think PCIe NVME would be a better option. I have two OWC Accelsior PCIe SSD cards in my 2010 5,1 with 2 x 3.46 GHz CPUs, 128gb of RAM and a Vega 64 GPU. 4k is editable in Davinci Resolve but the achilles heel is still read speed. I drop the occasional frame in playback or scrubbing.

The Accelsior cards top out around 500 MB/s whereas NVMe cards can do 1500 MB/s. You'll want an NVMe card with built in data controller if you plan to do more than one drive per card.

I'm also running Mojave via RefindPlus/OpenCore for full hardware H264/HVEC encoding and decoding. Depending on what your upgraded GPU is, you may want to consider that as you won't be able to achieve it running a vanilla OS installation.