MP All Models PCIe SSDs - NVMe & AHCI

[zedex]

And how to fix it (going back in)?
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And how to fix it (going back in)?

I should probably start by saying "IF your NVMe PCIe SSD is inserted with all gold pins perfectly matched between DISK and SLOT you will get maximum throughput".

This statement assumes the following:
DISK is 4 lanes (usually PCIe 3.0 x4)
SLOT is 4 lanes (usually PCIe 3.0 x4)

4 lane DISK can only run at 2 lane speed if the SLOT (link width of internal PCIe interface) is only 2 lanes wide.

Not as well known is that a poor connection (all gold pins IMPERFECTLY matched OR slightly "crooked") forces the PCIe link to negotiate the best possible connection which can result in a (x2) or just as frequently a (x1) connection.

THE FIX
I haven't owned an iMac for a while but I seem to remember that you have to open it up (separate screen from the logicboard) to fit the NVMe PCIe SSD to the internal PCIe slot..

SO BEFORE YOU DO - research your iMac model using everymac dotcom or the iMac forum on this website and MAKE SURE the internal PCIe slot has a lane width of 4 (i.e. 4 lanes OR x4). Many IMACS were shipped with Samsung SSUAX PCIe SSDs - natively this is a 2 lane PCIe SSD (x2).

The reason I'm encouraging you to do your research is because the internal PCIe slot may be limited to 2 lanes. This is uncommon. I know that most Macs shipped with a SSUAX (x2) inserted in a PCIe 3.0 (x4) internal interface.

Hopefully - this all makes sense

 

[Rezblah]

Ok good news and bad on my attempted update to 2 samsung 970pros on the crest I/O bifurcation riser...

Good - firmware upgrades to 144.0 all done successfully and Mojave 14.6 installed on sata SSD

the 970s I ended up formatting one at a time on my lycom D-120, all good but neither are installed now as my current 951 AHCI boot drive is on that lycom adapter (on Sierra)

Bad: the machine won't see the I/O Crest card in slot 2. It's an I/O Crest SI-PEX 40219 bifurcation riser, but it can't be seen with the 2 formatted 970's installed on it booting from the mojave drive

Probably a topic for another thread but I can find sfu all this card and this issue - only success stories!

Tried looking for drivers but no luck

Put it in slot 3 and it briefly showed up, put the lycom back in and it disappeared again and I haven't got the IO visible in any slot, but it needs to be in slot 2 to work properly doesn't it? It says windows support on the box but people are using these so I must be missing something obvious

Fingers crossed that someone can help otherwise this is looking like $300 down the drain!

Oh, all this is on a 2010 6 core 3.33ghz 5.1 btw...

Any help much appreciated!

Cheers all

 

[s.m.t.]

Ok good news and bad on my attempted update to 2 samsung 970pros on the crest I/O bifurcation riser...

Good - firmware upgrades to 144.0 all done successfully and Mojave 14.6 installed on sata SSD

the 970s I ended up formatting one at a time on my lycom D-120, all good but neither are installed now as my current 951 AHCI boot drive is on that lycom adapter (on Sierra)

Bad: the machine won't see the I/O Crest card in slot 2. It's an I/O Crest SI-PEX 40219 bifurcation riser, but it can't be seen with the 2 formatted 970's installed on it booting from the mojave drive

Probably a topic for another thread but I can find sfu all this card and this issue - only success stories!

Tried looking for drivers but no luck

Put it in slot 3 and it briefly showed up, put the lycom back in and it disappeared again and I haven't got the IO visible in any slot, but it needs to be in slot 2 to work properly doesn't it? It says windows support on the box but people are using these so I must be missing something obvious

Fingers crossed that someone can help otherwise this is looking like $300 down the drain!

Oh, all this is on a 2010 6 core 3.33ghz 5.1 btw...

Any help much appreciated!

Cheers all

Is your GPU in slot 1? Try putting the GPU in slot 2 and the IO Crest in slot 1... I also saw some earlier posts where someone had to power it on without a GPU and the IO Crest by itself to reset, then put back in the GPU...

 

[s.m.t.]

Personally I am still on the fence about the IO Crest card... Mine should be here to day and I am planning on speed testing it. I am hoping to see a bump in random 4k reads/writes... If I don't, I will likely just return it. Seq. speeds are not too relevant to me...

would someone with an IO Crest mind posting a similar benchmark?

 

[Rezblah]

Is your GPU in slot 1? Try putting the GPU in slot 2 and the IO Crest in slot 1... I also saw some earlier posts where someone had to power it on without a GPU and the IO Crest by itself to reset, then put back in the GPU...

Yep gpu is in slot 1, thanks for the suggestion I'll give it a go and report back

I'm a bit on the fence with it myself with the fan noise - it's not quiet, especially in a recording environment, and it sits right on top of the gpu fans. I'm on my 3rd graphics card on this machine in 5 years so would be keen to avoid any additional heat build up in that department...

 

[yukdave]

Thanks I will be on slot 2 and 4 with USB on slot 3.

Here are my stats with the Lycom 120 and the Crucial P1 1TB

 

[Rezblah]

Yep gpu is in slot 1, thanks for the suggestion I'll give it a go and report back

I'm a bit on the fence with it myself with the fan noise - it's not quiet, especially in a recording environment, and it sits right on top of the gpu fans. I'm on my 3rd graphics card on this machine in 5 years so would be keen to avoid any additional heat build up in that department...

Is your GPU in slot 1? Try putting the GPU in slot 2 and the IO Crest in slot 1... I also saw some earlier posts where someone had to power it on without a GPU and the IO Crest by itself to reset, then put back in the GPU...

Ok that wasn't much fun - confirmed graphics card working in slot 2, but no go with crest card in slot 1 and with no graphics card at all for 1 boot, which mojave did not like at all, it's fritzing out big time with the screens now (3 of them, but only used 1 to check all of this) maybe an smc reset will help that fingers crossed. So, no go with this particular crest card by the looks of things, and a busy week so this week so no time to mess with this any further, I think I might just stick with a working sierra install for the life of this machine, that was stressful with an unexpected work deadline this week!

 

[s.m.t.]

Sorry to hear that...

I got mine in slot 1 with the RX580 in slot 2. My 4k write scores are actually less than the simple PCIe adapter, but the reads are higher. Guessing this is a possible side effect of the switching overhead. But I am going to keep the IO crest. It's the best way for me to use 2 NVMe blades with the RX580 taking up part of slot 2... I ordered a Samsung 970 EVO which should arrive today, curious to see how it compares. It will replace the MX500 as my boot drive...

 

[Rezblah]

Worth a shot as I don't have a plan B for this set up apart from a second Lycom dt-120 which won't do the 3k mbs speeds of course, but I just can't justify a highpoint $-wise for the work I do - they're getting pretty pricey!

My screens are back to normal after booting back into my sierra 951 AHCI, unplugging and replugging them all back in and doing an smc reset - phew! I thought I'd stuffed the video card for a second but looks to be all good. Not game to boot into the mojave drive this week to sort the screens there with a big work deadline so a job for another day...

Anyway, the box this crest came in says windows only or linux kernel 3.3 or later, could it be a driver/firmware thing?

Thanks again for the suggestions, I'm quite the OTT stress head when I mess with my work rig which is why I only do this stuff every 3 years or so, at least the firmware update to 144 went without a hitch so that's the main thing

 

[s.m.t.]

Amazon has one used for $139, might be worth returning yours and trying another... Mine was an Amazon warehouse deal, $146 and I used discount points from my Amazon card to get it for about $110...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B07HYZY7P2/ref=dp_olp_all_mbc?ie=UTF8&condition=all

 

[Rezblah]

Wow you scored a bargain - good idea cheers - I got mine off ebay for $300 which was the best I could do at the time with the Aussie $ so far down the s-bend, but looks like it's a no returns policy on that one. Might as well on sell this one for the time being though - so close!

 

[zedex]

Hey @Rezblah - I just persuaded the owner of RamCity to begin stocking Lycom DT-130's. They're available for pre-order on his website. This is the greatest news ever for Aussies because now we can purchase an 'IOCrest equivalent' locally. You see the DT-130 uses the same ASMedia2824 switch as the board by SYBA/IOCREST. Personally, I'm stoked. Putting my Highpoint SSD7101 on eBay tonight!

 

[Rezblah]

Hey @Rezblah - I just persuaded the owner of RamCity to begin stocking Lycom DT-130's. They're available for pre-order on his website. This is the greatest news ever for Aussies because now we can purchase an 'IOCrest equivalent' locally. You see the DT-130 uses the same ASMedia2824 switch as the board by SYBA/IOCREST. Personally, I'm stoked. Putting my Highpoint SSD7101 on eBay tonight!

That is good news, thanks for the heads up! I wouldn't want to go through sourcing another crest and hitting the same wall again... do you know if the DT 130 gets 3k mbs with nvme? And if it's bootable? Looks like the ram city info says not bootable...

Thanks for the help on this, I need to get a few more years life out of the old beast yet, no budget for a new mac pro in the forseeable future...

 

[zedex]

They all say not bootable. Highpoint SSD7101 is apparently not bootable either (but my NVMe boot drive is housed in the SSD7101). I owned an IOCREST - also "not bootable" except it was.

 

[tsialex]

They all say not bootable. Highpoint SSD7101 is apparently not bootable either (but my NVMe boot drive is housed in the SSD7101). I owned an IOCREST - also "not bootable" except it was.

It's the Mac Pro BootROM NVMe native support that makes compatible PCIe drives bootable, not the adapters.

 

[JedNZ]

Does the DT-130 have bifurcation? I couldn’t find anything on their website, nor on RamCity website. Looks like they don’t ship to NZ

 

[tsialex]

Does the DT-130 have bifurcation? I couldn’t find anything on their website, nor on RamCity website. Looks like they don’t ship to NZ

No, has a PCIe switch.

 

[JedNZ]

Dumb question, sorry: so does the PCIe switch split the 8 lane into two 4 lane streams (each M.2 have it’s own 4 lane)? If so, would this then give two x ~1500MB/s in RAID0 (~3000MB/s R/W)?

 

[tsialex]

Dumb question, sorry: so does the PCIe switch split the 8 lane into two 4 lane streams (each M.2 have it’s own 4 lane)? If so, would this then give two x ~1500MB/s in RAID0 (~3000MB/s R/W)?

Bifurcation splits the lanes, a PCIe switch shares the total bandwidth. With bifurcation you have less throughput than with a PCIe switch.

 

[JedNZ]

@MisterAndrew
Do we have enough info to include the Lycom DT-130 on post#1? I’m still a bit confused where this adapter fits in/compares to the I/OCrest or other PCIe adapters, and what speeds we can expect.

I have my Samsung 960 EVO 500GB NVMe in a dumb PCIe adapter (no heatsink) in a Fusion Drive with a WD Black Caviar 2TB spinner (in direct connect bay). But I’m wanting to buy another NVMe drive for a scratch disk, so need a dual bay M.2 adapter because I don’t have a spare PCI slot. I don’t immediately need RAID capability, however it might be useful in the future. What’s the best dual M.2 PCIe adapter for my needs/wants, bearing in mind that I want to use one NVMe blade in a Fusion Drive (if that’s possible in a dual bay adapter).

 

[yukdave]

Copying 900GB of data using the Finder/Copy and starts fast then slows down to 80MBPS and has for over an hour. WTF?

OK just decided to migrate data from my Primary Data Drive (3qty SanDisk 480GB SSD RAID 1 HFS) to my new Crucial P1 NVME M.2 on a Lycom DT-120 in Slot 2 APFS. For the first 15 minutes it was running at around 500-700MBPS using Finder Copy. Then it just parks in first gear and is pushing 70-100MBPS

Moving forward I was planning on using the SSD's as an automatic Super duper daily full backup.

 

[AidenShaw]

Copying 900GB of data using the Finder/Copy and starts fast then slows down to 80MBPS and has for over an hour. WTF?

OK just decided to migrate data from my Primary Data Drive (3qty SanDisk 480GB SSD RAID 1 HFS) to my new Crucial P1 NVME M.2 on a Lycom DT-120 in Slot 2 APFS. For the first 15 minutes it was running at around 500-700MBPS using Finder Copy. Then it just parks in first gear and is pushing 70-100MBPS

Moving forward I was planning on using the SSD's as an automatic Super duper daily full backup.

Many SSDs have large and fast write buffers, but sustained write speeds when the write buffers fill are much slower.

That's likely what you are seeing.

It is what it is. Make sure that TRIM is enabled, and don't fill SSDs.

 

[yukdave]

Trim enabled. So it looks like a RAID of 3qty SSD may still be the best solution for sustained transfer. So would my 3qty RAID 1 SSD array be best for receiving a daily backup of data cloning of about 800GB from an NVME since the NVME will be 80% full (800GB of 1,000GB) and the OS is on a separate drive.

 

[tsialex]

Trim enabled. So it looks like a RAID of 3qty SSD may still be the best solution for sustained transfer. So would my 3qty RAID 1 SSD array be best for receiving a daily backup of data cloning of about 800GB from an NVME since the NVME will be 80% full (800GB of 1,000GB) and the OS is on a separate drive.

No, a 970 Pro have 2000 to 2100MB/s sustained write speed after the buffer is full.

It's the TLC and QLC blades that have small buffers, some cheap blades don't even have buffers, and serious sustained write speed limitation. Some take more time to show it or have more write throughput, but all have it.

 

[Rezblah]

further to my weird graphics freak out the other day after shifting my graphics card around in an effort to get this crest card working, my regular sierra boot up is fine - 3 screens up and running no problems every time

Booting into my mojave drive, it gets stuck half way through boot progress and jams up detecting the additional screens, constantly flicking them on and off but not moving further through boot up

All fine if it's just 1 screen or if I turn off the 3rd screen during boot, it unlocks and will finish boot (phew)
there's also weird flicker on the main monitor that I've never seen before as it adds the other screens when I turn them back on

Have done an smc reset, is this for another thread?

Thanks for all the help peeps, you rock!
Cheers all,
r