SATA III 6Bb/s on Mac Pro

Hi-

Welcome to Discussions!

Useable, Yes, but 3.0 Gb/s is all that is supported by the MP controller.

You could get an eSATA PCI card that runs at 6Gb. But not internally.
Sorry, actually it will run at 5Gb. Bus isn't wide enough. But still.

The only time it matters is where you get into multiple drives sharing one controller, like PM or if you have enough SSD drives.

NewerTech sells two PCIe controllers, the low end is 500MB/sec interface.

Port Multiplier though is maxed out now with just two of today's SATA 7.2k drives and that is in dire need of new Si chips.

There are single SSD drives that can saturate SATA 2. Shame the new machines don't have the faster version, there are plenty of comparable PC mobos that have it already.

In another words would the SATA III SSD outperform SATA II SSD if installed on a 2010 Macbook pro Core i5/i7?

The Marvel SATA III chipset found on some motherboards is slow and performs worse than the SATA blocks. Have it, yes, useful?

No. A good example is the 6Gb/s Crucial C300 SSD. It has a read speed of 350MB/s on a 6Gb/s host adapter. But on the built-in 3Gb/s SATA interface (like the Mac Pro internal and MacBook Pro internal), the read speed drops to 270MB/s -- or no faster than the fastest 3Gb/s SSD. The write speed never gets over 230MB/s on either interface.

As for 6Gb/s PCIe SATA III host adapters, the two port variety is has good read speeds but the write speeds are subpar. The only 6Gb/s host adapter I've seen with a fast read and write speed is the ATTO ExpressSAS R680 adapter. With that card and an external SAS/SATA enclosure from Raidon/Stardom (ST8-U5), I measured 806MB/s with 4 SSDs and 1503MB/s with 8 SSDs.

... and what happens when I put two C300 in a brand new Mac Pro 2010 and combine them in a RAID 0 with the hard drive utility? Will this be faster than a single C300?

Is the overall speed/throuput then about 2 times the max. speed of SATA II? Can I calculate it like this?

Maybe this is a rather stupid question.

Cheers,

Chris

Message was edited by: ix400

Message was edited by: ix400

I forgot to mention: I'm not sure if I should order the Mac Pro with the Apple SSD or just with the 1TB hard drive and then build in two C300s in a RAID0 configuration.

I'm open for suggestions.

Chris

I wouldn't order the MP with anything other than what you can't upgrade easily.

Buy the SSD's separately.

... it seems like my idea with two C300 is rubbish. I just found this:

http://macperformanceguide.com/SSD-RealWorld-SevereDuty.html

Chris

@alex

Thanks for the advice. And according to some sources the Apple SSD is relatively slow.

Maybe I should go for an OWC SSD. The only problem is that I have to import it from the US to Germany.

Chris