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MP 1,1-5,1 SSD options when PCIe slots are full
- Thread starter ptr22
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I use this:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC...uI1I_gd3e66RFlMtMCoBtd8aZ4cfw470aAi4MEALw_wcB
My DVD drive died a number of years ago. I have no need for DVD's any more. All my bays are filled with Hard Drives, so for $30 I bought the Multi Mount. Sure, you can just lay an SSD in the bay on top of a hard drive, but for $30 I thought having them separated with a little airflow between them would be worth it. So now I have 5 Hard Disks and, 2 SSD's and 1 NVMe. 1 SSD is mounted in the upper DVD drive bay and one SSD is mounted on a PCIe card.
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC...uI1I_gd3e66RFlMtMCoBtd8aZ4cfw470aAi4MEALw_wcB
My DVD drive died a number of years ago. I have no need for DVD's any more. All my bays are filled with Hard Drives, so for $30 I bought the Multi Mount. Sure, you can just lay an SSD in the bay on top of a hard drive, but for $30 I thought having them separated with a little airflow between them would be worth it. So now I have 5 Hard Disks and, 2 SSD's and 1 NVMe. 1 SSD is mounted in the upper DVD drive bay and one SSD is mounted on a PCIe card.
@fatespawn Thank you, was already looking into that and will most likely get it. Will just see if I need the SATA power for a GPU first. Thanks!!
That's just not true. The difference between an SSD on sata-2 vs even an AHCI SSD over PCIe is dramatic. 300MB/s vs 800MB/s or more and then NVMe will jump up another notch to 1500MB/s. I think it's worth it, give up the USB3 and sound adapter and get a PCIe SSD.
Are you measuring elapsed times with the applications that you use, or synthetic performance on AJA or Blackmagic?
Hehe...I wish it was that simple. I often have to transfer files that are several hundred GB and doing this without USB3.0 would be a pain. The only option would be with SATA connector on the outside and getting those drives or, if existing, adapters to USB3.0...no idea. Thanks for the input though!!
Synthetic performance ala Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. Real-world non-sequential performance will be half those speeds or less but it will still jump up propotionally from sata-2 SSD to ahci SSD to NVMe SSD accordingly.
The only card that I can think of that would give you both SSDs inside and also eSATA ports for external expansion is the OWC Mercury Accelsior E2 dual SSD adapter with 2x eSATA ports but it is no longer sold by macsales.
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDPHW2R480/
You can still find them available used on eBay though for around $100-150. This adapter uses raid to combine the SSDs together and so making a bootable APFS volume is challenging which is prob one of the big reasons it is no longer sold. I'm sure HFS+ works but that gets dicey on Mojave. It still doesn't give you USB3 but instead eSATA. However this is probably your best/only option to have speed and external ports at the same time.
Also remember that published 'best case' speeds for SSDs are often for large sequential reads and writes. As soon as you check random, small files—perhaps a more typical scenario for actually working with the computer in most cases—you'll see that even the fastest drives max out well below even 250MB/s.
That's not to say that a fast PCIe isn't nice—I've got one myself—but the difference compared to a bay mounted (especially RAID 0) SSD isn't as great as it first looks on paper.
That's not to say that a fast PCIe isn't nice—I've got one myself—but the difference compared to a bay mounted (especially RAID 0) SSD isn't as great as it first looks on paper.
To expand on this, note that the key differentiator between AHCI PCIe SSDs and NVMe SSDs is that AHCI allows a few handfuls of active IO requests in parallel (typically 16 to 32 for NCQ). This is based on the fact that AHCI was designed for spinners, with moving heads that could only be in a few (often 1) places at once.
NVMe supports tens of thousands of IO requests in parallel.
What that means is that if you transfer 8KiB (read or write) - the AHCI and NVMe drives will be about the same speed.
However, if you're transferring hundreds of MiB per IO, the NVMe drive can process that as thousands of smaller packets in parallel - and get amazing speeds. If you application is using 64KiB transfers with limited queue depths, you'll see much less advantage to NVMe.
Of course, the synthetic benchmarks are doing large IOs with deep queues. Your applications probably aren't.
Not a fan at all...
For a 2TB blade, I would grab one of these... They offer speeds as fast as the 970, same Pro warranty, higher TBW rating than the Pro. I have 3 Samsung Pro SSD’s, and they do not outperform the Addlink that I also have.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MNKJLT...psc=1&coliid=I1ND7FDH2X572R&colid=3D2L983MRA2
Just my personal 2¢ - Pick your poison...
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I'm using an 860 QVO in an external enclosure for data only. For storage, seems to be OK.
Lou
Firmtek is still around. Though they haven't introduced any new products in awhile.
Their SeriTek 6G2+2 is a PCIe card with dual SATA3 ports inside (2.5" drives mount on the card) and dual eSATA3 ports on the outside. The eSATA ports support port multiplier. I suspect the inside ports do also, but you'd need extra adapters to test that.