It signals the motherboard of its presence in slot 4 and takes over the control of the internal drives. It does not require a mini-SAS cable connection to the motherboard like last year's RAID card. If you want to go faster, get a PCIe RAID host adapter!" But there's a problem there, too.Īpple has introduced a new Pro RAID card that's trick.
#SSD MAC PRO 5.1 PROFESSIONAL#
When I shared my findings with a professional who builds custom Nehalelm servers running Vista 64, he said, "Everybody in the Windows world knows about that bandwidth issue. for use as a very fast Photoshop scratch volume).ĥ. That may be true but Mac power users are always pushing the limits with extreme setups like an SSD RAID 0 set (e.g. Who needs more than 725MB/s? Some would say that if you used normal 7K HDDs, they would never hit a "brick wall" like we did with the multiple SSDs. We happen to know that a different I/O hub chip is being used in the Nehalem than what is used in the 2006-2008 Mac Pros, but, according to the specs, it should be just as fast as the old one. The Harpertown, on the other hand, kept climbing in write speed as drives were added up to six. With six SSDs, the Nehalem was slower than with four SSDs. The 2009 Nehalem is indeed was slower than the 2008 Harpertown when it came to sustained WRITE speeds. Three SSDs can READ faster than either four or six. MaxUpgrades makes a special kit for permanently mounting two of them in the lower optical bay. As for the fifth and sixth SSDs, in the case of the Nehalem, w e popped out the dual optical drive module and used the combined data and power cables to connect to fifth and sixth SSDs. "How did you mount six SSDs inside the Mac Pro?" MaxUpgrades makes custom sleds for mounting 2.5" drives in the four drive bays for all models of Mac Pro including the 2009. Keep in mind that the Intel X25-Es that we used clocked 268MB/s READ as single drives, so theoretically, four should achieve 1000MB/+. In our testing, we saw a max 725MB/s READ no matter how many SSDs we threw at it. This may be due to the fact that the I/O hub has only 1000MB/s toĭisribute among all I/O devices including USB and FireWire. The maximum average transfer speeds of internal SATA RAID 0 sets are limited on the both the 2009 'Nehalem' Mac Pro and previous Mac Pros. X2, x3, x4, 圆 = number of drives in the RAID 0 setġ. Nehalem = 'early 2009' Mac Pro 2.93GHz 8-core 'Nehalem' Harper = 'early 2008' Mac Pro 3.2GHz 8-core 'Harpertown' So we did some experimentation of our own and learned some fascinating things. He noticed that the speed was lower on the 2009 Nehalem Mac Pro than on the 2008 'Harpertown' Mac Pro. One of our strategic partners was experimenting with a Solid State Disk (SSD) RAID set. Posted Tuesday, A pril 17th, 2009, by rob-ART morgan, mad scientist