New OWC PCIe Express SSD and Mac Pro 3.1

Is this the info for your Mac:

Model Identifier: MacPro3,1

Boot ROM Version: MP31.006C.B05

SMC Version (system): 1.25f4

How many hard drives do you have? Where is your Boot Camp installed? What OS is on your Boot Camp partition? Do you have Mac OS X installed on the Accelsior?

I've never been able to boot into Boot Camp while the Accelsior is installed. I haven't tried using other graphics cards though. I have 4 hard drives with several partitions on each and a ATI Radeon HD 5870. I have Mac OS X on a few of the hard drives and on the Accelsior.

A followup to my Boot Camp issue on my Mac Pro 3,1 (2008).

Boot Camp works for me on the MacPro3,1 with the Accelsior card if

1. there is only one Accelsior card

and

(

2a. the Accelsior card is in slot 3 or slot 4 (190 MB/s max)

or

(

2b. the Accelsior card is in slot 2 (700+ MB/s) and the graphics card is

(

2b1. not a ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB

and

2b2. is a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB or a ATI Radeon HD 4870 512 MB.

)

)

)

Hi joevt. Sorry about not updating this. If you recall my issues are exactly the same down to GPU configuration (except you have a radeon and I have a newer gtx).

I eventually gave up - I called OWC and they could not reproduce the problem. The same issue remains - when the Accelsior is in slot 2, my GPU (other than the 8800gt which works) in slot 1, Windows will NOT boot. Even updated to windows 8 which fixed a whole bunch of other windows issues but not this one. I think it is specific to the 2008 mac pros, which had a unique pci slot configuration I think - the next year added faster slots (pci express 2.0 for all 4 slots I think). The controller is probably having issues with the accelsior in some way.

FWIW, I have noticed that certain other configurations, while they do work, can cause significant delays in booting windows. For example, I have a cheap USB3 card that works in any slot, but when in slot 2 it can take a full minute to initialize (on bios screen a driver message eventually comes up - seems like cards that display such a message can have issues in slot 2, whatever that means if anything).

Eventually I took the accelsior to another computer (a pc) and swapped out the standard 2.5" ssd in that computer to the mac pro. Of course with sata3gb I don't get the same speed as the accelsior in an x16 slot but it's still fast.

Really what I need is a new computer with modern busses, and it looks more and more like that will be a custom built windows box.

Sorry apple, but your direction and my needs don't line up anymore. It's sad but only a little.

How much memory did the gtx285 and gtx670 cards have? I wonder if it's a problem with 1GB+ cards or if there's a 1GB card that will allow BootCamp with the Accelsior.

When you say OWC could not reproduce the problem, does that mean that they did not have any problem when they tried the same configuration, or is it that they could not reproduce it because they don't have a Mac Pro 3,1 with a gtx670? In the first case, they could have tried to figure out what the difference is between your system and theirs with a system report comparison. In the second case, that seems kind of lazy on their part but I suppose they can't test with everything especially cards that aren't supposed to be supported.

I personally believe the problem is the EFI firmware of the Mac Pro 3,1. Apple is not going to fix the EFI of old Macs. The only other solution is a third party EFI patch that gets applied while booting but that would require a lot of work to figure out what's wrong with the old firmware.

One problem I've seen is that rEFInd (or rEFIt) usually can't see all the other harddrives when it boots. If it boots from the Accelsior then it can't see the normal harddrives. If it boots from a normal harddrive, then it can't see the partitions on the Accelsior. What makes it weird is that in certain cases, it can see all the harddrives... that points to some kind of flakey EFI thingy.

The 285 had 1gb the 670 has 4gb. But I think youre on to something with the efi. Both cards that work have efi (are "mac" cards). I think there is something off with the efi and/or the pci configuration. Of course it could be that it is a nearly 5 year old machine used in a professional environment. Motherboard or anything elae could be failing at this point.

Actually, I've also had some other odd issues through the years, again only with my 2008 mac pro. 1 external RAID I have (promise smartstor) has a utility that came with it for upgrading firmware etc. When connected to my 2008 (via firewire 800, usb 2.0 or my pci esata card) the utility will not see the drive. The same drive won't mount automatically on login - I have to manually disconnect and reconnect or wait until I'm logged in to turn on the drive. On a 2009 Mac Pro I've been using lately I don't have these issues with the same exact drive and pci esata card. GO figure.

As for OWC I think they said they just didn't have a gtx 670, and I can't blame them for not having one or getting one -- I knew I was on my own when I went to an unsupported non-mac card (it works great though, and gives very respectable CUDA numbers, even if OpenCL and other 'compute' performance is less than impressive). Many people don't even believe it works when I tell them!

I've actually moved the accelsior to that 2009 Mac Pro (office mac, the 2008 is my home mac), which now has 2 of them (1 boot, 1 for after effects cache). No issues but then again I don't use Windows on that computer. I haven't tried the GTX 670. I should try rEFIt and the 670 on the 2009 and see what happens.

Then again, I've been using Windows a lot lately and been perfectly happy so I think this may be my last professional mac anyway, so it probably isn't even worth the hassle.

The problem I had with rEFInd not being able to see all the other harddrives seems to have been fixed in a later version (I was using 0.3.4 before). I'm using 0.6.8 now, and using "scan_delay 1" in the conf file fixes it.

Hello, I'm having trouble with this new OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 PCIe Express SSD card in my 2008 MacPro 3,1 at 8 core 3.0ghz. I'm only getting 154.2mb/s Write and 624.5mb/s read. I was expecting more write speed out of this card as it says it should have. I have tried three different configurations with the same speed results, OSX Mav 10.9 on it's own, Raid 0 with a standard HD, and now fusion with a standard HD. The Raid 0 being the worst at 124 write and 140 read. On its own and setup Fusion my resualts are the same 154 write and 624 read. Is there something I'm doing wrong?

2008 MacPro 3,1 8 core 3.0ghz

8 gig of ram

8800 GT card in PCIe 2.0 slot 1

OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 PCIe Express SSD PCIe 2.0 slot 2

Test in fusion and on It's own

Hi superkmg05,

in my macpro 2008 I've the same situation, good read speed (about 500mb/s) but low write speed (max 250mb/s).

Have you find a solution?

komax

PCIe slots of either version 1 or 2 come in varying "widths" as well.

A card can be an x1 (has one small data finger for simultaneous presentation of data) or x4 (has two fingers and four times the throughput). and so on in powers of 2 up to x16.

None of these by definition takes up more than one slot.

Hi,

I just bought an Accelsior to put in my Mac Pro 3.1.

I have the boot camp issue. I have a GTX680.

When I put the GTX in the slot 2 and the Accelsior in the slot 1, I can boot windows, but if I put back the GTX680 in slot 1, Windows don't boot... it's VERY strange !

Wow, that actually works! I put my ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB in slot 2 and the Accelsior in slot 1 of my MacPro3,1 and now I can use Boot Camp again (with CD/DVD or one of the four internal drive bays).

The only problem is that the graphics card now blocks slot 3.

I can't boot from the Accelsior using Boot Camp. I even tried adding a boot menu entry to one of my Windows installations to point to a Windows installation on the Accelsior.

Because of the way SSDs Write their data (in pre-cleared "SuperBlocks" with soft Block numbering) Write performance will get progressively worse unless you can clear out Deleted Data. This can be accomplished on a non-Apple Drive by Installing TRIM Enabler or Chameleon. The reason why this Deleted data is a problem is explained is in this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIM

After getting Boot Camp to work, I figured out a way to boot a Windows 8.1 partition on the Accelsior.

I used EasyBCD to create a NeoGrub boot menu item on a Windows 8.1 partition on a hard disk in Bay 1. The NeoGrub configuration has an item like this:

title Windows 8.1 on Accelsior

find --set-boot /Windows8.1onAccelsior.txt # this file is an empy text file I created on this partition only

chainloader /bootmgr

Now when I boot Windows 8.1 on the hard disk in Bay 1, I can select Neogrub. The computer restarts into the NeoGrub boot menu where I can select the Windows 8.1 on Accelsior menu item.

However there seems to be a problem with the Accelsior at this stage. It is very slow. If you use the NeoGrub command line, and do an ls command on an Accelsior partition, you can see how slow it is. There are noticable pauses while the files are being listed. It takes longer than 10 minutes for the Windows 8.1 partition on the Accelsior to boot this way. Once Windows is booted, the Accelsior appears to behave normally.

Note that the extra restart before NeoGrub loads is a feature of the new Windows 8.1 boot manager as described here: https://neosmart.net/blog/2011/the-new-windows-8-bootloader/

Using a Windows 7 boot manager instead removes the extra restart (eliminates the second display of the Accelsior BIOS screen which itself takes a few seconds to show) but does not speed up the rest of the boot process.

I have been struggling through the exact issue that you have been posting about, joevt. I finally moved The Mercury Accelsior to slot 1, and the ATI Radeon 5870 to slot 2. Now I can boot from my boot camp hard drive. However, it is very important to me to boot OS X from the Mercury Accelsior. I did not catch that this apparently was not possible.

Have you ever figured out any way to boot from the Accelsior when running our set up? I am not terribly familiar with how to use rEFIt. Does it provide any type of solution? Any idea why this would be the case that it couldn't food when Boot Camp is there, even though Boot Camp cannot boot?

And to clarify, I am not trying to boot from Boot Camp on the Accelsior. My Accelsior only has OS X on it. I wanted to boot boot camp from a different SSD drive, which now works fine. But now I cannot boot OS X on my Accelsior.