MP 1,1-5,1 testing TB3 AIC with MP 5,1

[siox23]

in case someone has trouble getting the titan cartridge working correctly under windows, one error which might occur and how to solve it, is described here:

Thunderbolt Control Center Driver Error

The tutorial might be written for windows on non-apple machines, but nevertheless i experienced the same problems on a 5.1 and the solution worked perfectly for me.

The only way (for me) to make the card working correctly was to use the drivers from the CD provided from the manufacturer, after removing all thunderbolt software / drivers from windows following the description in the link.

 

[joevt]

I've gotten the GC-ALPINE RIDGE to work in my MacPro3,1 as a USB controller. I haven't tried Thunderbolt devices yet because I can't seem to boot into Windows 10 like before. I did recently upgrade my RAM to 64 GB. I know macOS on my MacPro3,1 is super slow unless I include maxmem=63488 in the boot-args nvram variable. I wonder if Windows is having a problem with the 64 GB of RAM. I'll have to start disconnecting stuff from my MacPro to find out.

I was able to boot into Windows 10 #30 but I wasn't able to use the Alpine Ridge cards in Windows. Windows wouldn't load the PCI bridge driver for the Alpine Ridge upstream link but it was able to see the vendor ID and device IDs (8086:1578). I also had two GC-TITAN RIDGE cards installed (8086:15ea) which continued to work as before in Windows/macOS.

It seems strange that macOS can use the USB XHCI controller of the Alpine Ridge but Windows can't.

 

[joevt]

in case someone has trouble getting the titan cartridge working correctly under windows, one error which might occur and how to solve it, is described here:

Thunderbolt Control Center Driver Error

The tutorial might be written for windows on non-apple machines, but nevertheless i experienced the same problems on a 5.1 and the solution worked perfectly for me.

The only way (for me) to make the card working correctly was to use the drivers from the CD provided from the manufacturer, after removing all thunderbolt software / drivers from windows following the description in the link.

More info at https://egpu.io/forums/pc-setup/thunderbolt-control-center-vs-intel-thunderbolt-software/

 

[ampman]

@Flint Ironstag

Is it possible to build a KEXT that simulates the boot process of a BIOS by using WINE? You could then install the Windows driver and you would no longer have to boot into Windows 10 to activate the card,because when starting the Mac OS the KEXT activates the card.
I think if someone manages to build a KEXT that runs the TB3 on Mac Pro 5.1, I would be willing to pay up to € 40 to install this driver, if you see how expensive the new Mac Pro is and many of the Mac Pro 5.1 don't want to throw it in the garbage, then all these people could continue to use the Mac Pro 5.1. What do you think how much money the youngster makes with this driver.

 

[JohnHa]

Hi all - I've spent the past week reading this whole thread and trying to grok everything. Thank you to all the helpful and knowledgeable folks here, especially @joevt and company!

I think I have a fairly simple use case.. I'd like to upgrade my storage capability by connecting an OWC Thunderbay 4 or 6 to my 2010 5,1 dual-cpu 2.4Ghz 8-core.

Currently my PCIe layout is (if memory serves...):
[top slot] - Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus (with 1TB Samsung 840EVO and a 1TB 850EVO)
[middle slot] - Sonnet Tempo E4i 4-port internal SATA2 controller
[middle slot] - ebay PCIe adapter with a 1TB Apple "ssubx" SSD (from a 2015 MacBook Pro)
[lowest slot] - stock 5770 graphics card

I've been running Linux on it for few years and it acts primarily as a file server and vm/container box. It's running Debian (Proxmox hypervisor).

I modded the machine years ago by removing the optical drive(s) and putting four 3.5" large capacity hard drives in there, and connecting them to the Tempo E4i. I also have four 3.5" drives in the normal bays (1-4). The OS is installed and boots from the Apple SSD ("ssubx"). And I have decently fast storage with the two 2.5" samsung SSDs sitting in the Tempo SSD Pro Plus. But the eight spinning drives with SATA2 interface are bumming me out... I have contemplated over the years of getting an internal SATA3 controller to at least upgrade 4 of the 8 drives... then thought about a USB 3.x external solution... But now I'm excited by the prospect of getting a fast Thunderbolt 3 external enclosure and putting all the large capacity 3.5" drives in there... Thinking of perhaps two Thunderbay 6 enclosures and putting all the drives in there...

Assumptions:
A. I can use a GC-Titan Ridge card and connect two Thunderbay 6 enclosures to it using Thunderbolt 3 and it will work with Linux even from a cold boot.
B. Using Thunderbolt 3 external enclosures for these 3.5" spinning drives will provide better speed and convenience than upgrading my existing SATA2 controller card to a SATA3 controller card (acknowledging that the drives in the native slots 1-4 will still just be SATA2).
C. If I use two Thunderbay 6 enclosures, I'll be able to have 12 big drives instead of my current 8. (I would get one enclosure now, and get the second in a few months once I'm happy with the setup... and money...)
D. The OWC Thunderbay 4 or 6 enclosures are my best bet for Thunderbolt 3 enclosures for spinning 3.5" drives as of December 2019.
E. Since I don't intend to use the GC-Titan Ridge card with a display nor any USB2.0 devices, I can safely ignore the internal USB2.0 wiring that's been discussed in this thread.
F. Since the Thunderbay enclosures I'm contemplating are powered, and I don't need to charge any devices over USB-C, I can safely ignore connecting extra internal power to the GC-Titan Ridge card.
G. The Apple SSD ("ssubx") in the PCIe slot will still be the fastest, bootable drive in my system.
H. If I ever retire the Mac Pro with another machine with TB3, I could easily just disconnect the external exclosures from the Mac Pro and plug them into the new machine.

Questions:
1. Are my assumptions, A through H above, correct?
2. If I get rid of the Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus and move those two samsung SSDs over to the Thunderbay enclosure, will they be any faster than my current setup?
3. Are there other enclosures I should consider? My research didn't find any other TB3, multi-bay, fairly quiet, non-rack mount drive enclosures... (well, besides the pricey Areca ones on OWC's website)

Objective:
To optimize my Mac Pro as a hypervisor and file server with high disk capacity and fast I/O.

Plan:
1. Replace the Sonnet E4i controller with the GC-Titan Ridge card.
2. Buy Thunderbay enclosure(s) - I can have up to two because the GC-Titan Ridge has 2 usb-c ports (ignoring daisy-chaining and any associated instability...).
3. Move all 8 internal spinning drives to the enclosures.
4. Continue to boot and run the OS (linux) from the Apple SSD.
5. I should install High Sierra and upgrade it to Mojave at some point to ensure I'm on the latest firmware...

Thank you so much! Love the Mac Rumors community.. Been here since 2011.

 

[joevt]

A. I can use a GC-Titan Ridge card and connect two Thunderbay 6 enclosures to it using Thunderbolt 3 and it will work with Linux even from a cold boot.

A warm boot from Windows might be necessary. I haven't done much testing with Linux so I don't know if it will work at all. I haven't tried it recently.

B. Using Thunderbolt 3 external enclosures for these 3.5" spinning drives will provide better speed and convenience than upgrading my existing SATA2 controller card to a SATA3 controller card (acknowledging that the drives in the native slots 1-4 will still just be SATA2).

All the drives are spinning. Does there exist spinning drives that are faster than 267 MB/s? Maybe. I have a spinning drive in my MacPro3,1 that can do 197 MB/s. You don't mention RAID. The SATA 3 could be useful when you replace the spinning disks with SSDs (or your existing SSDs).

C. If I use two Thunderbay 6 enclosures, I'll be able to have 12 big drives instead of my current 8. (I would get one enclosure now, and get the second in a few months once I'm happy with the setup... and money...)

Each Thunderbay 6 can do 1150MB/s (or 1500MB/s depending on what page you're looking at). Thunderbolt 3 can do 2750 MB/s. They don't show what SATA controller chip it uses. I suppose it must be a PCIe 3.0 x2 chip. That leaves x2 for the NVMe socket?

D. The OWC Thunderbay 4 or 6 enclosures are my best bet for Thunderbolt 3 enclosures for spinning 3.5" drives as of December 2019.

They seem nice for SATA. Find more options at:

Products | Thunderbolt Technology Community

thunderbolttechnology.net

E. Since I don't intend to use the GC-Titan Ridge card with a display nor any USB2.0 devices, I can safely ignore the internal USB2.0 wiring that's been discussed in this thread.
F. Since the Thunderbay enclosures I'm contemplating are powered, and I don't need to charge any devices over USB-C, I can safely ignore connecting extra internal power to the GC-Titan Ridge card.
H. If I ever retire the Mac Pro with another machine with TB3, I could easily just disconnect the external exclosures from the Mac Pro and plug them into the new machine.

Yes.

G. The Apple SSD ("ssubx") in the PCIe slot will still be the fastest, bootable drive in my system.

Yes. I guess 1500 MB/s (PCIe 2.0 x4).

2. If I get rid of the Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus and move those two samsung SSDs over to the Thunderbay enclosure, will they be any faster than my current setup?

No, both are limited to 1500 MB/s, but the Sonnet doesn't have the latency of Thunderbolt. Sonnet lists 960 MB/s for two SSDs. Performance depends on the SSDs and the SATA controller. Maybe the SATA controller in the Thunderbay is better, but I'm not sure how different controllers would give you different speeds. The Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus has a PCIe 2.0 x2 Marvell SATA controller for each internal drive which should allow max performance for each drive in a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot.

3. Are there other enclosures I should consider? My research didn't find any other TB3, multi-bay, fairly quiet, non-rack mount drive enclosures... (well, besides the pricey Areca ones on OWC's website)

There are many enclosures listed in the Thunderbolt products page I linked. Some may allow connecting more drives. I did not check price and features. RocketStor, LaCie, etc.

Plan:
1. Replace the Sonnet E4i controller with the GC-Titan Ridge card.

That is a very old card (PCIe 1.0 x4 ≈ 730 MB/s).

2. Buy Thunderbay enclosure(s) - I can have up to two because the GC-Titan Ridge has 2 usb-c ports (ignoring daisy-chaining and any associated instability...).
3. Move all 8 internal spinning drives to the enclosures.
4. Continue to boot and run the OS (linux) from the Apple SSD.
5. I should install High Sierra and upgrade it to Mojave at some point to ensure I'm on the latest firmware...

Definitely should be running Mojave. You have enough hard drives to keep all your old OSes (60 GB each after cleaning up your user folder and apps folder).

 

[ampman]

can this help?

[PATCH 18/18] thunderbolt: Add support for Intel Titan Ridge — Linux Kernel

Linux Kernel: [PATCH 18/18] thunderbolt: Add support for Intel Titan Ridge

www.spinics.net

Titan Ridge Patch

 

[DearthnVader]

Some interesting stuff here:

edk2-platforms/Platform/Intel/KabylakeOpenBoardPkg/Features/Tbt/AcpiTables at master · tianocore/edk2-platforms

EDK II sample platform branches and tags. Contribute to tianocore/edk2-platforms development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[ampman]

@Developer

"
I have a 2010 Mac Pro with the GC-Titan Ridge AIC, Apple Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 adapter, and an Apple Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter working on High Sierra (10.13.6). I needed to jumper pins 3 & 5 on THB_C header cable, boot into Windows 10 with the AIC driver installed, and then reboot into macOS High Sierra for it to work. "


do you a a screenshot how to jump the pins on THB C Header ?

 

[ampman]

dose anyone tested this?

GitHub - KhaosT/tb3-enabler: Enable Thunderbolt 3 for unsupported peripherals on macOS

Enable Thunderbolt 3 for unsupported peripherals on macOS - KhaosT/tb3-enabler

github.com

 

[DearthnVader]

dose anyone tested this?

GitHub - KhaosT/tb3-enabler: Enable Thunderbolt 3 for unsupported peripherals on macOS

Enable Thunderbolt 3 for unsupported peripherals on macOS - KhaosT/tb3-enabler

github.com

As far as I know, some TB devices are "blacklisted" under the macOS, this just is a work-a-round to help remove that blacklisting.

The main issues here with Titan Ridge are hotpulg and tunneling.

Hotplug should be a matter of ACPI tables, we should be able to create a sddt patch to deal with that issue, but it would be specific to the PCI-E slot the card was in, tho a relatively trivial matter to edit it for your preferred slot.

Tunneling is another matter, people are booting Windows to set that up now, tho I've started work on this project, so we'll see what can be done.

 

[cdf]

There is also this:

GitHub - osy/ThunderboltReset: Reset and disable Thunderbolt ICM

Reset and disable Thunderbolt ICM. Contribute to osy/ThunderboltReset development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[DearthnVader]

There is also this:

GitHub - osy/ThunderboltReset: Reset and disable Thunderbolt ICM

Reset and disable Thunderbolt ICM. Contribute to osy/ThunderboltReset development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

That was made for Alpine Ridge, but could be of some use as we learn more.

 

[joevt]

do you a a screenshot how to jump the pins on THB C Header ?

#58

 

[Logix1]

What about the Apple I/O card from the Mac Pro 7,1? will it work the same (or better) than the Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge?
The Apple I/O card can be ordered from Apple.

 

[DearthnVader]

What about the Apple I/O card from the Mac Pro 7,1? will it work the same (or better) than the Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge?
The Apple I/O card can be ordered from Apple.

The Apple I/O card has an extra bunch of pins on the PCI-E connector at the rear that only the 7,1 has a slot for.

It's likely just a dumb card anyway, more like the Alpine Ridge "riser" cards, maybe it has a few switches, but it likely lacks a true Thunderbolt 3 controller like the Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge cards have.

Meaning, it's likely taking it's TB from the chipset on the logic board.

 

[ampman]

What about the Apple I/O card from the Mac Pro 7,1? will it work the same (or better) than the Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge?
The Apple I/O card can be ordered from Apple.

i think you can´t buy it. only replace. you must send the old back to apple.

 

[joevt]

It's likely just a dumb card anyway, more like the Alpine Ridge "riser" cards, maybe it has a few switches, but it likely lacks a true Thunderbolt 3 controller like the Gigabyte GC-Titan Ridge cards have.

Meaning, it's likely taking it's TB from the chipset on the logic board.

I believe the I/O card has a Titan Ridge controller (it has to be near the USB-C ports, plus there's no Titan Ridge controllers on the main board of the MacMini7,1 shown in the iFixit teardown pictures (they have pictures that are 6384x4788 pixels).

The other pins on the I/O card are probably similar to the extra connections on a GC-TITAN RIDGE: two USB 2.0 connections, two DisplayPort 1.4 connections, extra power, and Thunderbolt header connection. There's probably also two USB 3.0/USB 2.0 connections for the USB-A ports of the I/O card.

All that means is there is no compelling reason to try the I/O card in a cMP because there's no adapter to connect all the other stuff to the extra pins of the I/O card connector.

 

[ampman]

i cross my figer on a KEXT.@joevt

????????????

i do a donation of 40€ if someone do the KEXT.

 

[ampman]

wath is this?

HaC-Mini/Thunderbolt at master · osy/HaC-Mini

Intel NUC Hades Canyon Hackintosh support. Contribute to osy/HaC-Mini development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[John Seput]

How was the Thunderbolt card not being seen resolved in windows?


MAC 4,1 - 5,1

Windows 10 1090 installed on its own drive

Titan Card not seen. Please advise it you can.

RX580 slot 1
Titan Ridge slot 2
Sonnet FW card slot 3
Lynx AES16-PCIE slot 4

 

[ampman]

How was the Thunderbolt card not being seen resolved in windows?


MAC 4,1 - 5,1

Windows 10 1090 installed on its own drive

Titan Card not seen. Please advise it you can.

RX580 slot 1
Titan Ridge slot 2
Sonnet FW card slot 3
Lynx AES16-PCIE slot 4

do you have done this ?

testing TB3 AIC with MP 5,1

Here's a picture of the simplest way to do the jumping as suggested by https://egpu.io/forums/thunderbolt-enclosures/list-of-intel-titan-ridge-thunderbolt-3-devices/paged/3/#post-44262 I would test the difference using pcitree.sh with and without the jumper after a cold boot. Here's a test...

forums.macrumors.com

Jumper

 

[joevt]

wath is this?

HaC-Mini/Thunderbolt at master · osy/HaC-Mini

Intel NUC Hades Canyon Hackintosh support. Contribute to osy/HaC-Mini development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

That folder contains patches to the NVM firmware of the thunderbolt controller in the Intel NUC Hades Canyon for purpose of Hackintosh. It might be applicable to non-Hackintosh (depends if Thunderbolt add-in card is similar to built in Thunderbolt controller if the NUC or not).
The macOS Thunderbolt firmware patcher is at https://github.com/osy86/ThunderboltPatcher
The cMP doesn't have the ACPI stuff that the tbpatch command needs to find devices.

 

[NoLemon]

In order to get the THB card recognised in MacOs, is it possible, that by the "cold warm booting process" kills the EFI chip faster ?

In other words, choosing twice a different Start Volume on every Start writes every time something time into the EFI so the Flash memory wears out faster ?

 

[tsialex]

In order to get the THB card recognised in MacOs, is it possible, that by the "cold warm booting process" kills the EFI chip faster ?

In other words, choosing twice a different Start Volume on every Start writes every time something time into the EFI so the Flash memory wears out faster ?

Every time you change a bit inside the NVRAM, a whole 4KB block is erased/written since it's a sectorized/block storage flash memory. After all these years, the 100k rated erase/write cycles wears off.

http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/20005071B.pdf

The problem is not changing the default boot drive, but everything that is written frequently inside the NVRAM, like Wi-Fi credentials for example. Every time you add a new Wi-Fi credential to your iCloud account, this is written inside the NVRAM. Apple shouldn't do this for desktop Macs…

In reality, it's not just one culprit, but the whole combo of diverse things writing inside the NVRAM that wears the SPI flash over the years. Whenever I have to desolder a SPI flash from the backplane, I solder back a brand new memory.