The latter choice might be good news for owners of the unsupported 3,1 for achieving APFS support.
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Will there be NVME booting EFI for 2010+ Mac Pro on High Sierra?
- Thread starter darkgoob
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Which sadly did not include support for booting from NVME M.2 PCIe SSDs
So am I correct in saying that NVME M.2 modules are ok as data only volumes on 10.13? Is it also true with the current 10.12.6 build?
I can only speak for 10.12.6, but you can only use NVMe for data only (it's not bootable - yet hopefully). I have my NVMe in a Fusion Drive with a HDD with all my User data on it, and it works perfectly. Only pain is having to curate and install a kext to allow NVMe to be seen by the system. Fingers crossed 10.13 may allow native support for NVMe drives.
FWIW, I don't have any intentions right now of replacing mine. I bought it new in 2013, dual Xeon 3.06, 128GB RAM, 4 spindle disks, 2 512 SSDs, USB3, and a GTX980 GPU, with two Apple Cinema Displays. Runs Windows, OS X, and *nix just fine natively, and I am very happy with it. Knock on wood, not a single issue.
Overall I have been very pleased with all of my Apple purchases. Granted since they chose to go down the non-upgradable path with the new notebooks and iMacs, I have not purchased anything recent, but I have a MacBook Pro 13" Mid 2012, 16GB, i7, 512 SSD, Mid 2012 MacBook Pro 15" i7 16GB, 512 SSD, and an Early 2013 MacBook Pro with Retina Display, i7, 16GB, 512SSD. Only issue so far is the Retina did have a fuse blow that powered the backlight that I had a friend repair for a very reasonable price. I know SATA3 technology is old now, but I am still very pleased with the performance and the quality of the now aging batteries in them still being able to hold a good charge after many cycles. I was able to get Thunderbolt, USB3, SuperDrives, FW800, and 1GbE on two of the three MacBooks which was featured I wanted and use. The Mac Pro was a big investment at the time but it was for work and has done me very well. Runs 24/7 without a hiccup. I am sure the more time I spend in front of 4K+ displays the LED Cinema Displays will look dated, but I try to stay away from them
Also, remote work other than Terminal sessions do not scale or perform the best on the Hi DPI displays over a mediocre internet connection on the remote end.
I was pleased to discover that High Sierra performs better than any version of OS X to date on the Early 2013 Retina MacBook Pro in regards to a smooth GUI. I was anticipating the opposite as that has been a mild complaint from some users since the Retina was introduced, but they are indeed continuing to improve the experience on older models. Not sure the rational behind removing Telnet, though. People who use it for troubleshooting are fully aware it is an insecure protocol and do not send credentials across insecure networks using Telnet, and it is a valuable tool for troubleshooting many networking issues. So far I just have to put it back from the current Sierra build and it works fine, but it seems like an unnecessary step.
Now if they would build higher quality power and Lightning cables and stop trying to minimalize EVERYTHING!
Also, with Microsoft pushing the subscription model down everyone's throats is pushing me more to OS X. At least Microsoft is offering both options, but I foresee that coming to an end soon. The NT Kernel and Darwin are extremely stable, so both manufacturers have that ironed out for the most part. VMware has too in their vertical and has always made a high quality product before it was even intended for data centers. The direction the large companies are going is a little uneasy as they are essentially fighting for your data and before long insist they sit on it and manage it entirely.
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This is what differentiates Apple for me. I've bought many, many electronic/computing devices in my time, and in hindsight have regretted wasting the money on a lot of them. But I don't think there's ever been a piece of Apple gear I have regretted buying.
I had installed MAC OSX High Sierra beta in my MAC PRO MID 2010 and was necessary an online firmware upgrade. Now I have firmware:
Boot ROM Version: MP51.0084.B00
In the begin of September I will receive 2 of Samsung 960 EVO Series - 500GB NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V6E500BW) and 2 of Lycom DT-120 M.2 PCIe to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter (Support M.2 PCIe 2280, 2260, 2242). I will test this configuration with one board and two boards in RAID0 to see if my MAC PRO can boot from NVMe SSD from a PCI slot board and will post results here.
Regards Marcos Silva
Update OCT 13 2017
Installed both NVMe SSD in two Lycon adapter and install it in slot 3 and 4. Working very well for data only. Impossible to boot from. EFI BIOS do not see NVMe adapter during boot. NVMe is only available after MAC OSX load properly drivers.
Another very interesting point : If I install a NVMe board in slot 2, the slot speed is downgraded from 5 Gb/sec to 2.5 Gp/sec . Only in slot 3 and 4 maintain the PCIe slot speed in full 5 Gb/sec. But, slot 3 and 4 share the same lane to CPU so, the total aggregate speed is limited to 5 Gb/sec.
Appreciate comments.
Boot ROM Version: MP51.0084.B00
In the begin of September I will receive 2 of Samsung 960 EVO Series - 500GB NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V6E500BW) and 2 of Lycom DT-120 M.2 PCIe to PCIe 3.0 x4 Adapter (Support M.2 PCIe 2280, 2260, 2242). I will test this configuration with one board and two boards in RAID0 to see if my MAC PRO can boot from NVMe SSD from a PCI slot board and will post results here.
Regards Marcos Silva
Update OCT 13 2017
Installed both NVMe SSD in two Lycon adapter and install it in slot 3 and 4. Working very well for data only. Impossible to boot from. EFI BIOS do not see NVMe adapter during boot. NVMe is only available after MAC OSX load properly drivers.
Another very interesting point : If I install a NVMe board in slot 2, the slot speed is downgraded from 5 Gb/sec to 2.5 Gp/sec . Only in slot 3 and 4 maintain the PCIe slot speed in full 5 Gb/sec. But, slot 3 and 4 share the same lane to CPU so, the total aggregate speed is limited to 5 Gb/sec.
Appreciate comments.
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It seems like everything is getting SMC or EFI updates. My MacBook Pro just upgraded from a previous build of 10.13 to Beta 7 and received an SMC or EFI update. Since I don't have the previous values recorded, I am not sure what versions changed. I do recall there being a "Payloads" (or something similar) that is included in the install image, but I can't recall where it is. If anyone recalls, it would be good to know to see what is changing.
That is one thing I wish Apple had a solution in place for: downgrading firmware/EFI in the event it breaks something. There may be a way and it may be simple, but I imagine one would have to did through forums to find it. Fortunately, I have not had a need for it, but on the "other" side, I use ThinkPad notebooks exclusively. They do provide a long history of their firmware updates if they are needed for a specific purpose, as seen in the attachment. The list goes on beyond the screenshot!
Attachments
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How about a scenario like this:
A PCI caddy that has slots for two M.2 ports.
One is with an AHCI SSD, the other with an NVMe SSD. Make the AHCI as boot drive, boot and then create a Fusion drive from both. Would this work? I'm asking this knowing that there is almost no noticable application launch and boot speed boost with M.2 drives over regular SATA3 SSD's, but, when working with large video files, the 256 GB AHCI Drive does fill up quite quickly - 512GB SM951 are REALLY Expensive and regular 256GB AHCI's are still much more expensive and rare compared to more common NVMe SSDs.
A PCI caddy that has slots for two M.2 ports.
One is with an AHCI SSD, the other with an NVMe SSD. Make the AHCI as boot drive, boot and then create a Fusion drive from both. Would this work? I'm asking this knowing that there is almost no noticable application launch and boot speed boost with M.2 drives over regular SATA3 SSD's, but, when working with large video files, the 256 GB AHCI Drive does fill up quite quickly - 512GB SM951 are REALLY Expensive and regular 256GB AHCI's are still much more expensive and rare compared to more common NVMe SSDs.
Why make it so complicated?
Just install a 500GB or 1TB 960 Evo and then use it for video editing. No need to boot from it.
If fact, it's better practice to separate the working drive from OS.
You might be right. My idea to do this specifically this way was because I already have 4 drives with data to manage manually and another one to use as a sratch disk for this would be ANOTHER thing to manage manually. I thought that maybe Fusion could make my life a bit easier.
this will actually become less commonplace as time goes on due to EFI exploits. Ive seen several manufacturers lock out downgrades after a certain version due to patched EFI exploits.
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if you've got that many drives and need to squeeze more performance or easier management out of them I'd go with a raid controller over putting that many drives into a fusion cluster drive. it's basically the same as putting your drives into a striped raid 0 array with no failure protection.
You know there is an NVME driver for EDK, clover bootloader uses it. By booting Clover it allows booting from NVME drives. It may work for the cMP, you'll just need a EFI Shell to load it and test.
Never ceases to amaze me that boot screens for PC video cards, and booting from NVME seem to be popular topics, yet when someone tries to point out how you should be able to do that on a cMP, really no one seems to care.
If you're waiting on Apple to enable these features for you, I wouldn't hold my breath. One of these days I'll get an old cMP and have these things working, then I'll inject them into the boot rom, and release a firmware upgrade for everyone, but if you're waiting on me to make it that easy for you, again, don't hold your breath.
Never ceases to amaze me that boot screens for PC video cards, and booting from NVME seem to be popular topics, yet when someone tries to point out how you should be able to do that on a cMP, really no one seems to care.
If you're waiting on Apple to enable these features for you, I wouldn't hold my breath. One of these days I'll get an old cMP and have these things working, then I'll inject them into the boot rom, and release a firmware upgrade for everyone, but if you're waiting on me to make it that easy for you, again, don't hold your breath.
I would guess people that still have these machines rely on them as their main workhorses, just like I do. With limited experience in such hacking, it would be a big risk in bricking our machines without the know-how to bring them back to life (and work) as fast as possible. If you are, like you say willing and able to release such a hack to the public, that would allow many many people to benefit from it, how about you take it more seriously, ask for donations (money or someone might donate a machine) for the project and go ahead and do it
This post just make people feel de-moralized. Yes, some might not be as smart as you in this field, but that doesn't give you bragging rights or to be rude about it.
I would guess people that still have these machines rely on them as their main workhorses, just like I do. With limited experience in such hacking, it would be a big risk in bricking our machines without the know-how to bring them back to life (and work) as fast as possible. If you are, like you say willing and able to release such a hack to the public, that would allow many many people to benefit from it, how about you take it more seriously, ask for donations (money or someone might donate a machine) for the project and go ahead and do it
This post just make people feel de-moralized. Yes, some might not be as smart as you in this field, but that doesn't give you bragging rights or to be rude about it.
Wan't trying to be rude, or brag, just pointing out that if you want these things, you have to be willing to test them to see how they work.
Wanna try Clover? One of the theory is a cMP can boot from NVMe or USB 3.0 by using Clover. The required driver should be there.
Yup. I'm interested. I'll be following this thread religiously. Additionally, Does anyone know how to make default install locations and make it so that all your personal documents, folders, etc are stored on the external NVMe? I am trying to get the same performance from the chip despite not having it as the main boot drive.
-Thanks!
Is it me, or has someone been editing this thread?
EDIT:False alarm, so many topics on the same subject, I just got them confused.
EDIT:False alarm, so many topics on the same subject, I just got them confused.
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So, I take it that cMP did not get NVMe booting in High Sierra? Not even the last 2012 model of cMP?
It’s all good. I ended up just tossing a 1TB Samsung Evo in there, and it’s fast enough to hold me over until the 2018 MP.
Might even just get iMac Pro.
It’s all good. I ended up just tossing a 1TB Samsung Evo in there, and it’s fast enough to hold me over until the 2018 MP.
Might even just get iMac Pro.
Apple's not going to update the firmware to support NVME booting on a system that didn't ship with a known controller. There are just too many PCI-E cards, and too many drive combinations, it's a support nightmare for them if someone's combo doesn't work, or they lose data due to a bug in the driver.