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SSDs on 2010 Mac Pro 6-Core

E

Ethosik

Contributor
Original poster
Oct 21, 2009
8,186
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I have Windows installed on SSDs. I have gone through many Samsung SSDs that all experience the same problem:

250 MB/s max for both Read and Write -- I think this is SATA 2 at fault here.

What really concerns me though, is the IOPS.

Random Read only gets about 8,000 IOPS
Random Write only gets about 25,000 IOPS.

Is this also due to SATA 2?

The results are from the Samsung Magician software.
 
xWhiplash said:
I have Windows installed on SSDs. I have gone through many Samsung SSDs that all experience the same problem:

250 MB/s max for both Read and Write -- I think this is SATA 2 at fault here.

What really concerns me though, is the IOPS.

Random Read only gets about 8,000 IOPS
Random Write only gets about 25,000 IOPS.

Is this also due to SATA 2?

The results are from the Samsung Magician software.
Click to expand...

Measuring IOPS can be missleading. To answer you question, it's lilely due to the SATA2 connection depending on the tool used to take the measurement.

I suggest you READ THIS to get a better understanding.
 
I have the APricorn x2...works flawlessly. I even have a second port (although it needs a power line)
 
Alternatively

What do you mean you have 'gone through many Samsung ssds' ?
SATA II is SATA II, it will always be the bottleneck but it aint too slow.
Forgetting IOPS testing, whats your real world experience?

You could also boot from an ssd in a drive bay for a speedier boot and, if youre going to spend money, buy a decent pcie card (Lycom 4x NGFF adapter for instance) and add some blades. There is plenty of info in these forums about that.
 
Pending said:
What do you mean you have 'gone through many Samsung ssds' ?
SATA II is SATA II, it will always be the bottleneck but it aint too slow.
Forgetting IOPS testing, whats your real world experience?

You could also boot from an ssd in a drive bay for a speedier boot and, if youre going to spend money, buy a decent pcie card (Lycom 4x NGFF adapter for instance) and add some blades. There is plenty of info in these forums about that.
Click to expand...

I mean I have tested 5 different Samsung drives with their magician software and get the same results. As in, I went through many drives so it was not a faulty drive.

Last time I tried a PCIe option, I had to install windows FIRST, then do a hack to get the drivers to install.

I am building a gaming computer anyway, I just wanted to make sure it was SATA 2 and not me getting faulty drives.
 
I probably should know the answer to this, but would there be any actual benefit for installing this in a machine that has SATA-III support? Because it would be a shame to upgrade and have spent 150 bucks for nothing.

Although I suppose it would still be useful for adding more internal drives...
 
I have a 2010 Mac Pro and these are the speeds I'm getting with various SSD configurations:

Samsung 840 Pro 512GB in HD bay: Write 258 MB/s , Read 270 MB/s

SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB in HD bay: Write 258 MB/s , Read 270 MB/s

3x SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB in RAID 0 in HD bays: Write 610 MB/s , Read 675 MB/s

2x Samsung 840 Pro 512GB in RAID 0 in Sonnet Tempo Pro PCIe: Write 820 MB/s , Read 950 MB/s

2x SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB in RAID 0 in Sonnet Tempo Pro PCIe: Write 778 MB/s , Read 952 MB/s

A Samsung XP941 SSD PCIe Blade: Write 992 MB/s , Read 1096 MB/s

and just for kicks I tried this configuration:

2x SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB in Sonnet Tempo Pro PCIe and another SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB in a HD bay all in RAID 0: Write 738 MB/s , Read 765 MB/s

Also, a while ago I had three hard drives in RAID 0 in the HD bays:

3x Seagate CS.2 3TB in RAID 0 in HD bays: Write 513 MB/s , Read 517 MB/s

I hope all that info is helpful.
 
xWhiplash said:
I have Windows installed on SSDs. I have gone through many Samsung SSDs that all experience the same problem:

250 MB/s max for both Read and Write -- I think this is SATA 2 at fault here.
Click to expand...
It's definitely SATA II that is the bottleneck. Even modern hard disks are almost able to saturate the bus. I have a 2TB Toshiba drive that benchmarks at 180MB/s read & write which is in some ways better better than the old Crucial M4 in a sled on my Mac Pro that benchmarks at 90MB/s write & 280 MB/s read.
 
benjobe2513 said:
I have a 2010 Mac Pro and these are the speeds I'm getting with various SSD configurations:

I hope all that info is helpful.
Click to expand...

Yes, this is very helpful! Thank you for providing these guidelines.

My Sandisk 480GB SSD startup drive is in the lower DVD bay of my 2012 MP 3.33GHz 6 core with 20 GB ram. My speeds are a bit slower than yours at 206W and 262R, not a whole lot faster then the 3 Seagate 7200 RPM 3GB drives I have mounted in the trays. Those run at 155-171 W and 165-172R.

Could you explain these 2 configuration a bit and how you got those speeds: "3x SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB in RAID 0 in HD bays: Write 610 MB/s, Read 675 MB/s." And " 3x Seagate CS.2 3TB in RAID 0 in HD bays: Write 513 MB/s , Read 517 MB/s" Is the added speed accomplished with raid software only and which one do you use? How many SSD's were in each bay in the 1st setup? Very interested as this would seem to cut my backup write times maybe by 2/3 over the Seagate drives the way I have them.

Jim
 
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SpecFoto said:
Yes, this is very helpful! Thank you for providing these guidelines.

My Sandisk 480GB SSD startup drive is in the lower DVD bay of my 2012 MP 3.33GHz 6 core with 20 GB ram. My speeds are a bit slower than yours at 206W and 262R, not a whole lot faster then the 3 Seagate 7200 RPM 3GB drives I have mounted in the trays. Those run at 155-171 W and 165-172R.
Click to expand...
This is in line with my experience on my 2008 3,1. I used to be happy get around 120MB/s R/W with HDD but a recent purchase of a Toshiba 3GB gives about 180MB/s R/W. There has obviously been a big jump in HDD speed since they moves to 1TB platters. The old Crucial M4 in one of the sleds gives about 250MB/s R/W but after a minute or two drops to 90MB/s W. The Crucial M500 in an Apricom Velocity Solo X2 in my wife's 2008 3,1 runs at over 500MB/s R/W.
 
SATA-SSD:
I would highly recommend the CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 Pro. http://www.caldigit.com/Fasta-6GU3pro/

Works flawlessly, full bootable, no boot lag, with two internal SATA connections, two external eSATA and two USB 3.0. No native TRIM support in Yosemite.

PCI-Express SSD
If you want to get the maximum out of it buy a simple PCI-E Adapter card http://eshop.sintech.cn/20132014-macbook-pro-air-ssd-to-pcie-4x-adapter-card-p-1038.html and an original Apple Samsung PCIe-SSD http://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Samsu...?pt=US_Solid_State_Drives&hash=item4adec62882 By the way: Has native TRIM support in Yosemite.
 
Last edited:
SpecFoto said:
Could you explain these 2 configuration a bit and how you got those speeds: "3x SanDisk Extreme Pro 960GB in RAID 0 in HD bays: Write 610 MB/s, Read 675 MB/s." And " 3x Seagate CS.2 3TB in RAID 0 in HD bays: Write 513 MB/s , Read 517 MB/s" Is the added speed accomplished with raid software only and which one do you use? How many SSD's were in each bay in the 1st setup?
Click to expand...

I just used OSX Disk Utility to setup the RAID 0 for both the SanDisk SSDs and the Seagate HDs. I had three SanDisk SSDs occupying three hard drive bays.

I expected the three SSDs in RAID 0 get better performance. I thought that RAID 0 multiplied the speeds directly proportional to the number of drives in the array. For example, if a single drive got 100MB/s Read then putting three of them into a RAID 0 array should produce 300MB/s Read speeds. By that logic the SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD (solitary speed 270MB/s Read) when put into a three drive RAID 0 array should get 810MB/s Read. Instead it got 675MB/s. Can anyone explain that?

Does the SATA II bitrate limitation (300MB/s) work at an individual drive level or an overall bus level? It would seem that my three SSD RAID 0 array got faster-than-SATA-II speeds, so perhaps the limitation works only at the drive level?
 
Thank you nigelbb and benjobe 2513. Having never used RAID, I was not aware that software had the ability to multiple the drives to such speeds. I need to look into this and get mine setup.
 
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Old Version Apricorn Duo X2

I have the old version of this card (one SSD mounts on card directly, the other one not on the card via a SATA cable). Using 2 X Crucial M550 SSDs I get about 600MB/s Read and 690MB/s Write speeds using BlackMagic. My drives are 50%+ full now and I think the top speeds were in the range of 700/750 or so when mostly empty.

The PCI-E card was probably THE BEST upgrade for the buck that I've made to my MP 4,1 (posing as a 5,1 with firmware patch), certainly better for the buck than the 6-core upgrade.
 
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