OWC's Mercury Accelsior_E2 PCI Express Solid State Drive in MP5,1

[Demigod Mac]

OWC quietly released a new driver for this card in November 2015:

http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/index.cfm?page=/manuals/item/owcaccelsior.html

Signed and El Capitan compatible.

 

[davebean]

Considering the E2 right now, had two questions-

a. Someone else asked but I didn't see a response - can we upgrade the blades ourselves? I know OWC has a program to do it but if we run across a good sale on blades, can we jump on it? What kind of blades are they anyway?

b. Does anyone have this card running on a cMP5.1 on Sierra?

Thanks much

 

[atomsnine]

Have had four of these cards. All have failed.

Find an alternative!

 

[RobertLoeser]

Considering the E2 right now, had two questions-

a. Someone else asked but I didn't see a response - can we upgrade the blades ourselves? I know OWC has a program to do it but if we run across a good sale on blades, can we jump on it? What kind of blades are they anyway?

b. Does anyone have this card running on a cMP5.1 on Sierra?

Thanks much

Sorry about the late reply (it's Aug. 2019) but I just found this thread.

At the beginning of the year, I upgraded to High Sierra on my hacked MP5.1. The Accelsior E2 worked but I've had years of fighting with the striped drive to be recognized after shutting down my computer and restarting. Just before a big edit job, one of my E2 SSD blades finally failed.

I called OWC and they revealed to me that there is a hidden (by them) tool that can be used to look at the status of the Accelsior E2, and to set it up. First, you have to know about the Marvell ACHI controller, which I believe is related to the drivers that OWC eventually started supplying to try to stem the flow of problems this product caused.

Then, because OWC suspected my blades had died, they revealed their big secret, what they call the Marvell Tray utility (or Accelsior Raid Utility) which runs in a web browser page and can give you stats on the blades and allows you to RAID or otherwise format the blades (documentation link below). They only allowed me to download the utility because I begged them to explain how I can check and salvage this expensive piece of hardware and I knew the eSata ports were still working well and independent of the blades (obviously, I like to keep my old car running).

With the utility, I saw that one of my blades was still good and I was able to reformat it as a regular 480GB SSD drive and keep using it in one of my fast (6 Gbps) PCI slots. Another secret that OWC still doesn't share is that the Mac Pro's PCI slots are capable of 6 Gbps and that's really where you want to put your 6G SSD drives.

Marvell Storage Utility Guide
https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=a00022850en_us

 

[SnakeCoils]

Nice! I was curious to see if thru this utility was also possible to set an hardware RAID-0 configuration on my Sonnet TempoSSDPro+ so I installed the latest Marvell 91xx drivers on Windows 10 (they are not available for MacOS) and with MSU on BootCamp side I have seen the devices and SSD attached but sadly no RAID options to try (at least with EFI/BIOS mixed ROM, I have not yet tried with BIOS only version) so the RAID configuration on this card seems possible only via software (Disk Utility or SoftRAID).
A thing I have noticed is that the internal SATA ports of the card are separate Channels while the external ports are subsequent devices of the internals, I mean:

Channel 0 - Internal device:0, External device: 1
Channel 1 - Internal device:0, External device: 1

I also tried to put the SSDs on the same Channel (Devices 0 and 1) but with no luck, the TempoSSDPro+ is really a simple "dumb" PCIe to SATA adapter.

 

[RobertLoeser]

Nice! I was curious to see if thru this utility was also possible to set an hardware RAID-0 configuration on my Sonnet TempoSSDPro+ so I installed the latest Marvell 91xx drivers on Windows 10 (they are not available for MacOS) and with MSU on BootCamp side I have seen the devices and SSD attached but sadly no RAID options to try (at least with EFI/BIOS mixed ROM, I have not yet tried with BIOS only version) so the RAID configuration on this card seems possible only via software (Disk Utility or SoftRAID).
A thing I have noticed is that the internal SATA ports of the card are separate Channels while the external ports are subsequent devices of the internals, I mean:

Channel 0 - Internal device:0, External device: 1
Channel 1 - Internal device:0, External device: 1

I also tried to put the SSDs on the same Channel (Devices 0 and 1) but with no luck, the TempoSSDPro+ is really a simple "dumb" PCIe to SATA adapter.

Do you have two SSD drives mounted to your Sonnet card? If you have a Marvell chipset on your Sonnet card, then the MSU (as displayed in your web browser, after you open it and login), should display a Device section in the left pane. The two SSD's should show up as Physical Disks under an Adapter shown in the Device section. Each disk should be using a different port on the card. I haven't seen anything labeled Channel in my setup. You can set up your RAID 0 (or 1 or 10) Virtual Disk following the steps similar to what's outlined at the link https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=a00022850en_us or by reading through any of the numerous versions of the Marvell Storage Utility Guide that various card manufacturers have published on the web. OWC does have a download link for the Mac installer for the MSU. http://download.macsales.com/kb/Accelsior_RAID_Utility_Mac.dmg

Also, I see where Sonnet recommends using Disk Utility to set up a RAID (documentation for the
Tempo SATA X4i card) and they call their ports "channels".

 

[SnakeCoils]

Yes, I have two SSD Crucial MX500 with 512 Mb each, I know the word "Channel" does not appear in the MSU menus but I used a terminology that makes more sense for me (closer to what ATTO use in their Setup Utility) where "Channel" is the controller bus and "Devices" are the physical disks attached to the same bus. Anyway the graphical hierarchy of MSU menus is enough clear for me to understand the logic behind.
Reading the MSU manual seems that only the adapters with a CPU onboard can handle an hardware RAID setup, in fact on my configuration with Sonnet TempoSSD the RAID field of the menu is empty, all the others reports some kind of infos. This happens on Windows side because the Marvell 91xx drivers are used (version 1047) while on OSX only the generic AHCI drivers exists. The Accelsior drivers (from OWC site) seems to be ignored by MSU when used together the Sonnet Tempo but after all it was expected, the chipset is different it was just a try to see if they were backwards compatible.
Until Mojave I was able to setup on the Sonnet adapter a working (and really fast) RAID-0 at software level using Disk Utility (and also for fun I have made a Fusion Drive using the two Crucial SSD but of course the maximum speed was not higher than the one of a single SSD). I was REALLY tempted by the OWC Accelsior E2 expecially for the two external SATA ports (like my Sonnet TempoSSDPro+) but the upgrade options were tied to OWC modules: your discovery about the MSU app radically changes this situation and now everyone should be able to populate this adapter with the preferred modules.
Too late for me because I have in the mean time installed a Samsung 970 EVO (1 Gb) in the Kryo.M2 adapter but I could give the Accelsior E2 a try if I found a good bargain.

Thank you very very much Robert for sharing your experience, it is greatly appriciated!

 

[RobertLoeser]

Yes, I have two SSD Crucial MX500 with 512 Mb each, I know the word "Channel" does not appear in the MSU menus but I used a terminology that makes more sense for me (closer to what ATTO use in their Setup Utility) where "Channel" is the controller bus and "Devices" are the physical disks attached to the same bus. Anyway the graphical hierarchy of MSU menus is enough clear for me to understand the logic behind.
Reading the MSU manual seems that only the adapters with a CPU onboard can handle an hardware RAID setup, in fact on my configuration with Sonnet TempoSSD the RAID field of the menu is empty, all the others reports some kind of infos. This happens on Windows side because the Marvell 91xx drivers are used (version 1047) while on OSX only the generic AHCI drivers exists. The Accelsior drivers (from OWC site) seems to be ignored by MSU when used together the Sonnet Tempo but after all it was expected, the chipset is different it was just a try to see if they were backwards compatible.
Until Mojave I was able to setup on the Sonnet adapter a working (and really fast) RAID-0 at software level using Disk Utility (and also for fun I have made a Fusion Drive using the two Crucial SSD but of course the maximum speed was not higher than the one of a single SSD). I was REALLY tempted by the OWC Accelsior E2 expecially for the two external SATA ports (like my Sonnet TempoSSDPro+) but the upgrade options were tied to OWC modules: your discovery about the MSU app radically changes this situation and now everyone should be able to populate this adapter with the preferred modules.
Too late for me because I have in the mean time installed a Samsung 970 EVO (1 Gb) in the Kryo.M2 adapter but I could give the Accelsior E2 a try if I found a good bargain.

Thank you very very much Robert for sharing your experience, it is greatly appriciated!

Excellent tooling around to see what works for you. I was blown away by the speed through the eSata ports, so much so, I bought two of OWC's Accelsior S 6gbps SSD Host Adapters to put drives on. I'm giving up on the E2 and blade drives in my old Mac Pro (for now). OWC had a bunch of problems with them and they are now obsolete. I can't find a replacement blade for the one in my RAID 0 setup that failed so I think it would be a bad investment overall. Oddly, after I reformatted the working blade, the MSU no longer shows my two eSata ports in the Device list. I have either lost that functionality on the card or I've done something else wrong. It could be that I moved it to slot 4 and the eSata ports are not supported. I'm a little bummed so I have some testing and research to do.

Cheers!