MP All Models PCIe SSDs - NVMe & AHCI

[Gr1f]

No thermal sensors for PCI´s in Mac Pro 5,1

This is a Mac Pro 7,1
So the NVMe temp can be taken from the PCIe slot sensor?

Just noticed something interesting.... or not...hard to tell. BlackMagic disk speed test runs fast for first 2 cycles then drops considerable to like 550 MB/s write and 370 MB/s read.... it stays consistent when testing the Apple SSD

 

[tsialex]

This is a Mac Pro 7,1
So the NVMe temp can be taken from the PCIe slot sensor?

Just noticed something interesting.... or not...hard to tell. BlackMagic disk speed test runs fast for first 2 cycles then drops considerable to like 550 MB/s write and 370 MB/s read.... it stays consistent when testing the Apple SSD

You found the real throughput of the NAND, after the SLC cache is full. Maybe even some thermal throttling, if the blade is not on a proper heatsink.

 

[streak8047]

MacPro 4.1 with PCI Nvme Booted SSD shows orange colour on SSD drive ,like external device ,every thing was fine on macpro ,temperature PCH DIE shows 71 degree ,tested Samsung 970 & Serbent Rocket ,Samsung has good speed than serbant model.

video editing purpose Nvme SSD with Fan can be trust on Macpro specially on high end rendering ,heat control for Nvme any good methods other than Fan , Heat sink & Thermal sticker.

 

[Gr1f]

You found the real throughput of the NAND, after the SLC cache is full. Maybe even some thermal throttling, if the blade is not on a proper heatsink.

I do have heatsink on it... not sure how to tell what temp it's running at but PCIe sensor never got over about 116f.

I installed a BigSur system on it but I think I'll revert back to the internal and try to off-set some content to the other drive

 

[tsialex]

I do have heatsink on it... not sure how to tell what temp it's running at but PCIe sensor never got over about 116f.

I installed a BigSur system on it but I think I'll revert back to the internal and try to off-set some content to the other drive

Check the temperatures and all other SMART parameters with DriveDX. While it's a paid app, you can use it for free for a 14 day test.

DriveDx - the most advanced drive health diagnostics and monitoring utility

DriveDx - the most advanced drive health (S.M.A.R.T.) diagnostics and monitoring utility. Save yourself the data loss and downtime that is associated with unexpected SSD and HDD failures. Don't worry about losing your important data, music, and photographs.

www.binaryfruit.com

 

[Gr1f]

Check the temperatures and all other SMART parameters with DriveDX. While it's a paid app, you can use it for free for a 14 day test.

DriveDx - the most advanced drive health diagnostics and monitoring utility

DriveDx - the most advanced drive health (S.M.A.R.T.) diagnostics and monitoring utility. Save yourself the data loss and downtime that is associated with unexpected SSD and HDD failures. Don't worry about losing your important data, music, and photographs.

www.binaryfruit.com

Nice little tool that. Thanks!
So not close to max temp threshold. I'll keep an eye on it for a bit. Running some After Effects work on it today so I'll see how I get on.

 

[PeroPenx]

Hi,

I am new to SSD M.2 world and also to this forum so my apologies if all of my questions were answered before, but so far I couldn't find them

My Mac Pro is 5.1 single 3.3 6-core Xeon with Radeon RX 580, 52 GB ram and Mojave installed. Now it is turn for SSD upgrade. Recently I bought Samsung EVO 970 Plus 500GB (Black Friday sale) and some 10$ AliExpress PCI-e M.2 adapter (got it from a friend for free). Still waiting for copper heatsink to arrive so I only tried SSD in slot 3 (GPU is in slot 1). Everything is working as it should be (around 1500 MBps).

And here are few questions:

1. Do you recommend removing sticker from Samsung EVO SSD before putting on heatsink? Did you do that?

2. While testing SSD without heatsink I just copied some large media files to it, and while doing that Mac Fan Control showed temperature rising up to 65 degrees Celsius/149 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe it could go more but I stopped it. SSD was in slot 3 and GPU in slot 1 was not doing much (just showing desktop on 1 monitor, GPU fans didn't move). Is it normal or can it be because of cheap adapter?

3. Is there any card for single SSD that converts PCIe 2.0 x16 to the PCIe 3.0 x4? I won't be buying more disks soon so I am looking for something cheaper than switch cards written in first post (designed for 2, 4 or more blades)

Thanks for answers!

 

[bsbeamer]

Do not remove the Samsung foil sticker. Clearly says that in packaging. If there is plastic wrapper present, remove that.

 

[PeroPenx]

Do not remove the Samsung foil sticker. Clearly says that in packaging. If there is plastic wrapper present, remove that.

Yes I know that but there are articles like this:

Should you remove an SSD sticker before mounting a heatsink? - Page 2 of 4 - HWCooling.net

Measurement resultsHere are some questions that everyone who wants to tune their computer to the last detail deals with: Does it make any sense to remove the sticker from a powerful M.2 SSD format? Is it worth the effort and, if something goes wrong, the breach of warranty? How much will the...

www.hwcooling.net

 

[joevt]

3. Is there any card for single SSD that converts PCIe 2.0 x16 to the PCIe 3.0 x4? I won't be buying more disks soon so I am looking for something cheaper than switch cards written in first post (designed for 2, 4 or more blades)

Not for single SSD. 2, 4, 6, or 8 are the current options. Converting PCIe 2.0 x16 to/from PCIe 3.0 x4 requires a PCIe switch chip. A single SSD would be a waste of a PCIe switch chip.

 

[tsialex]

Yes I know that but there are articles like this:

Should you remove an SSD sticker before mounting a heatsink? - Page 2 of 4 - HWCooling.net

Measurement resultsHere are some questions that everyone who wants to tune their computer to the last detail deals with: Does it make any sense to remove the sticker from a powerful M.2 SSD format? Is it worth the effort and, if something goes wrong, the breach of warranty? How much will the...

www.hwcooling.net

SSDs fail, if you don't care with the manufacturer warranty and know that it will be voided, you can always remove it.

Btw, did you noticed the conclusion of the article you posted? They stated that you shouldn't bother removing it.

 

[paulcons]

No thermal sensors for PCI´s in Mac Pro 5,1

Then how does it measure PCI Ambient? I have looked at that temp to get a general idea of how hot things are running in that whole bay... BUT I also recently noticed that I could get my 980 very hot running the Uninge benchmarking apps (in win10 I CAN read the temp of the GPU and it ramps down pretty quickly, so I surmised it was the fan on the card that may have kept the whole bay reasonable).

 

[macguru9999]

Has anyone tested one of these in a mac pro 5,1 ? I imagine they work fine, at pcie 2.0 speeds ?
(and they come in 4TB as well )

Western Digital WD Black AN1500 1TB RGB NVMe PCIe 3.0​

 

[joevt]

Has anyone tested one of these in a mac pro 5,1 ? I imagine they work fine, at pcie 2.0 speeds ?
(and they come in 4TB as well )

Western Digital WD Black AN1500 1TB RGB NVMe PCIe 3.0​

WD_BLACK AN1500

https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-black-an1500-nvme-ssd#WDS100T1X0L-00AUJ0 I bought this drive to try out, it's certainly a compelling form factor for the MP. It's basically a RAID 0 setup with an 8x PCIE 3 interface. For starters it works without issue in MacOS...

forums.macrumors.com

It has a PCIe 3.0 switch (not sure which one - probably the ASMedia ASM2824 upstream switch) which can probably have PCIe 2.0 x8 upstream and two PCIe 3.0 x4 downstream.

 

[1madman1]

Anyone tried one of these "RIITOP Dual NVMe PCIe Adapter" things yet?

Dual NVMe PCIe Adapter, RIITOP M.2 NVMe SSD to PCI-e 3.1 x8/x16 Card Support M.2 (M Key) NVMe SSD 22110/2280/2260/2242/2230

RIITOP Dual NVMe PCIe Adapter x8

www.amazon.ca

It's the lowest cost adapter with a PCI-E bridge that I've seen. I'm guessing a new product?

 

[joevt]

Anyone tried one of these "RIITOP Dual NVMe PCIe Adapter" things yet?

Dual NVMe PCIe Adapter, RIITOP M.2 NVMe SSD to PCI-e 3.1 x8/x16 Card Support M.2 (M Key) NVMe SSD 22110/2280/2260/2242/2230

RIITOP Dual NVMe PCIe Adapter x8

www.amazon.ca

It's the lowest cost adapter with a PCI-E bridge that I've seen. I'm guessing a new product?

It's physical x8 but electrical x4. Why does it have an x8 physical connector if it only supports 4 lanes upstream?
And it doesn't support AHCI. How do you make a PCIe switch that doesn't support other PCIe devices?
And why does it say the max is 2 GB/s when a single NVMe should be able to do 3 GB/s at least?
Garbage, unless you really need to connect two NVMe devices to a single slot at this price.

 

[tsialex]

Just a note here, trying to diagnose some issues that @BoomerTheBlunt was having with his BootROM found that some of the problems were caused by the SanDisk Ultra 3D NVMe blade, upon investigating I've found that this blade is just a rebadge of WD SN550 - that is known to be macOS incompatible - even the firmware of SanDisk Ultra 3D NVMe is the same 211070WD of WD SN550.

Added it to the first post, changed from just WD blades to WD and SanDisk blades since SanDisk is now just a brand of WD.

 

[DigitaLife]

This shows absolutely nothing besides that the VII slot is working correctly. M.2 devices are always x4 or less.

Look, if you installed your SI-PEX40129 on the slot that the VII is installed now and had the same problem, it's your SI-PEX40129 that is defective.

I tried to ask for replacement under warranty (bought on AliExpress in April) but unfortunately they want a proof (picture) that my computer meets the characteristics required officially by the card and that is PCIe 3.0 x16!
So I guess they won't replace the card... I don't know what to do, I lost 200 € and I don't know what to do with it if the card is defective as you say!

 

[tsialex]

I tried to ask for replacement under warranty (bought on AliExpress in April) but unfortunately they want a proof (picture) that my computer meets the characteristics required officially by the card and that is PCIe 3.0 x16!
So I guess they won't replace the card... I don't know what to do, I lost 200 € and I don't know what to do with it if the card is defective as you say!

Take a photo of the Mac Pro slots, or go to a friend that have a PC with PCIe 3.0 x16. It's too much money to let go.

 

[DigitaLife]

Take a photo of the Mac Pro slots, or go to a friend that have a PC with PCIe 3.0 x16. It's too much money to let go.

Okay! Thank you!
I'd also like to do a test to see if the PCIe 2.0 slots on my Mac Pro are working properly... how can I do that?

 

[tsialex]

Okay! Thank you!
I'd also like to do a test to see if the PCIe 2.0 slots on my Mac Pro are working properly... how can I do that?

If your GPU is x16, and installed on slot 1, open System Information and check the link width of it. Then move to slot 2 and do the same.

 

[joevt]

If your GPU is x16, and installed on slot 1, open System Information and check the link width of it. Then move to slot 2 and do the same.

System Information.app might not show the current PCIe link rate.
Try CL!ng.app from the App Store. Go to the Performance tab. At the bottom, select OCL GPU or MTL GPU for your GPU. The Host to Device and Device to Host numbers should be between 5 GB/s and 7 GB/s for a working PCIe 2.0 x16 connection.

 

[DigitaLife]

System Information.app might not show the current PCIe link rate.
Try CL!ng.app from the App Store. Go to the Performance tab. At the bottom, select OCL GPU or MTL GPU for your GPU. The Host to Device and Device to Host numbers should be between 5 GB/s and 7 GB/s for a working PCIe 2.0 x16 connection.

It seems to me that both PCIe slot #1 and #2 are working properly.
Can you give me your opinion?
Thank you!

 

[joevt]

It seems to me that both PCIe slot #1 and #2 are working properly.
Can you give me your opinion?

That all looks good. The graphs will look better if you click the button to hide the "Device to Device".
The Host to Device and Device to Host numbers are in the range expected by PCIe 2.0 5 GT/s x16.

In the PCIe tab, it says 8 GT/s which is PCIe 3.0. Is the PCIe tab reporting the Capability or is it the Status of a device behind a PCIe 3.0 switch? Probably Status behind a PCIe switch, because the slot number is followed by bus, device, function numbers.

Apple should change the PCIe tab so it shows the hierarchy like the USB and Thunderbolt tab does. My script at https://gist.github.com/joevt/e3cd4ff08aae06279134969c98ca3ab7 will show the PCIe hierarchy.

 

[DigitaLife]

If your GPU is x16, and installed on slot 1, open System Information and check the link width of it. Then move to slot 2 and do the same.

Since the PCIe slots of my cMP are working properly and since I was able to convince the vendor who sold me the card on return, I ask you for advice on whether to send me a new card or get my money back.
In the second case, which card do you suggest me to buy?
Highpoint for example? Or other? Thanks!!!