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Which SSD for a Mac Pro?

Ben1l

Ben1l

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 30, 2006
249
0
I have a Mac Pro 2.66 Quad-Core Xeon.

A few years ago I bought a 2.5" OCZ SSD. I had massive problems installing it. The mac wouldn't recognise the drive when installed in the HD bays and I could only get it working by installing it in the bay of the 2nd Optical drive.
The drive lasted 3 months before it died. I had to switch back to a standard HD.

I'd like to try getting SSD working in the Mac Pro again. Can anyone advise me of a drive they bought and installed in one of the HD bays that seams to be working well??

I'd also really appreciate if you could let me know which bracket/adapter you used to get the 2.5" SSD to fit into the 3.5" slot.

Many Thanks for your help!
 
The Samsung 830 is pretty popular and seems reliable. You can get it with a desktop adaptor kit included that should work with your Pro.
 
I have used the Intel X25M G2 and currently use the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro. Both have been awesome, with the slight exception of a sleep issue with the OWC drive that has now been resolved with a firmware update.

I intentionally installed in the empty optical bay with adapters readily available at OWC and other places. I wanted to use the main bays for a platter drive RAID array. I think I remember having to reformat using disk utility when the system first noticed the drive. The cool thing about OWC is that they have a Mac firmware updater.
 
I can recommend the Samsung 830 it is fast and reliable, since the successors are coming up soon the prices drop.
 
The OCZ Vertex2 drives were also sold in 3.5" format and slot straight into a drive sled. SATA II, firmware is now stable and it just works. Nice warranty too.

I have two of them - 120Gb as my boot drive and a 240Gb as my Win7 Steam Games drive.
 
Thanks for all your help everyone! So, I bought my SSD and I got a little stuck trying to find a 2.5" to 3.5" bay adapter. I bought 2 from different manufacturers, neither of which properly lined up to fit the mac pro bay cradles.

Do you think it's better just to push the SSD into the SATA connector of bay 1 (where it is only supported by the actually pins), or connect it to the spare SATA connector in the optical bays?

If I do go with the optical bay option, is there any issue with reduced speed/reliability issues?

Thanks!
 
Ben1l said:
I have a Mac Pro 2.66 Quad-Core Xeon.

A few years ago I bought a 2.5" OCZ SSD. I had massive problems installing it. The mac wouldn't recognise the drive when installed in the HD bays and I could only get it working by installing it in the bay of the 2nd Optical drive.
The drive lasted 3 months before it died. I had to switch back to a standard HD.

I'd like to try getting SSD working in the Mac Pro again. Can anyone advise me of a drive they bought and installed in one of the HD bays that seams to be working well??

I'd also really appreciate if you could let me know which bracket/adapter you used to get the 2.5" SSD to fit into the 3.5" slot.

Many Thanks for your help!
Click to expand...
What did you end up going with?

I have a 1st gen 2006 mac pro with upgraded Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors. That I want to speed up.
 
I have a 2.66 gHz quad-core early 2009 which I just put a Samsung 840 (not Pro) into. I used a Newer Tech AdaptaDrive from OWC to fit the drive into a HD bay in my tower. I transferred my OSX drive contents using Carbon Copy Cloner, and the SSD has worked perfectly. Since the SATA 2 bus in the MacPro can only handle ~275 Mb/s, the 840 drive can easily keep up.
 
I have a crucial M4 128 GB SSD I have been happy with its performance and no issues with reliability so far. I am using this as a boot drive.

One thing that really annoys me is that I cannot update the firmware while this sucker is in my 3,1 mac pro since you cannot switch from AHCI mode to IDE mode. So to upgrade my firmware I need to put this into a different computer. Argghhh.

I have contacted crucial about this issue a few times, but I might as well have sended the email to /dev/null.

http://edge.crucial.com/firmware/m4/000F/Utility_User_Guide.pdf
 
kudukudu said:
I have a crucial M4 128 GB SSD I have been happy with its performance and no issues with reliability so far. I am using this as a boot drive.

One thing that really annoys me is that I cannot update the firmware while this sucker is in my 3,1 mac pro since you cannot switch from AHCI mode to IDE mode. So to upgrade my firmware I need to put this into a different computer. Argghhh.

I have contacted crucial about this issue a few times, but I might as well have sended the email to /dev/null.

http://edge.crucial.com/firmware/m4/000F/Utility_User_Guide.pdf
Click to expand...
I have two Crucial M4 256GB SSDs, and I updated the firmware on both of them inside my Mac Pro. I just burned the Crucial firmware update tool to a CD and booted from it. The M4 was recognized and updated to the 0309 firmware that was newest at the time, and I've left it on that firmware ever since, because I've had 100% reliability and excellence ever since.

You should be able to do the same on your Mac Pro. Not sure what firmware you want to update to, but if you want a copy of my 0309 firmware CD, I can make one for you.

I've since moved one of those SSDs to my MacBook Pro, and the other is my backup clone for my newer Samsung 830 boot SSD.
 
kudukudu said:
I have a crucial M4 128 GB SSD I have been happy with its performance and no issues with reliability so far. I am using this as a boot drive.

One thing that really annoys me is that I cannot update the firmware while this sucker is in my 3,1 mac pro since you cannot switch from AHCI mode to IDE mode. So to upgrade my firmware I need to put this into a different computer. Argghhh.

I have contacted crucial about this issue a few times, but I might as well have sended the email to /dev/null.

http://edge.crucial.com/firmware/m4/000F/Utility_User_Guide.pdf
Click to expand...

I have used my Mac Pro 3,1 several times to upgrade Crucial M4 SSDs. I simply installed the SSD into a IcyDock adapter and plugged it into a drive bay, then booted from the CD .iso into the upgrade environment where the SSD was identified and the firmware updated. I think I did pull the other drive sleds out a bit to make a cleaner environment for the CD boot.

-howard
 
I am using plextor 256G M3P with a transcend's pci-e sata 3 card for my mac pro 3.1

Generally, I am happy with my computer's performance.

But, I still feel confuse that since it's performance under sata 3 is only around 350MB/s in read or write. I don't know whether the performance of M3P is just in this spped or theis is problem of my pci-e card.

Would someone can advise?
 
Giuly said:
SATA-II tops out at 375MB/s, if you factor in some losses here and there, 350MB/s sounds fine.
Click to expand...

SATA II tops out at 300MB/s data throughput per-port when you account for 8/10 encoding (as everyone should - and I can't think of any apps that don't.) The raw stream is 3Gb/s which is 375MB/s but 2/10ths of that isn't available as user data of any kind so you'll never get more than 300MB/s. :) There are no other significant taxations to consider in a modern system so you can always achieve very close to that 300MB/s (298MB/s ~ 299.9MB/s) if there's no other command overheads, stream encodings, and etc.
 
Crucial is known for firmware upgrade problems on mac pros:

http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Mac-Pro-3-1-early-2008-M4-64G-0002-gt-000F/m-p/95635/highlight/true#M28529

http://forums.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/Hang-on-InitDisk-when-upgrade-m4-0009/td-p/61617

I kept getting the "initdisk" error when trying to upgrade the firmware on my mac pro 3,1. Based on some folks indicating success when pulling all other drives from the machine and putting the SSD in bay 1, I tried the same but continued to get the error. After trying a half dozen times the screen gave me the initdisk error again and then miraculously took me to the firmware update screen. I was able to upgrade to 070H. Go figure.

Based on my experience and that of others YMMV using crucial firmware updaters on Mac Pros....
 
Which SSD?

I have the following SSDs which I want to install in my 2008 Mac Pro.
I will be using the ICY DOCK adapter.
1. Intel X25-M G2 160 GB SSD
2. Samsung 840 Pro SATA III 256 GB SSD

I will use one for OS X (10.8.3)
and the other for Windows 7 (64-bit) under bootcamp.

I doesn’t matter to me which one goes where.
But I have two questions
1. Trim? ..Is there an advantage to using Trim in Windows for either of these SSDs?
2. Sata III? ..Will I have a problem with that in my 2008 Mac Pro?
 
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