MP 1,1-5,1 Please help with NVME card issues on 5,1

[hardw0od]

I recently decided to keep my 5,1 and upgrade it and wait until the next version of the Mac Pro with ARM processors releases in the next 2 years.

I upgraded the RAM to 64GB
I upgraded the Video Card to a Radeon 5700XT
I upgraded to Catalina using Dosdude1's patcher...
and finally I purchased an OWC PCI-e NVME card with 2 1 TB Samsung 970 Plus Drives.


Everything upgraded fine and is running well in the computer. My Geekbench scores jumped about 20% on the multicore and 10% on the single core, but I am having one issue.

The NVME drives are showing up as external devices. How can I change this so that they are treated as internal drives? Also, Blackmagic is showing Read/Write speeds in the 2800 MB/s but OWC was claiming twice that for my Mac. Is there anything I can do to increase the speeds? The speeds are the same as separate drives and in RAID 0.


Thanks in advance

 

[tsialex]

All PCIe drives are external to the MP5,1 firmware, only SATA drives connected to the south bridge are internal. You can use innie to change it cosmetically.

MP5,1 is a PCIe v2.0 Mac, maximum throughput possible is around 2900MB/s for a x8 card like the OWC 4M2.

You definitely need to check this type of things before buying, only x16 cards like HighPoint SSD7101A-1 can fully utilize the bandwidth of a fast M.2 blade with a MP5,1. Read the first post of the thread below:

PCIe SSDs - NVMe & AHCI

This is a general info thread for blade SSDs that can be used in the Mac Pro. This is a WikiPost so anyone with the proper credentials may edit it. NVMe SSDs can be used as a boot drive in the MP5,1 and MP6,1 with the latest firmware installed (beginning with version 140.0.0.0.0 for MP5,1 and...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[hardw0od]

All PCIe drives are external to the MP5,1 firmware, only SATA drives connected to the south bridge are internal. You can use innie to change it cosmetically.

MP5,1 is a PCIe v2.0 Mac, maximum throughput possible is around 2900MB/s for a x8 card like the OWC 4M2.

You definitely need to check this type of things before buying, only x16 cards like HighPoint SSD7101A-1 can fully utilize the bandwidth of a fast M.2 blade with a MP5,1. Read the first post of the thread below:

PCIe SSDs - NVMe & AHCI

This is a general info thread for blade SSDs that can be used in the Mac Pro. This is a WikiPost so anyone with the proper credentials may edit it. NVMe SSDs can be used as a boot drive in the MP5,1 and MP6,1 with the latest firmware installed (beginning with version 140.0.0.0.0 for MP5,1 and...

forums.macrumors.com

Thank you so much for your answer. I could've sworn that they promised speeds of 6000 MB/s for my computer and 12000 for the new Mac Pro. I'm still content with the speeds I'm receiving.

Could I used the NVME drives to install Catalina and boot off them?

 

[tsialex]

Thank you so much for your answer. I could've sworn that they promised speeds of 6000 MB/s for my computer and 12000 for the new Mac Pro. I'm still content with the speeds I'm receiving.

Could I used the NVME drives to install Catalina and boot off them?

It’s a x8 card, throughput will never past ~2900MB/s with MP5,1.

See the OpenCore thread to know how to install Catalina.

 

[hardw0od]

It’s a x8 card, throughput will never past ~2900MB/s with MP5,1.

See the OpenCore thread to know how to install Catalina.

Thank you so much for all of your help.