The other nice option for storage on the new Mac Pro is that PCIe cards offerin a bunch of NVMe SSD (up to at least 4 per card) slots aren't terribly expensive, and they use surprisingly little power (one board with a RAID controller uses about 8W for the board itself, then 4-8W per drive).
There's really no reason to pay for expensive Apple SSDs beyond whatever needs to be on the boot drive - I'd be shocked if it'll boot off of something in a PCIe slot (if it will, there's no reason to upgrade from the 256 GB SSD - use it for whatever random purpose and boot off a PCIe drive). Especially in RAID, drives on a card will be just as fast. This is actually a real advantage of the Mac Pro over a similarly configured iMac Pro - you can do the same thing with Thunderbolt with a $299 4 slot case, but 4 NVMe drives are an awful lot for a Thunderbolt 3 connection to support, but no problem for even PCIe x8, let alone x16.
Why would spinning drives go inside the case? The Promise adapters certainly allow it, but I'm having trouble seeing the purpose. It takes a lot of hard drives to saturate a Thunderbolt 3 or 10 Gb Ethernet connection, and it's easy enough to throw the noisy drives in a case that can be tucked in a cabinet connected by Thunderbolt 3 or better yet in a closet over 10 Gb Ethernet? Those adapters won't be cheap - as limited production items, they'll probably be more expensive than a $300 4-bay Thunderbolt case, and they might well be as expensive as an entry-level 10 Gb NAS, which start around $600. If you're only looking for a drive or two, enterprise-class drives are available in USB 3.1 cases for only about $50 more than they cost as internals - there's no way the Promise adapter will be that cheap, is there?
I concur with this statement. I have successfully used a PCIe card to boot macOS Sonoma on a 2019 Mac Pro (7,1).
This is the setup I have:
2019 Mac Pro (7,1)
- 12-core processor
- 96GB RAM
- 256GB Apple SSD (paltry size but have a larger one on the way)
- AMD Radeon Pro W5700X 16GB
- OWC Accelsior 4M2 with 4 x 2TB WD Black M.2 NVMe SSDs
(This is the PCIe to NVMe card I bought - can be found here:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDACL4M20GB/ )
I can confirm that I was able to utilize a WD Black NVMe as a startup/boot volume using the OWC Accelsior 4M2 - I went the route of the card that didn't include any storage because I wanted to choose my NVMe SSDs and could get them for a fraction of the cost of the variants that came with them preinstalled.
At first I tried just cloning my 256GB Apple SSD with macOS Sonoma to the 2TB WD Black NVMe SSD using Carbon Copy Cloner (
https://bombich.com/ - a free 30-day trial can be used for this if you don't want to pay the license fee) on the OWC Accelsior 4M2 - it appeared to clone correctly but wouldn't boot from that drive.
So I instead created a bootable USB macOS Monterrey installer. Booted from that, setup the 2TB WD Black NVMe SSD as a APFS drive, installed using the USB (be present during installation and ready to hold the Alt/Option key at bootup and during restarts during the installation).
From there I went to Software Update (click the Apple 🍏 in the upper left-hand corner of your screen, then select System Settings, go to the General tab, then Software Update, install macOS Sonoma from here - it should show up as an available software update. Remember to be present and ready to hold the Alt/Option key during this macOS installation as well - otherwise it will default to opening up macOS from your Apple SSD.
After I successfully upgraded from macOS Monterrey to macOS Sonoma I went through the (simple) process of migrating my files and applications from the 256GB Apple SSD to the 2TB WD Black NVMe SSD. This was done using the built-in Migration Assistant (can be found in Utilities folder within Applications folder or alternatively go to Launchpad and it shows up in the Other folder there - why they label it differently is something I cannot answer but it would be a little confusing to a person unfamiliar with it).
The only thing I was NOT able to do was to install a Bootcamp volume on the 2TB WD Black NVMe SSD housed in the OWC Accelsior 4M2 PCIe card. This is because for whatever reason my 2019 Mac Pro recognizes/labels the drives in the OWC Accelsior 4M2 PCIe card as "external" storage - a frustrating experience - if anyone has a tip on how to overcome that, I'd love to hear it.
eshop.macsales.com
