Cheers! I have read this whole thread from go to whoa, but given 42 pages, some of it went in one ear and out the other. I was planning on running the SSUBX in slot 3 to avoid the link negotiation issue, does it still have a boot delay in that slot? Thanks for your input so far! Much appreciated.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
SATA Express meets the '09 Mac Pro - Bootable NGFF PCIE SSD
- Thread starter handheldgames
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I got my SSUBX installed in my Mac Pro 5,1 last week and it has been running great. I have it in slot 3 and have a USB 3 card in slot 4. Smart Utility reports that it usually runs at about 43C. Black magic shows about 1430-1500MB/s. A nice improvement from my old Crucial M550 on a Velocity X2.
Thanks to everyone for helping and contributing with their experiences on this thread, especially to handheldgames for maintaining and updating this thread.
Thanks to everyone for helping and contributing with their experiences on this thread, especially to handheldgames for maintaining and updating this thread.
Took the Plunge and imported a 512gb SSUBX from California to London. Smacked with the duty so it cost about £350 but got the Sintech card for £3 and it came quick from China.
Just copying my system disk to the drive now but all looking good... Here's my results in slot 3
Just copying my system disk to the drive now but all looking good... Here's my results in slot 3
Just curious, but when you run Blackmagic, is the FIRST run speeds much slower than subsequent runs? With my SM951, the first run of BM shows about 800-900MB/s, but subsequent tests are full speed at 1400-1500 MB/s.
I have not seen any boot delay with an SSUBX 1TB installed in Slot 3 of my 2009 Dual CPU Mac Pro (4,1>5,1).
I think yours is the exception rather than the rule. I have a 512GB and yours is a 1TB, that too could be the difference.
Just curious, but what's the difference between a KVP1T00 and a KPV1T0R/0A2 ?? The latter is going for $799.
The kvp1t00 was the sought after model from November last year, they've been scarce since the original 24 drives were sold on eBay.
I'm not sure how they compare to all the latest models but they are fast, circa 1500MB/s read/write with trim and work in MBP and pro's.
They may sell quickly if not surpassed so do your research. This thread is gold.
I'm not sure how they compare to all the latest models but they are fast, circa 1500MB/s read/write with trim and work in MBP and pro's.
They may sell quickly if not surpassed so do your research. This thread is gold.
Take a look at post number 999 - the controller on the current eBay item appears to fall into that same category.
The earlier version was reported to be capable of 5.0GT/s in Slot 2 - these may not ???
Sadly I have removed my SSUBX from my daily 2009. The "boot delay" was happening to me but I was seeing it as something else. I typically have the 2009 configured as GPU tester. So all day I boot GPUs, whilst rolling to 2nd station where flashing PC and hot air station is.
So pretty standard to not pay attention to boot time, just as long as machine is up and running by the time I roll back. But I started to notice that it wasn't always. And then a few times I tried to use the "boot picker" and sometimes the SSUBX doesn't show up. Which would explain the boot delay, the NVRAM says "here is path to boot disc" but it goes there and finds....???? So then it hangs. (my guess)
I switched today back to a 2nd card with SSUAX (from my 3,1) and noticed improved boot reliability. So the SSUBX will go into my nMP and I will get the 2nd SSUAX out and it will go in 3,1. I doubt I will notice loss of speed.
Would be nice to figure out if a specific part number has issue. All of mine are 1TB. Will post a pic of SSUBX when I get it out to go in nMP.
Mine boots reliably and the boot picker always shows it unless I do an NVRAM reset. If I do an NVRAM reset then it won't show up when doing OptionKey-Boot, however it's never failed to show up from the menu to select startup disk (even when not showing up in Option-Boot.
I'd be a lot happier without the delay, but it's not really getting in my way. I wish I had purchased the 1TB SSUAX however.
Although it's not the cheapest method thunderbolt boot drives work well when it comes to booting without a delay. I'm speaking of those SSD thunderbolt ones, but I wonder if you can throw that PCI card into an expansion chases through thunderbolt in order to remove that delay... I'm also wondering if the Ssuax would perform better too? Has anyone ever tried it?
http://www.amazon.com/Akitio-AK-T2P...id=1433616434&sr=8-5&keywords=PCI+thunderbolt
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
Sorry to repost, but wondered if anyone could share thoughts on any of these questions. Any input is appreciated!
I'll echo others' sentiments: what a fantastic thread!
Forgive me if these have already been discussed...I'm working my way through the whole thread, but so far I'm only on page 17 of 42.
1. Will these SSDs/adapters negotiate an x4 PCIe 1.0 link using slots 3 or 4 in a MacPro3,1 (2008)? Has anyone tried? With 1000MB/s available (250MB/s x 4), I would think the performance would still be pretty good, even accounting for overhead.
2. While these reported speeds are staggering, I'm interested in possibly doing a mirrored setup for ultra-quick data accesses on a server I maintain (which is the MP 2008 mentioned above) that wouldn't have to have the ultimate speeds shown in some tests. Does anyone see a problem w/ doing a mirrored setup in slots 3 & 4 on that machine?
2b. If #2 would work, any thoughts on comparing that to something like an OWC Accelsior (which can reportedly be firmware-switched to mirror, rather than stripe)?
3. Regarding the Bplus "dual" adapter that has to use the flex/ribbon cable to hook into a 2nd PCIe slot, why bother? Is there any benefit to doing this vs. just getting a 2nd card? Seems to me a 2nd card would have the advantage of being able to be moved to another system, whereas the card + cable cannot.
Thanks!
Fred
Barefeats.com
Shows that they run FASTER in cMP then via TB2. His findings mirror mine.
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
Yeah, but I don't have thunderbolt anything on my cMP.
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
A little old now, but I didn't see any answers to this, so thought I'd try to contribute my observations (and even if you have your answers, maybe this will help others). To answer question #1, I don't believe you'll have a very optimal arrangement w/ two 128GB modules on that card. If you study the layout and description, you'll see that the lower SSD M.2 socket is connected to the PCIe circuits, while the upper M.2 socket connects via the SATA port on the edge of the card. So, in a cMP, you'll get nice, fast PCIe x4 performance on 1 blade, and 3Gbps SATA-2 on the other.
I'm not sure about question #2.
Your last Q about certain SSDs being x4 after a certain year... From what I've gathered here, the 2013-2014 Apple SSDs (SSUAX or XP941-equivalent) are x2 on capacities less than the 1TB model, where the 1TB is x4. For the 2015 (or late 2014, I guess) SSUBX, SM951-equivalent blades, they are all x4, although it appears some or all of them only negotiate a "half-speed" 2.5GT/s link if installed in slot #2.
Experts correct me if I'm wrong! Hope this helps...
Fred
Last edited:
Just dealt with two OWC Accelsiors failing on me in a week. Had to then do a crash course in Apple/Samsung/SSD's/PCIe's over the past three days with a video editing project looming over my head. I apologize if this post is redundant, my retina's (the human kind) are begging for mercy at this point and I really just need to make a purchase so I can get back to work.
I see most people on here say Sintech adapters are the way to go but the latest adapter I can find from them (ST-A2013SA-B) doesn't mention anything about being compatible for the 2015 SSD's found in the new MBP's. My gut is telling me that they will work because they support the 12+16 pin design from the 2013/2014 blades which is the same design featured on the 2015 blades. However, I may be oversimplifying how compatibility between the adapter and SSD works; at which point feel free to shame me, but don't forget to educate me after.
I'm also seeing reports of SSUBX boot reliability issues compared to the older SSUAX blades. Does this mean when you restart the computer the drive isn't picked up by the machine? What has to be done to get the drive to eventually boot? 5.1 cMP running 10.3. Fair to say that if 2009 machines are experiencing this then there's a good chance I'm in store for this as well?
Really appreciate any help on the matter.
I see most people on here say Sintech adapters are the way to go but the latest adapter I can find from them (ST-A2013SA-B) doesn't mention anything about being compatible for the 2015 SSD's found in the new MBP's. My gut is telling me that they will work because they support the 12+16 pin design from the 2013/2014 blades which is the same design featured on the 2015 blades. However, I may be oversimplifying how compatibility between the adapter and SSD works; at which point feel free to shame me, but don't forget to educate me after.
I'm also seeing reports of SSUBX boot reliability issues compared to the older SSUAX blades. Does this mean when you restart the computer the drive isn't picked up by the machine? What has to be done to get the drive to eventually boot? 5.1 cMP running 10.3. Fair to say that if 2009 machines are experiencing this then there's a good chance I'm in store for this as well?
Really appreciate any help on the matter.
Last edited:
Interesting... I just looked at his results. Although the speed loss isn't much their is a loss in speed. I would have thought that the thunderbolts 20gbps would have been faster than the pci 5gbps... Must the hardware on the external drive card that's limitiing it.
I was actually thinking about buying the Akitio for my Imac to bootcamp windows off the thunderbolt pci-e sm951, but now seeing your results its not the best idea. Yes, It's still really fast, but for the price of it all its probably not worth it in the end since apple ssubx and sm951's are alot more expensive per gb than basic ssd's.
Maybe for my imac ill buy the Quad Akito mini and run 4 512gb Evo SSD's. that should yield me similar read/write speeds if it works as described. This also gives me a lot more space for the cash.
http://www.amazon.com/Akitio-Thunde...38599&sr=8-1&keywords=thunderbolt+akitio+mini
http://www.amazon.com/Akitio-Thunde...38599&sr=8-1&keywords=thunderbolt+akitio+mini
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
But that looks to be limited to SATA III which is still half of what PCIe-SSD 4x blades achieve. There is no SATA IV that I have heard tell. And ideally a blade is designed for PCIe 3.0 (backward compatible).
It looked like even on cMP using dual SATA III PCIe and 4 x SSDs (standard, not blades of course) it seemed like even if the numbers could get up above 900-1100MB/sec all that traffic over PCIe bus slots resulted in a less fluid operation than when usiing a single blade and adapter (not controller, no driver or firmware involved as the likes of Lycom and XP941 are bootable & support full line of Mac Pro Classics.
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
The Sintech card should work for any PCIe-based SSDs with Apple-specific connector.
What happened to the Accelsiors?
I'm sure the bit of overhead for TB-to-PCIe (and back to PCIe) conversion or encapsulation would cause a slight drop in performance. But the PCIe bus on the cMP is way faster than 5Gbps. After encoding, PCIe 2.0 yields 4Gbps (500MB/s) per lane. That means that an x4 (4-lane) PCIe SSD has a usable bandwidth of 2000MB/s, quite a bit faster than TB2's practical limit of about 1350MB/s.