Currently using my 7,1 for the past few months and loving it. I spend most of my time in MacOS between work, audio production and some software development. I also boot into Windows for games, and replaced the Pro 580 GPU with an RX Vega 64.
The only thing lacking is storage. I spent a little extra on the CPU to get the 12-Core model, both for better multithreaded performance and faster 2933 MHz memory. So that left me with the 1TB SSD config. With some games these days like Red Dead Redemption 2 taking up 120GB+ on their own that isn't nearly good enough.
For now I've been using an external 3TB HDD I had lying around with USB-3. It's such a bottleneck on the rest of the system, even when I'm not using it. Irritating things like spotlight having to wait while it takes 5-8 seconds to spin up when idle! Might sound silly but with normal read/write perforce of over 2500MB/s and no latency it grinds my gears. Seek time and much lower bandwidth also mean long waiting times for some of the latest and greatest games.
I had been considering one of the internal HDD enclosures, but honestly I think I'd rather go with an all SSD solution using PCIE.
I've been looking at the OWC Accelsior and Sonnet M.2 PCIE cards.
The only thing lacking is storage. I spent a little extra on the CPU to get the 12-Core model, both for better multithreaded performance and faster 2933 MHz memory. So that left me with the 1TB SSD config. With some games these days like Red Dead Redemption 2 taking up 120GB+ on their own that isn't nearly good enough.
For now I've been using an external 3TB HDD I had lying around with USB-3. It's such a bottleneck on the rest of the system, even when I'm not using it. Irritating things like spotlight having to wait while it takes 5-8 seconds to spin up when idle! Might sound silly but with normal read/write perforce of over 2500MB/s and no latency it grinds my gears. Seek time and much lower bandwidth also mean long waiting times for some of the latest and greatest games.
I had been considering one of the internal HDD enclosures, but honestly I think I'd rather go with an all SSD solution using PCIE.
I've been looking at the OWC Accelsior and Sonnet M.2 PCIE cards.
- Do people have recommendations between the two in terms of fan noise, cost, value?
- Probably looking for 4TB solution
- I do not need the fastest performance on earth, but if I'm going to any PCI-E RAID 0 config I'd like to get the best value to performance possible.
- If I get 4 1TB Samsung 970 M.2 cards and put them in RAID 0 as a single 4TB drive, will I be able to partition that into two drives? Ideally I'd like to use the full speed of RAID0 with an AFPS partition and an NTFS partition. Unclear if this is possible, wonder if I'll have to create two separate RAID drives from the 4 drives to dedicate one to each OS, meaning half (if still incredibly good) RAID 0 performance. Basically what's the most sensible RAID solution, if any, when I want a MacOS and Windows partition.
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