MP 7,1 Samsung 980 Pro - Best Setup?

[MikeX]

I'm considering getting an array of 1TB 980Pros as secondary disks. No boot or bootcamp.

Which pcie card(s) should I get?

What would be the max disks I could put to the 2020 Mac Pro?

What do you think would be the max read/write speed I can get with them?

 

[ivion]

I would go for the 970 pro’s. Those are MLC instead of TLC and offer way better lifespan and consistent write speed (no need for ‘turbo write speeds’ to cover up the slower tlc speeds). Especially if you may use them one day in Raid 5/6. Also, the Mac Pro currently only supports PCIe 3.0.

 

[ivion]

Another route is the one I just ordered:

- 10 Samsung 860 Pro 4tb Sata SSD’s
- 1 Areca Arc-1883ix-12 (40-50 db sound from raid-card)
- 1 Pro Caddy V

40 tb of 3000/4000 mb/s in Raid 0, 36tb in raid 5, 32 tb in raid 6.

Barefeats.com did a test with it recently: https://barefeats.com/mac-pro-2019-pro-caddy-v.html

 

[Grumply]

I would go for the 970 pro’s. Those are MLC instead of TLC and offer way better lifespan and consistent write speed (no need for ‘turbo write speeds’ to cover up the slower tlc speeds). Especially if you may use them one day in Raid 5/6. Also, the Mac Pro currently only supports PCIe 3.0.

+1

The "980 Pros" are essentially PCIe 4.0 970 Evo Pluses (a shame really, it'd be good to still have the option of 2-bit MLC, hopefully they don't discontinue the 970 Pros).