pcie with ssd for 2009 Mac Pro

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offtheroad

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I have an old 2009 Mac Pro and need to know if it's a good idea to go the route of pcie with a 1TB attached to it rather than try and just go straight into a sata bay with an ssd. After talking to some tech people they said SSD's are matured and it's all going towards PCIE but my Mac is so old neither option I was told would be safe.
 
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Eximo
There are a lot of ways to improve disk I/O for heavy tasks like Adobe products.

Using a single 1TB SSD for the entire system means you are trying to do random I/O and sequential data from the same drive. Generally not recommended for performance.

With the SATA II limit, you are limited to 200MB/s per channel, ICH10 will not get saturatted until you hit about 4 drives I think. I used to have a pair of SSDs on my old x58 board and did manage an exact 400MB/s with a striped pair. (As compared to the terrible marvel SATAIII controller that board came with, fine for a single drive, but easily saturated with a pair)

That PCIe SSD is actually a complete SATA III disk controller, likely a 4 channel setup with two channels dedicated to the...
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Eximo

Eximo

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Safe?

Are we talking as a boot drive? PCIe SSDs on older hardware tend not be bootable and only work as storage devices once the OS is loaded.

You can't take advantage of the speed of NVMe, so most PCIe based solutions will only be marginally faster then SATA 3.

I would consider it to be no danger at all to install a SATA 3 SSD into a 2009 Mac. You might not have a SATA III(~550MB/s) controller, but that would just mean running at SATA II speeds (~200MB/s) or about twice as fast as a mechanical hard drive doing sequential data.

Another option would be to install a SATA III controller card. But then you are back to just getting a PCIe to M.2 adapter.

Straight PCIe drives do tend to be expensive and are more for enterprise tasks.
 
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offtheroad

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Thanks for the speedy reply. Yes a boot drive. Here's what I saw http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSDPHWE2R960/
Here is my SATA info
Intel ICH10 AHCI:
Vendor: Intel
Product: ICH10 AHCI
Link Speed: 3 Gigabit
Negotiated Link Speed: 1.5 Gigabit
Physical Interconnect: SATA
Description: AHCI Version 1.20 Supported
 
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Eximo

Eximo

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Well the external eSATA ports are certainly interesting, and they are at SATA III speeds.

Fairly slow for a PCIe SSD though. Even in 2008/2009 you could get OCZ revo drives that broke 1000MB/s. Late model NVMe drives are pushing 2000MB/s through PCIe 3.0/PCIe M.2 slots.

Your internal controller only supports up to SATA II, so a SATA SSD upgrade wouldn't be that impressive.

They do list boot support, so it would give some pep to your aging machine. Wouldn't fit into the trashcan Mac Pros though, so this would be a $600 purchase that couldn't be re-used.

In looking at available alternatives, there is no guarantee that you could boot from some of the later models. Still some Revodrives out there, but they would be quite old at this point, and about the same cost.

Some reports of success with the Intel 750, but it won't boot without a UEFI bios, which I don't think the 2009 mac pro has.

 
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offtheroad

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So what your suggesting is that an SSD in one of my hhd slots (or bays) wouldn't give me at least 50% more speed and to mention better reliability. I could get a Samsung 850 Pro 1TB Amazon 414.00 but would it be entirely bootable and run Photoshop and recognize scratch disk requirements and Also Adobe Illustrator. Or should I just wait another year and see whats on the horizon?
 
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Eximo

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There are a lot of ways to improve disk I/O for heavy tasks like Adobe products.

Using a single 1TB SSD for the entire system means you are trying to do random I/O and sequential data from the same drive. Generally not recommended for performance.

With the SATA II limit, you are limited to 200MB/s per channel, ICH10 will not get saturatted until you hit about 4 drives I think. I used to have a pair of SSDs on my old x58 board and did manage an exact 400MB/s with a striped pair. (As compared to the terrible marvel SATAIII controller that board came with, fine for a single drive, but easily saturated with a pair)

That PCIe SSD is actually a complete SATA III disk controller, likely a 4 channel setup with two channels dedicated to the flash memory (and thus its relatively slow speeds) and the other two going to the eSATA ports.

Another option would be to get a small SSD for the OS and main applications only, SSDs are the king of random I/O and are good for the OS. Then get a pair of high speed disks and stripe them. In sequential tasks, this can rival entry level SSDs and is cost effective while getting you a lot of disk space. There are also SATA 960GB SSDs for around $250 vs the $600 for the card.

Or even a small SATA SSD plus the OCW 1TB scratch SSD would be an ideal configuration to separate the two access pipelines. That way you are guaranteed a bootable system through SATA and still have the performance of the plug in card.



They claim to support it is a bootable drive, but I'm not sure under what conditions. I am more familiar with Windows myself.

 
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