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OWC SSD problem with 08 Mac Pro

K

kinwah02

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 19, 2008
21
0
Hey guys, sorry that I got a problem with my new OWC 240G extreme 6G and hope you could help to get me some ideas on the issue. My mac pro is 08 8-core 2.8. I just bought a OWC SSD and a Icydock 2.5-3.5 converter. I just put it in one of the trays but it didn't show up for the first and second time. And it appeared on my third reboot. I format it and try to do a speed disk test. But the test won't start up and just stopped at the 0 at all. It doesn't have any problem with my other HDD in other trays.

In the end, I just put the SSD directly on the port with a tape to hold it, as I'm not sure if that's the converter problem or not. It appears again and the test still won't start at all. I can copy files to the SSD but seems like the rainbow ball can appear quite easily... and even my startup seems to be slowed down... I'm wondering if there's anything wrong??
 
I'm using Mac OS extended (journaled). I reboot it again and seems things are getting better now and it appears. But as the mac pro has a SATAII port, the speed is about 210 write and 220 read. I'm wondering if there's any way to fully utilize the speed of 6G? is there a PCI card for putting the SSD on it to make it able to write and read around 500MB/s? or there's other way to do that??

many thanks for spending time to read my message!
 
I have the same MP as you and a 6G OWC SSD drive also. I recently bought a PCIe card with two SATA ports capable or SATA3 speeds.

The part number for the card is SY-PEX40039

The card costs about $40

You can use a regular long 40" SATA cable, I had some issues due to a bad SATA 3 cable, but now my issues are resolved. Speed is very good and fast.
 
Many thanks for your ideas! Is it the one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124045

So I can just plug the cable to the SSD and I should find a place to plug the power cable, right? Is there any place in the Mac pro that I can find the power port??

sorry that most of the time, I just put the HD in the trays and never really deal with PCI cards and cables...
 
What are you using the SSD drive for? Practically speaking I would be surprised if you noticed any difference between a 3G and 6G link. You will only get anywhere near those speeds with sustained sequential transfers of large files, which is an uncommon situation with general use, especially in your system with no other high performance storage.
 
I have four 3.5" HD in the four trays, one for boot up and other three are for storage and media. It used to be ok to me but as I'm using After Effect to output a huge video (10000 x 1340), so it takes me many many days to do that.... I used two HDD and raid it (140MB/s) and it gets a bit faster but still not much difference. So I took one HD out and put the SSD in and thought may be using a SSD would be much faster when outputting the video to it ...

I'm actually waiting for the new mac pro, so still a bit hold to stick with my 08 mac pro at the moment and try to find a faster way to finish the work.

So in this case, SATA II or III won't make much difference?
 
I suspect you are CPU-bound with that workflow so the 6G SSD won't make much difference.
 
kinwah02 said:
Many thanks for your ideas! Is it the one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124045

So I can just plug the cable to the SSD and I should find a place to plug the power cable, right? Is there any place in the Mac pro that I can find the power port??

sorry that most of the time, I just put the HD in the trays and never really deal with PCI cards and cables...
Click to expand...


Yes that is the one I have.
I also have one of these that I put in my optical bay. I used a power splitter to provide power for both the SSD and the additional 3.5" drive I installed.
You would then need to thread a 40" SATA cable down under the optical bay to the PCIe SATA card.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MM352A52ST/
 
Thank you all for your help and info! I probably realize that the SSD doesn't increase the speed of the rendering/outputting... It just takes similar time as a "storage" for the file in rendering compare with my previous 2 HDs (Raid0), 150MB/s...

I google a bit the Revodrive and seems it's very fast but more like for booting time, loading files, etc. It seems doesn't have in increasing the speed of rendering... Am I correct??

Sorry that I'm a bit disappointed about that... probably change the CPU, graphic card or increase RAM would help more, right?

And the OWC SSD disappears again......
 
I don't use AE, so maybe one of the experts here will chime in.

You can get an idea of where the bottlenecks are by running Activity Monitor during a rendering job. If the CPU's are pegged to near 100%- well there's one problem. If there are lots of page outs and intense disk activity then you may benefit from more RAM.
 
yes, the CPU is like 9X% during rendering and also only 1XXMB ram left...
 
I'm very disappointed by OWC SSD now... probably will return it to them
 
I am happy with mine on my SATA card, my system is zippy and responds faster then it did when the drive was connected to the onboard port. Sorry to hear you are disappointed.
 
AE can take forever. It likes having at least 2GB of memory allocated per thread, preferably 4GB per thread. You can run 8 threads on your Mac. So minimum for better performance for you is 16GB-32GB of memory. This way the processors are not memory starved on output renders. The SSD will not help you at all no matter where you put it or if it is 1G, 3G or 6G. You could use an HDD from the stone age and get similar results as you are just waiting for the fastest parts of the system to complete (ie. Processor and Memory) so the HDD can write. At least how I understand your problem as specified.
 
thanks very much. now I understand more. I'm still wondering would it benefits if I have the video output to a RAID 0 (like my 2 HDs, software raid) than a single HD? or even to 2 SSDs in RAID 0? or still doesn't matter at all when using AE but more related to CPU and ram?

I just have 14G ram at the moment but I set it to purge every 2 frames in the "secret" section in AE preference and press the caps lock to freeze the screens when outputting.

many thanks!
 
kinwah02 said:
I have four 3.5" HD in the four trays, one for boot up and other three are for storage and media. It used to be ok to me but as I'm using After Effect to output a huge video (10000 x 1340), so it takes me many many days to do that.... I used two HDD and raid it (140MB/s) and it gets a bit faster but still not much difference. So I took one HD out and put the SSD in and thought may be using a SSD would be much faster when outputting the video to it ...

I'm actually waiting for the new mac pro, so still a bit hold to stick with my 08 mac pro at the moment and try to find a faster way to finish the work.

So in this case, SATA II or III won't make much difference?
Click to expand...

If you are using AE 5.0...the only way to really speedup your output is to get a CUDA card and use the GPU instead of using the CPU via the mercury playback engine.
 
kinwah02 said:
thanks very much. now I understand more. I'm still wondering would it benefits if I have the video output to a RAID 0 (like my 2 HDs, software raid) than a single HD? or even to 2 SSDs in RAID 0? or still doesn't matter at all when using AE but more related to CPU and ram?

I just have 14G ram at the moment but I set it to purge every 2 frames in the "secret" section in AE preference and press the caps lock to freeze the screens when outputting.

many thanks!
Click to expand...

Doesn't matter as you can't get the data processed and written to the drive faster than even a single HDD. Storage is not the issue. The issue is processor speed and cores, memory and how it is allotted, and GPU brand and speed for GPGPU renders. Even if you get a 12-core Pro with 48GB of memory and a CUDA enabled Nvidia card you most likely will never write to the drive in renders faster than a single modern HDD. I am no expert though. The SSD's and RAID sets can help with other things in your workflow but not the output renders.
 
So a ATI 5870/5770 would definitely help to speed the rendering up? I still have the original 2600X in my mac pro at the moment. And would a SSD or Raid help me anything when using AE? or it helps to speed up my editing/rendering when using FCP?

I'm also using soundtrack pro but seems the there're some "noises" when I'm working on a 20min long soundtrack. Is it partly related to the write/read speed of my HD?
 
After Effects doesn't use CUDA at all. What speeds up renders in AE is RAM and threads. I ran many tests on my system (6-core with 32GB RAM) to determine the fastest render setup, and found that setting AE to use 8 of 12 processor cores (indicate "CPUs reserved for other applications: 4") with 2GB RAM allocation per background CPU, and 24GB of RAM available for AE was the sweet spot. Some other settings came close, but the above configuration consistently beat all others.

You have to leave some RAM and processes available for other tasks, or else you end up starving your system. Likewise, you have to allocate enough to render the video efficiently. With my 6-cores showing up as 12 CPUs in AE, and 32GB of RAM, I found out that nothing works better than telling CS5 that I have a quad core with HyperThreading and 24GB of RAM to work with, saving 1/4 of my resources (two of six actual cores and 8GB of RAM) for running the system.

It doesn't matter that I have an 8-disk RAID that gives sustained speeds of 714MB/sec read and 816MB/sec write as my media/output drive. What that helps with is scratch, previews and playback, not so much with AE renders. Tomorrow, I receive my first SSD, and it will replace my 7200rpm boot drive. I'll do more tests and let you know if anything is improved, but I'm betting it only boots and loads programs faster, and that's about it.
 
Last edited:
Give 3/4 to AE and save 1/4 for other processes.

If you have 8 cores, let AE use six of them. If you have 24GB of RAM, let AE use 18GB of it.

That should give you the fastest renders in CS5.
 
So in my case, I should leave 2 cores out of 8 to other applications and roughly 10-11G ram reserve for AE? I'll do a test on this.

many thanks for your ideas.
 
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