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Startech vs Smfeltec for m.2 SSD

H

hamishb

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 14, 2002
40
0
Vic, Australia
Has anyone benchmarked these? I will put SM951 AHCI boot drive plus an NVME blade for user files / storage.

I understand Startech can take two blades whereas the Amfeltec Squid will take 4 blades.

Cost of Amfeltrc is much more than Startech. Worth the extra?
 
hamishb said:
Has anyone benchmarked these? I will put SM951 AHCI boot drive plus an NVME blade for user files / storage.

I understand Startech can take two blades whereas the Amfeltec Squid will take 4 blades.

Cost of Amfeltrc is much more than Startech. Worth the extra?
Click to expand...

Which StarTech card?
 
hamishb said:
Has anyone benchmarked these?
Click to expand...

No benchmarks to compare, but it's safe to say the Startech card, being a SATA controller, will be much slower than the Amfeltec. For a two SATA SSD blade RAID, you might get 500 MB/s. I have a RAID with four SATA SSDdrives achieving about 1000 MB/s on a different SATA controller card.

The Amfeltec card, being a AHCI/NVMe controller, could provide up to 3500MB/s for a single drive. I get 5000MB/s with four Samsung 960 blades.
 
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Do you need a SINGLE PCIe for your bootable and separate media?

Ultimately it comes down to figuring out what speeds you are looking to achieve and what your budget is. There are options, but if you're already concerned about the cost difference between two PCIe cards, I doubt you're going to be thrilled with the costs involved with trying to reach those much faster speeds.
 
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BTW, M.2 is just a physical form factor. Both NVMe and SATA SSD drives can be M.2, but the specs for their communications interfaces are very different.
 
hamishb said:
Thanks for the comments. Hadn’t picked up Startech was only SATA.

This one has a PCIe NVMe slot.
https://www.startech.com/Cards-Adap...ds/pcie-m2-ngff-ssd-adapter-card~PEXM2SAT32N1

My SM951AHCI came with a cheapie PCI Card but looking to add more capacity and speed.
Click to expand...

If you are lookin for a dual NVMe card, why not go with this one? I have no experience with it on a Mac, but it's the only dual NVME card I can find.
http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SLG3-2M2.cfm
 
I hav ethe Amfeltec. It is the fastest card setup you can get for the cMP, but the most expensive (especially considering you have to populate the slots with SSDs as well). It splits the x16 slot into 4 dedicated x4 slots, so you can get max speeds and flexibility, but for a price.

I've run my 4 SM951s in RAID 0 and have achieved over 5000MB/s r/w. But I've found it far more efficient using each slot as dedicated SSDs for separate things (OS/Scratch Disk/Media Cache/Raw Media) for my video work. Depends on what your end goals are.
 
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Thanks everyone. So if you have an M.2 drive in your cMP, what card have you used to install it? Locomotive, BPlus or something else?

Cost of NVMe drives are less than AHCI so makes sense to have both; AHCI to boot and NVMe for storage.

Trying to cost effectively add both.

Also waiting for new nVidia Volta cards so my son can upgrade his graphics card and I can get his old one, which is better than the stock ATI card I currently have.
 
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