Jun 15, 2017 - In the wake of the iMac Pro announcement, Apple made a point of highlighting. NVMe M.2 SSDs now work in macOS High Sierra without additional third-party drivers. Here are two SM961 in RAID 0 on a single PCI-e card. Get up to 6x the capacity and 106x the speed of the original MacBook Pro factory drive. Includes free DIY installation videos to make upgrading easy.

Looking for the most cost-efficient way to upgrade my Nehalem: MacPro4,1 2,66 GHz 2 x Quad-Core 32GB RAM I have the impression that a faster system drive (SSD) would be a good first step. Then maybe RAM and/or CPU upgrade. Don’t want to spend to much, and need advice making some wise decisions since at some point I ”have to” get a newer machine, maybe with a Thunderbolt chassis.

At the moment I have my system (Mavericks 10.9.5) on a Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB in the lower optical bay. Don’t see any big improvements compared to an ordinary SATA drive. I assume that optical bus has something to do with that. System boot is 44 instead of 56 sec, and loading a Pro Tools session isn’t any faster. I’ve been looking at the Sonnet PCIe Drive Cards, and also lately at the Create Pro solutions. I have the original NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics card in slot 1 and one HDX card in slot 2 installed. I read that those cards must be installed in a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot for maximum speed.

What PCIe slots in the Nehalem are x4? The Create Pro 2TB / 1TB cards are on the expensive side: 2TB Samsung SM951 PCIe 2.0 x16 card for Mac Pro 5,700MB/s read & write RAID 0 But they also have the 256GB / 512GB cards: 512GB Samsung SM951 on PCIe 2.0 x4 card for Mac Pro 1,500MB/s read & write Then there is the new Sonnet, but can the PCIe 2.0 slots in my Mac take advantage of the PCIe 3.0 specs? Tempo PCIe 3.0 SSD Card Lastly, these Sonnet cards, that have the advantage of using 3rd party drives, so when prices comes down I could buy a large one to host my sample libraries instead of mechanical drives: Tempo SSD 6Gb/s SATA PCIe 2.0 Drive Card for SSDs Tempo SSD Pro Plus 6Gb/s SATA Dual 2.5' SSD PCIe 2.0 Card with eSATA Ports Any thoughts appreciated. Looking for the most cost-efficient way to upgrade my Nehalem: MacPro4,1 2,66 GHz 2 x Quad-Core 32GB RAM I have the impression that a faster system drive (SSD) would be a good first step. Then maybe RAM and/or CPU upgrade. Don’t want to spend to much, and need advice making some wise decisions since at some point I ”have to” get a newer machine, maybe with a Thunderbolt chassis. At the moment I have my system (Mavericks 10.9.5) on a Samsung SSD 840 EVO 500GB in the lower optical bay.

Purchase a bracket to make the SSD fit on the SATA HD sleds and move it to one of the four SATA HD bays. That should give you a noticeable boost. Forget RAID 0 or anything with a RIAD controller in the data path, that is just silly with an SSD. Doubly so for a boot drive (where you want as little complexity as possible that can go wrong). Just go JBOD. And without seeing extensive benchmarking I'd be dubious of any RAID controller performance claims.

You can get huge bang for the buck (or pound) here with very simple one or two M.2 cards in plain adapters. And likely be better off long term with a simpler system.