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MP 7,1 Waiting for Mac Pro 7,1 A1991 (no more)
- Thread starter Mago
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And Promised has announced a "dumb" drive cage that just snaps into place over those headers. It will fit two drives.
Apple has mentioned it as well, and seems to be the intended use for those SATA headers.
The J2 comes with a drive also (4TB), so it isn't just a 'cage'. It will probably be a higher end NAS drive (rated for higher operating temperature ) so the price point is probably going be to over $150 (and wouldn't be surprising to be up in the $200 range). Even with no RAID electronics or SATA connection embellishments, this likely won't be inexpensive. Which is where I think the knock originally is grounded ( "but I get that for 'free' in the mainstream workstation price". ) . For folks who already have two HDDs having to buy another from Promise is probably going to rub more than a few folks the wrong way.
A "just a cage' solution will probably come from elsewhere than Promise ( or Apple ) . It will just take time. However, the new Mac Pro doesn't really have a good place to put lower-end price point HDDs. Places where can do it; just not good.
Yes but how do you fix the drives in the MacPro? Right, you have to buy additional hardware. What a joke! The Promise solution should be included with that high price.
I imagine OWC/macsales will have an offering for internal spinning rust, and maybe twelvesouth. It doesn’t seem like a challenging project from a manufacturing standpoint.
Heck, I bet it won’t take long before there are free 3D printable plans on maker space sites.
Heck, I bet it won’t take long before there are free 3D printable plans on maker space sites.
Yeah, I expect this was done for some flexibility in the type of drives you can add. You could even have a cage that probably has SATA M.2 drives.
Apple gives people more flexibility and less lock in, and they complain that now they have to make more choices. No surprise there.
Come on - you're talking about a barebones work tool capable of being specialized in any direction you'd like: It's an expensive skeleton build with worse base specs than the low-end iMac Pro. Why? So you don't have to pay extra for stuff you won't need in your specific area of expertise. This is in fact one thing I bet Apple learned from the 2013 Mac Pro.
- Need CPU but not GPU? Keep the base GPU config and invest in the CPU.
- Need RAM and GPU but not a massive CPU? Go right ahead.
- Need large, slow drives, or a huge SSD RAID onboard your workstation? Both are possible, but those are edge cases in a world where most companies use centralized storage for their capacity requirements. The basic requirement is the ability to use good, fast primary storage, and that's handled well by the regular base and BTO options. Is it expensive? Yes, just like in any other computer in this segment. It's no joke - real hardware really comes at a steep price point. If you actually need this computer, you already know this.
Yea, I would like to see a cage that can hold 2.5"/U2 form factor drives. I bet you could get 3 or 4 2.5" drives in that same footprint. U2/2.5" size NVMe drives are very fast and need a spot in the case. Worst case, you can use the promise cage (throw out their useless extra 4TB drive they are overcharging for) and use a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter. You're already being fleeced like an idiot on the apple hardware, so I guess everyone wants to pile on the gravy train.
Agree with others, it's a bit embarrassing apple doesnt provide a bracket. Lucky for apple they dont give a ****. If embarrassment motivated them, we wouldnt be getting a hugely over priced machine that is dated on first sale and years late after the trashcan nor the trashcan to start with...
Internal spinning rust is an extreme edge case in a machine like this (U.2 may not be). The right way to connect slow hard drives (and by these standards, all hard drives are slow) is either Thunderbolt 3 or 10 Gb Ethernet. Hard drives are slow enough not to care about those interfaces - any RAID (not composed of SSDs) that could saturate them has enough drives that it wouldn't fit in the case! Hard drives are also noisy and unreliable - both good arguments for keeping them away from the fast, reliable and mostly quiet things that live inside the computer.
Various types of fast SSDs that use PCIe-derived interfaces do make sense in the case - but there are enough form factors, and the mounting/slot adapting hardware is cheap enough, that it makes sense for Apple just to provide a ton of PCIe slots and say "adapt these to your drives at will". If Apple had provided dedicated M.2 slots, people who had wanted U.2 would have said "I don't like that interface", and vice versa. The slots allow M.2, U.2 or anything else PCIe derived - and nobody who can even think about a $6000 computer can't afford a $50 adapter card.
Various types of fast SSDs that use PCIe-derived interfaces do make sense in the case - but there are enough form factors, and the mounting/slot adapting hardware is cheap enough, that it makes sense for Apple just to provide a ton of PCIe slots and say "adapt these to your drives at will". If Apple had provided dedicated M.2 slots, people who had wanted U.2 would have said "I don't like that interface", and vice versa. The slots allow M.2, U.2 or anything else PCIe derived - and nobody who can even think about a $6000 computer can't afford a $50 adapter card.
Please tell me more about how waiting for the supplier to release production versions of their upcoming workstation-class CPU makes a machine dated. What other parts of it are? The "makeshift" GPU which does what it should for anybody who only needs to connect to a screen or six(!), and which can be replaced with both proprietary and off-the-shelf parts by those who need actual GPU power?
If you can't get enough power out of this machine for what you do, what you really need is a set of screaming rack-mounted Linux beasts, not an under-desktop workstation.
People here are just funny... the same who call this already outdated, wants old form factor storage.
Where did I call the MacPro outdated? I now have 4 HDDs/SSDs in my MacPro 5,1 and would like to add them back into the new MacPro because I don't want to buy an additional external expensive drive that stands next to the MacPro while half of the MacPro is empty.
I do see the advantage of the modularity and flexibility of the new MacPro but at least some kind of drive fixing box or whatever should be included into a $6000 PC.
I was not referring to you
about the cost of the HD box, well, most 2019 MP will sell for 10k or more, I can't see how 50 bucks more(0,5% of the cost) represent an issue.
about the cost of the HD box, well, most 2019 MP will sell for 10k or more, I can't see how 50 bucks more(0,5% of the cost) represent an issue.I always find it funny when people say things like this. So what if it's a small percentage of the purchase price? You sound like the kind of customer companies love.I was not referring to you
As the price increases you're closer to your limit. There comes a point when that extra little bit is just too much.
The 7,1 will be full of EoLed tech on the day of release.
PCIe 3.0 - by the 7.1's release there will be both EYPC and TR systems with PCIe 4.0. In 2020, PCIe 5.0 will come out, and both AMD and Intel will support that.
No USB4, so get ready to buy some dongles and/or cards.
Video card - How long will you wait for Navi, and how much do you think it will cost? Not to mention no Intel or NVidia GPUs - No drivers.
If one the boot drive SSDs die - what do you do? You can't replace them with industry standard SSDs, because the controller is on the logic board (Apple pulled the same stunt with the video roms on the 6,1 - which is probably why the 6,1 never got a video card upgrade.)
Then there is the energy cost. What is the TDP on that CPU. Remember, Intel's TDP rating is at base clock, AMD reports TDP at boost clock.
The problem isn't that you can't get a lot out of the machine, it is that you can get a lot more performance for less money. For the price of bottom of the line 7,1, you can get 2 - 3 times the cores, double the memory, a current video card, and twice the hard drive. You don't have to buy proprietary modules just to add HD space.
In 2016, this would have been a great machine - the problem is that tech has passed it by - AMD is going to continue hammering Intel, and in response, Intel is going to pick up the pace, which will leave this further behind.
All of this is irrelevant. There’s always more and better tech coming. The old cheese graters have shown that PCIe 2 isn’t any major speed barrier for most performance cases, so I highly doubt 3.0 will be either.
pretty sure that was directed at ssgbryan and some other cohorts on that theme that has popped up on this thread over the last six months or so.
SSDs on the old 5,1 SATA bus? Substantive numbers of folks who have deployed modern SSDs in 5,1 era systems have moved those SSDs on to the PCI-e slots of that older system ( which in turn aren't particularly modern era either at PCI-e v2 ). SATA III SSD drives on add in cards. modern PCI-e SSD drives on add in cards. Same card carrier and hosted SSD flipped over the new Mac Pro will by-pass these SATA ports.
The new Mac Pro makes a trade off that "more standard PCI-e slots" was more higher priority than more 3.5" bays. That actually lines up with what folks were doing . The polling here has selection bias to it but it large enough that is has some useful context here for highlighting general direction of trends.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/whats-occupying-your-pci-e-slots.1614365/
if round up the add in card mounted SSD and "real RAID card' to >4 drives that is a sizable fraction of the entries. Yes, there are some Apple RAID and some internal by-pass mods to internal card instances in there, but smaller in volume. Additionally, this shows that folks have assigned money to getting their hosted drive up to speed on their Mac Pro before. It wasn't "free" there on the older system either. Part of the issue here isn't "what am it going to do with my relatively cheap drives" but "what am I going to do with my add in card investment with relatively expensive SSD drives" . This Mac Pro prioritizes the latter over the former.
The other common theme that shows up in many of the "the 2013 is bad , go back " threads was the internal Time Machine drive. A high frequency back up ( that would be coupled to a lower frequency external and/or remote one). That isn't supported out of the box but there is a path in the listed Mac Pro kits.
External single/dual USB 3.1/3.2 drive enclosures aren't that expensive. Your HDDs can't swamp them. This isn't the 5,1 era when USB was stuck at v2.0. Once get into quad (and up) then yes the costs go up.
I suspect there will be some vendor(s) pop up offering quad 3.5" rig to stuff 4 drives into that zone with minimal drive isolation and poorer thermal characteristics. [ Mount the drives vertical (rotate 90 degrees from J2i format) and "stack" them so that cover almost all of the cross section of airflow coming off the CPU radiator. ] if only to satisfy the "cheaper to four 3.5" crowd. Apple isn't going to stop that, but they also aren't going to be responsible for it either.
As above.... lots of Mac Pro 5,1 users already have add in cards that host drives. Those folks are covered (at least in part), by the increase in slots. Apple has a emphasis for folks to be on modern , fast , SSD storage for the local internal storage.
The "cheapest" option is in no way covered by anything that starts at $6000. That isn't just "drive cheap" that the system isn't covering. It is just all kinds of affordable option that isn't on the agenda. Brand new Mac Pros never were in the max affordability zone.
With less slots sure. But more folks yelped about lack of PCI-e slots being end of the world than drive slots.
U.2 isn't technically 2.5" drives. But it is more so de facto 2.5". But it is also de facto PCI-e x4 far more than optional combo of PCI-e and SATA ( SATA express aligned). M.2. SATA also faded pretty fast. ( what is on the market as M.2 SATA isn't all that good or modern. )
They have one... in the PCI-e slots on a carrier. The internal provisioned SATA sockets do nothing for those.
If some need them can put one in. If some don't then it isn't.
For SATA 2.5" SSDs. For most U.2 SSDs? No. For a NVMe SSD you'd need a PCI-e slot. Apple didn't do any direct M.2 or U.2 provisioning. This internal USB , SATA , and Power block on the motherboard could have been a M.2 slot. But that is the trade-off Apple made. The number of folks with a USB software unlocking dongle and need for 1-2 bulk archive data disks won out.
It isn't so much of an edge case as that. There are lots of reported examples of folks who bought into internal Time Machine volumes. APFS snaphotting isn't quite as easy to use as Time Machine.
Similar with folks who "gotta have" their entire iTunes collection internally local. Or other bulk media repositories that really don't require high bandwidth for nominal playback.
U.2 is still relatively an edge case versus those two; even for this machine. U.2. also probably won't work for the SATA ports anyway.
Not at all, Apple will see just 6k from me, I’ll upgrade the rest of the system by my self.
I like this thought, starting with the base config and max upgrading...
- self installed 28core cpu
- dual Radeon vii (is there an additional GPU you could put in that uses a 6pin power?)
- as much ram as you’d like
- many many TB of m.2 pcie storage
I don’t have the guts to spend 6k and potentially loose out on warranty to upgrade the cpu tho.
The gap between the standard and memory optimized version of the 28core is 3000$. Even if you broke something in your system and it’s not under warranty anymore it’s very unlikely that the repair price will be more than 3k.
The only other thing that I’ll consider depending on price, it’s a VegaII MXM since should be virtually silent compared to standard VII.
The only other thing that I’ll consider depending on price, it’s a VegaII MXM since should be virtually silent compared to standard VII.
Disagree. The J2 pagasus cage fits in there without taking away space from the slots and it holds 2 3.5" drives. You should be able to put in 3 or 4 2.5" drives in the same space.
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See any AMD with 32 and 64core 7nm chips on PCIe 4.0 motherboard. Thats how.
Not coming. Out right now. That's the difference. They're bringing a musket to a machine gun fight.
Please can you show us what workflow will benefit from PCIe4 over 3 in a typical creative workstation usage?
What PCIe4 periferal will outperform PCIe3 counterparts by a significant margin right now?
Also show us where you can buy a creative workstation with PCIe4(not a server, you know... Epyc are not intended for WS, and not a Zen2 desktop since CPU that lack support for large amount of RAM, many PCIe lanes etc don't match WS requirements neither).
What PCIe4 periferal will outperform PCIe3 counterparts by a significant margin right now?
Also show us where you can buy a creative workstation with PCIe4(not a server, you know... Epyc are not intended for WS, and not a Zen2 desktop since CPU that lack support for large amount of RAM, many PCIe lanes etc don't match WS requirements neither).
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