MP 7,1 Requesting feedback for MP7,1 installation of Sonnet SSD M.2 4x4 PCIe Card

[bxs]

Subject: Requesting feedback for MP7,1 installation of Sonnet SSD M.2 4x4 PCIe Card

• We do not have our MP7,1 yet.
• We would like to get some feedback from MP7,1 owners who have installed the Sonnet SSD M.2 4x4 PCIe Card with embedded 4x Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD/Flash blades.
• We have our Sonnet SSD M.2 4x4 PCIe Card with 1x 2TB, 3x 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD/Flash blades ready to be installed.
• For example...
  • What PCIe slot did you install this card in.
  • Our MP7,1 will have the Afterburner installed and Apple installs this in PCIe slot #5 that consumes one of the x16 slots. so what x16 slot is advised for the Sonnet card ?
  • How did you configure the 4 blades; JBOD single blades, RAID-0, RAID-5 ?
  • Did you use Apple's Disk Utility or SoftAID or other ?
  • What formatting did you use - HFS+ or APFS ?
  • What was the observed data rates for writing and reading, and what was used to observe the data rates ?
  • Did you keep the card's fan or did you remove it ?
  • If the fan left intact, was the fan noise acceptable or not ?
  • If the fan was disconnected or removed does the card/blades keep sufficiently cool when under load ?
  • The Sonnet card comes with a cover; did you leave it on or remove it, and if removed, why ?
  • How long have you been using the Sonnet/Samsung card ?
  • Are you satisfied with the Sonnet/Samsung card and if you are, why, and if not, why ?
  • Are there any other issues you care to reveal ?
  • Did you register products with Sonnet and Samsung ?

Thank you for spending time responding... it will be much appreciated.

 

[Theophilos]

All good questions. Did you see this video? It may answer some of the questions.

 

[bxs]

All good questions. Did you see this video? It may answer some of the questions.

I did watch the video and was impressed. I just hope our experiences turns out as good as shown in that video. I was pleased to hear the fan speed was temperature controlled.

We have certainly come a long way from washing machine size i/o devices (big disk platters) to these incredibly small and very fast i/o devices. Even so, i/o is still seen as the bottleneck in doing computations. The communication path between the device and the recipient now needs to be made even faster.

 

[shokunin]

• What PCIe slot did you install this card in.
• Our MP7,1 will have the Afterburner installed and Apple installs this in PCIe slot #5 that consumes one of the x16 slots. so what x16 slot is advised for the Sonnet card ?
• How did you configure the 4 blades; JBOD single blades, RAID-0, RAID-5 ?
• Did you use Apple's Disk Utility or SoftAID or other ?
• What formatting did you use - HFS+ or APFS ?
• What was the observed data rates for writing and reading, and what was used to observe the data rates ?
• Did you keep the card's fan or did you remove it ?
• If the fan left intact, was the fan noise acceptable or not ?
• If the fan was disconnected or removed does the card/blades keep sufficiently cool when under load ?
• The Sonnet card comes with a cover; did you leave it on or remove it, and if removed, why ?
• How long have you been using the Sonnet/Samsung card ?
• Are you satisfied with the Sonnet/Samsung card and if you are, why, and if not, why ?
• [Are there any other issues you care to reveal ?
• Did you register products with Sonnet and Samsung

Mine's in slot 4, was going to put it in slot 5, but saw that I had to remove 4 screws on the front backet and said forget it. As long as it's in an x16 slot it should be fine. I currently have the 580X video card waiting impatiently for the W5700XT as an add-on card.

Currently 3x WD SN750 black 2TB in Raid 0 via APFS and 1 Samsung Pro 1TB as boot. I tested both softraid HFS+ and Disk Utility HFS+ and APFS RAID 0. Softraid HFS+ was about 10% faster from what I can recall in read/write versus disk utility's APFS. However, Softraid doesn't support APFS and it also doesn't support encryption. I think this was with 64k chunk sizes.

Read/Writes with 3 NVMe sticks were in the high 6800-6900 writes and 6700-6800 in reads. Unfortunately if you enable encryption it drops to 3000-3400GBps in reads/writes. Didn't expect encryption to have that much of an impact, but seems like the T2 chip may be a bottleneck in encryption as there were plenty of CPU cores (16 cores) free to encrypt.

Card fan is on, heatsinks on, and full cover is on as instructed is near silent. From 2 feet away I can't even tell the card is installed vs not installed at full load. Because it's silent and cool when hammered, i felt no need to mess with fans, cover on/off etc.

Works great so far, no issues with sleep/wake/mounting volumes.

I tempted to get another one for future expansion, but we'll see.

I opted for the sonnet over the highpoint because I've never owned a HighPoint product that did not disappoint me sooner or later. On the other hand, most sonnet products have been great from Echo Express thunderbolt enclosures, Sonnet e4p and TSATA6 esata PCIe, and USB 3.1 PRO cards , never had an issue. knock on wood.