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.
SSD for 5.1
- Thread starter Cuciu
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Are you talking about getting a PCIe adapter for your existing SATA SSD? The OWC Mercury Accelsior S is an option. It will get you to 500MB/s r/w, but that’s the limit of SATA III, and your drive needs to be capable of those speeds.
Just make sure you enable TRIM, as that will help you maintain performance over time.
Just make sure you enable TRIM, as that will help you maintain performance over time.
If you really want to enhance your Mac Pro, you need to jump to the next SSD Generation.
In your case that means you use your current SSD for High speed storage on an Accelsior S card, and you go for a HyperXPredator PCIe card for a boot up drive. This way you will have a speed compared to the 2015 iMac.
There are even faster options, however it would not make sense to spend even more on an amfeltec card for you I guess.
The Samsung 951 AHCI would be even faster but they are already sold out.
How much is it worth to you to have a super speedy Mac Pro ?
I think it depends on what you're trying to do. If you want to spend $50 on a PCIe to SATA adapter, you might see some improvement, but probably not. As far as booting - no difference. And likely no difference with app start up either. As far as app performance, that will depend on the app and the workflow characteristics.
The thing to keep in mind is a similar concept that is often misunderstood: a primary advantage of SATA SSDs is not speed. When both SSDs and HDDs use a SATA interface the main benefit of SATA SSDs is essentially zero latency (especially true in SATA form factor). That is, when the file system requests some bytes, there isn't a delay due to the disk and head moving to the right place to get the data.
So if the app is making lots of I/O calls, but they are easily accommodated by SATA-II, you won't see any performance improvement on PCIe - assuming the SATA bus isn't otherwise constrained. But if the app is making I/O requests for very large amounts of data such that the difference between SATA-II and SATA-III is constraining the request then you could see an improvement.
If you want to see some file system performance improvement, something like HyperXPredator can help. Whether you need it, or can afford it, is for you to determine. But for the most part, sticking a SATA drive on a PCIe bus in a Mac Pro probably won't make much of a difference in performance, if at all. Another benefit is this will free up a SATA port, so you can put another drive in place.
The thing to keep in mind is a similar concept that is often misunderstood: a primary advantage of SATA SSDs is not speed. When both SSDs and HDDs use a SATA interface the main benefit of SATA SSDs is essentially zero latency (especially true in SATA form factor). That is, when the file system requests some bytes, there isn't a delay due to the disk and head moving to the right place to get the data.
So if the app is making lots of I/O calls, but they are easily accommodated by SATA-II, you won't see any performance improvement on PCIe - assuming the SATA bus isn't otherwise constrained. But if the app is making I/O requests for very large amounts of data such that the difference between SATA-II and SATA-III is constraining the request then you could see an improvement.
If you want to see some file system performance improvement, something like HyperXPredator can help. Whether you need it, or can afford it, is for you to determine. But for the most part, sticking a SATA drive on a PCIe bus in a Mac Pro probably won't make much of a difference in performance, if at all. Another benefit is this will free up a SATA port, so you can put another drive in place.
Last edited:
The difference on a cMP using the existing SATA II ports and using a PCIe SATA III expansion card is 300MB/s vs 600 MB/s. Most SATA SSDs seem to top out around 500MB/s, but it would be good to reference your existing drive. An NVMe drive will be much faster, but you need an AHCI variant of the drive if you want to boot to it on a cMP, and those drives are harder to find.
I’ve tried all three SSD options, and in day-to-day use, it’s hard to notice the differences in boot/launch times. Going from spinning disk to SSD is where the real gains are found, for the latency/seek reasons mentioned above.
I’ve tried all three SSD options, and in day-to-day use, it’s hard to notice the differences in boot/launch times. Going from spinning disk to SSD is where the real gains are found, for the latency/seek reasons mentioned above.