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SATA Express meets the '09 Mac Pro - Bootable NGFF PCIE SSD

crjackson2134 said:
I wish I was getting 16 Seconds. My Samsung 840 Pro on a solo x2 is about 20 Seconds boot. The Apple/Samsung is taking 3 times that to boot. Since I'm 300 Mi. Away from my machine right now, it's not annoying me.:)
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At the risk of sounding like the tech support person who asks if your computer is plugged in, did you say you did go into System Preferences and select the Apple/Samsung as the startup drive? I have read in several places that, even though someone took out a drive, the system was looking for it upon startup and only after all else was failing, did it agree to boot from the second choice. Even if this is not the correct answer in your case, I would look around that path. There is no freakin' way that 1 TB Apple blade should take that long to boot, and if everything else is working fine and the read/write speeds are testing okay, I do not believe the problem lies in the drive itself. As you point out, even the 840 PRO boots in 20 seconds, and it is a slower drive.
 
GregoryOrme said:
At the risk of sounding like the tech support person who asks if your computer is plugged in, did you say you did go into System Preferences and select the Apple/Samsung as the startup drive? I have read in several places that, even though someone took out a drive, the system was looking for it upon startup and only after all else was failing, did it agree to boot from the second choice. Even if this is not the correct answer in your case, I would look around that path. There is no freakin' way that 1 TB Apple blade should take that long to boot, and if everything else is working fine and the read/write speeds are testing okay, I do not believe the problem lies in the drive itself. As you point out, even the 840 PRO boots in 20 seconds, and it is a slower drive.
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Yes, it is selected but you are correct that it acts like no drive is selected. Done many NVRAM resets (each time I changed the installed slot), followed by selecting the startup drive.

It's interesting to note that following an NVRAM reset, the blade doesn't show up in the OPTION-KEY boot list. I have to boot to my connected TimeMachine drive so that I get recovery selections. From there I use the startup drive tool and it DOES show the Apple Blade. I select it, reboot, go to settings in OS X, and select the blade once again for good measure. From there on out, it's 60 Second Cold Booting & 10-13 Second warm booting.
 
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m4v3r1ck said:
I still don't understand what you mean by a 'cold' and/or 'warm' boot. Isn't a boot still a boot, can't figure out those differences by boot in secs of ~50s... :eek:
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Cold boot is booting from a complete power off / shutdown state. Warn boot is a restart from a powered on state (full desktop or recovery/option screen, etc...).
 
crjackson2134 said:
Yes, it is selected but you are correct that it acts like no drive is selected. Done many NVRAM resets (each time I changed the installed slot), followed by selecting the startup drive.

It's interesting to note that following an NVRAM reset, the blade doesn't show up in the OPTION-KEY boot list. I have to boot to my connected TimeMachine drive so that I get recovery selections. From there I use the startup drive tool and it DOES show the Apple Blade. I select it, reboot, go to settings in OS X, and select the blade once again for good measure. From there on out, it's 60 Second Cold Booting & 10-13 Second warm booting.
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Again, I do not remember your particular situation and what all you have tried, but if you think this will help, some have found success in solving the problem only by reattaching the old drive so that it once again shows in the choices of startup drive, then selecting the new drive. After doing this, the old drive can be removed, and the machine is no longer looking for it first as the boot drive. Others have offered the generic solutions of NVRAM resets, etc., but this drive-reattachment solution seems to be working when other advice has failed. I know it is frustrating!
 
Thanks for the input Greg. I've got several bootable drives, and it's not a problem to boot and select the Apple SSD as my startup drive. The problem is that the Apple SSD takes 60 Seconds to initialize and complete the booting process.

I was just describing the peculiarities of the boot process with this blade in my machine. I have one of the newer SSUBX blades with the really high speed chips. I've done all the normal troubleshooting. It's not anything that I've overlooked. The MP's equivalent of hardware P.O.S.T. doesn't see the drive as a bootable device. Actual software has to be loaded (ie. Disk utility or Startup Manager) before the MP can see it. It's easy to setup and select as a startup disk. However, once all that is solved, it still takes 60 Seconds to initialize and achieve full boot.
 
crjackson2134 said:
Thanks for the input Greg. I've got several bootable drives, and it's not a problem to boot and select the Apple SSD as my startup drive. The problem is that the Apple SSD takes 60 Seconds to initialize and complete the booting process.

I was just describing the peculiarities of the boot process with this blade in my machine. I have one of the newer SSUBX blades with the really high speed chips. I've done all the normal troubleshooting. It's not anything that I've overlooked. The MP's equivalent of hardware P.O.S.T. doesn't see the drive as a bootable device. Actual software has to be loaded (ie. Disk utility or Startup Manager) before the MP can see it. It's easy to setup and select as a startup disk. However, once all that is solved, it still takes 60 Seconds to initialize and achieve full boot.
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I believe you, but it is a head-scratcher as to why the Apple-branded drive is not being recognized as a boot drive when the SM951 is.
 
And also rather troubling that my brand new SM951 that matches Gregory's part number is running at half speed.

XP941 in same adapter runs fine.

And I have never paid strict attention to boot times. All day I am booting various machines and triple tasking, I'm really looking for screens that stay black or have artifacts.

But I have noted that even with Apple SSUAX that occasionally the blade won't show up in boot picker but will on next boot.
 
handheldgames said:
I'm booting again. PCIe Slot #2 does not support a bitruficated connection and has put my original 2009 in a non bootable state. Yikes. I've been meaning to test your request for boot times on the SSUBX, but have had some mis-steps along the way. It's great to see cold boot times from another member. Disconnecting your DVD may also improve boot speed as well.
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Was this using the SuperMicro active PCIe bridge device you mentioned in post #866?
 
RAID 0 With XP941 and SM951

I received an XP941 and tried out a few more combinations with the SM951s. All data is max sequential read/write in MB/s as tested using BlackMagic on 8-Core 2009 Mac Pro updated to 5,1 but otherwise very stock.

As points of reference:
XP941 alone in Slot 2 was 972.3/926.9.
SM951 alone in Slot 3 was 1427.9/1393.2.

RAID 0:
XP941 in Slot 2 and SM951 in Slot 3 was 1828.7/1514.9.
XP941 in Slot 2, SM951 in Slot 3, and SM951 in Slot 4 was 1924.7/1800.0.

As tested previously, SM951 in either Slots 2 and 3 or Slots 3 and 4 was essentially no faster than SM951 alone in Slot 3.

Again, other disk test software may result in higher scores, but for the sake of comparison to those considering their options, I provide this information. If anyone is going the Samsung route, I would recommend SM951 in Slot 3. If anyone is going the Samsung route and wants to RAID 0, then--although I did not test this combination as I have only one XP941 at the moment--using two XP941s might be the best solution in terms of bang for the buck.

Stay thirsty for speed, my friends.
 
GregoryOrme said:
Was this using the SuperMicro active PCIe bridge device you mentioned in post #866?
Click to expand...

The passive adapter bricked my CPU board and probably the system board as well. The active adapter boots, although it will need a kext to be recognized.

There are base implementations here it may be able to build an injector for the x16 PLX.
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/283065-asus-u3s6-lion-support/.

While this is deeper reference for attacking a custom driver in ioKit.

Happy thoughts.
 
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Finally!

Finally I was able to test the MZ-KPV1T0R-OA2 which I received yesterday. There is nothing new here and I just wanted to share my excitement. I beleive this blade was new as advertised; it came in a factory sealed anti static bag and when I checked the smart attributes it read 0 under power on hours. Initially I did a Mavericks clean install with the blade in slot 2 just to test what others have reported about link speed of 2.5 GT/s only. Then I moved the blade to slot 3 and link speed went up to 5.0 GT/s. I didn't experience any problem with this blade and it was detected properly. With the blade in slot #2 cold and warm boot were both 14 seconds; with the blade in slot #3 cold boot was 18 seconds and warm boot was 13 seconds. I'm including snap shots of System Profiler Hardware Overview, PCI Cards with blade in slot #2 and then in slot #3 and SATA/SATA Express readings which was the same no matter where the blade was installed. The final snap shot is from Disk Speed Test.
 

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edcopr said:
With the blade in slot #2 cold and warm boot were both 14 seconds; with the blade in slot #3 cold boot was 18 seconds and warm boot was 13 seconds.
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Nice results. I guess I should have went for the 1TB model, but the truth is I don't need that much storage for my boot drive so I didn't want to spend the extra $$. I've go so many storage and scratch drives, I just wanted native trim and faster booting. Well, at least I got the native trim and very fast everything but booting :). I'll live with it...

Notice the difference in controllers. Yours says Generic AHCI Controller where as mine says SATA Express Controller. The cMP firmware knows how to deal with AHCI but SATA Express seems to confuse it. I'm guessing that SATA Express didn't exist when the machine's firmware was created, so it has issues.
 

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Thank You!

crjackson2134 said:
Nice results. I guess I should have went for the 1TB model, but the truth is I don't need that much storage for my boot drive so I didn't want to spend the extra $$. I've go so many storage and scratch drives, I just wanted native trim and faster booting. Well, at least I got the native trim and very fast everything but booting :). I'll live with it...

Notice the difference in controllers. Yours says Generic AHCI Controller where as mine says SATA Express Controller. The cMP firmware knows how to deal with AHCI but SATA Express seems to confuse it. I'm guessing that SATA Express didn't exist when the machine's firmware was created, so it has issues.
Click to expand...

In my last testing with MZ-KPU1T0T/A06 (see post # 921) the controller was the SATA Express Controller but that was for that SSUAX blade. With that blade cold boot were about 25 seconds and warm ones were 11 seconds but write speed was 923 MB/s and read speed was 881 MB/s max. Would you be happier with these numbers and boot times? I was not because I knew I could achieve better performance with this last blade and I think I'm going to stick with this particular setup for as long as I can.
 
edcopr said:
In my last testing with MZ-KPU1T0T/A06 (see post # 921) the controller was the SATA Express Controller but that was for that SSUAX blade. With that blade cold boot were about 25 seconds and warm ones were 11 seconds but write speed was 923 MB/s and read speed was 881 MB/s max. Would you be happier with these numbers and boot times? I was not because I knew I could achieve better performance with this last blade and I think I'm going to stick with this particular setup for as long as I can.
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Well I'd just be happier if the SSD I have didn't have such long boot times, but I'm learning to live with it by making use of sleep mode more. I could put it in slot 2 and get better boot times, and still have 750MB/S-ish R/W times which would still be very good performance for a boot drive. I'll just deal with it for now. It is a very fast drive.
 
I have two 2009 mac pro's that I'm looking to upgrade to SM951 ssd's.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/WBTUO-Deskt...667?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_2&hash=item3aa8044693

Question 1: I found this adapter on ebay. Will i be able to run two 128gb SM951's in this? Would it be better to get a 256gb with a 1 slot card, or would two 128gb's be better for faster performance?

Question 2: Can i keep the two 128gb modules separate (on that ebay card) to boot Mac/Windows on different drives?

For my second mac since i plan to run windows and mac i was thinking about using two apple 128gb cards. Would that ebay card work with them or would i need a different one with dual slots on it? x2 would work for me as well, it looks like these cards are cheap. I can't seem to tell what cards might be x4 though. I was thinking that maybe the apple SSDs are x4 after a certain year?
 
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quite pleased
managed to score a sm951 for £261.
Not many suppliers to choose from that are UK based and the next cheapest I could find was £310.
Just have to be patient now as the Lycom DT-120 is on back order so will be arriving after the ssd
 
Im probably going to end up ordering one of these, but from what it looks like it currently out of stock. Just thought id share with you guys what i found.

SM951 512GB $387.99

Thats about $416 total for 512GB when you include the Lycom DT-120 Adapter Seems like the cheapest, best option for 512GB.
 
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Samsung SM951

Hi, I just got the samsung sm951 and already have an adapter that I bought from ebay last year.

The model is:

2013-2014 MacBook Air A1465 A1466 Pro A1502 A1398 MD712 SSD PCI-e 4X adapter

Does anyone know if it will work or if I need to get a different one?

Thanks!
 
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