New OWC PCIe Express SSD and Mac Pro 3.1

Yes, Boot Camp works with the Accelsior and a Radeon HD 5870 on a MacPro3,1 when you put the Accelsior in any other slot (4,3,1) than the one you would really want to use it in (slot 2). Go figure...

Booting OS X from the Accelsior is easy. Boot Camp does not affect being able to boot OS X. You just have to set the Startup Disk preference to the OS X partition on the Accelsior. However if the setting gets changed to something else, then you need to go through an extra step to get back to booting the OS X partition on the Accelsior.

Since the MacPro3,1's built in Startup Manager (hold option at startup) does not show the Accelsior partitions, you need another method to boot OS X from the Accelsior.

One alternative is to use rEFInd. But I think that will only show partitions on the Accelsior if rEFInd is installed on a partition on the Accelsior (I have to double check that) which means it could encounter the same problem as above.

So to solve this problem, you need to boot another installation of OS X or the OS X installer from one of the 4 internal drive bays, USB, FireWire, or DVD, and use the Startup Disk preferences panel to select the OS X partition on the Accelsior. I have another OS X partition for this purpose (and also to allow repartitioning of the disk containing my normal OS X boot). I think the Boot Camp control panel in Windows might be unable to see the OS X partition on the Accelsior (have to double check that too).

Note that the Startup Manager does not affect the startup disk preference. So you should use that to boot your Boot Camp partition. Then don't use the Startup Manager when you restart if you want to go back to OS X.

rEFInd is needed only if you have more than one Boot Camp partition on the same disk and want to use the boot loader on each partition. Otherwise, you would have one partition (the active partition) with a boot loader menu that lets you select from the other Boot Camp partitions. I use rEFInd to select between multiple OS X and Windows partitions on different disks (one disk has three versions of Windows and a couple versions of OS X).

FWIW, I found all of this to not be worth it. In the 2008 mac pro, the ideal slot to run the accelsior is slot 2. But it doesn't work, so you settle for slot 1, with GPU in slot 2, blocking slot 3 - or put the accelsior in slot 3 or 4, making it work at a fraction of its total potential speed.

My solution, while not ideal, was to sell the accellsior, and instead install a SAS (6GB/s) RAID card in slot 2, where I can connect normal 2.5" SSD's which run at full speed, can be raided, and I can fit 8 of them in the two 5.25" bays (if I remove the superdrive and use an adaptor).

The accelsior is a great card/device, but I am hoping my mac can last me another year or so, and I need to use windows, so as it turns out taking a full PCI slot (or two) actually hampers things for me.

Never did get windows to boot (at all - not just from the accelsior) when the accelsior is installed. OS X always worked fine though, regardless of where it was installed.

I greatly appreciate your response, but I am experiencing an odd problem that you apparently never did. When I swapped the Accelsior into slot one so that I could install Boot Camp on a separate hard drive, after that I became unable to boot OS X on the Accelsior. However, I did already do what you suggested -- I do have a backup OS X Drive, and I did boot into that drive and select my Accelsior with OS X as my start up drive. Upon resetting the computer, I can only boot back into my backup or boot camp -- never the Accelsior.

I even opened my computer and took out the Boot Camp hard drive, and then it would only let me boot from my OS X backup drive.

My Accelsior doesn't appear to be broken, it can be read from the other OS X Drive, and I ran disk utility on it and found no errors or problems.

Since nothing seem to be working, I have gone ahead and switched the Accelsior back into slot 2. And yet, still it won't let me boot into it even after I selected my backup OS X drive first, and then selected the Accelsior as the start up drive from within OS X and restarted again.

Unless there are any other suggestions, my next step might be to go ahead and format the Boot Camp drive that I spent so much time installing. In the end, it is more important that I bleed OS X from the Accelsior.

You said removing the Boot Camp drive doesn't fix the boot problem with OS X on the Accelsior so there's no point reformatting the Boot Camp drive unless you want to put OS X on the Boot Camp drive...

You also said that you've never been able to boot OS X from the Accelsior, so maybe it was never a valid installation in the first place. You could test that be using Recover in Disk Utility to copy the OS X partition on the Accelsior to a partition on a normal hard drive and try booting that. If it can't boot then it's not a good installation.

You could try using Recover in Disk Utility to copy your backup OS X to the Accelsior and try booting that since you know the backup OS X is valid.

Thanks again for trying to help. I know that the installation on the Accelsior was working, because prior to swapping the slots to get Boot Camp working, that was working with OS X perfectly. I could try cloning my backup drive back to the Accelsior but I'm really skeptical that will make any difference.

I have been considering whether there are any PRAM issues. I did reset the pram and that didn't work, but now I'm wondering if perhaps the battery on my motherboard is not working anymore. Sounds like a longshot, but perhaps that would make it continue to forget the start up disk and use my internal backup disk instead. Is there any way to tell whether the battery is working?

Would it make any sense that I damaged my Excelsior cart at some point, to the point where it won't boot anymore but yet it can be read and shows no errors and disk utility? That also seems like a longshot.

The Startup Manager (Alt/Option Boot) is code that was installed in a ROM when your computer was manufactured. It is not prepared to deal with drives that appear on a PCIe card.

System preferences > Startup Disk, even the version in Recovery_HD is software that has been updated for more recent advances in Hardware.

It is completely predictable that these two methods would yield different results, with Startup Manager recognizing far fewer possible Boot Sources.

Try booting to Recovery HD on another Volume (there should even be a Recovery_HD on your Time Machine Volume after 10.7.4) and using Startup Disk there.

Does Boot Camp work while the SAS (6GB/s) RAID card is installed?

An alternative to the Accelsior is the Tempo SSD Pro

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempossdpro.html

- It's a 4 lane card so it will perform up to 1000 MB/s in a PCIe 1.0 slot (Accelsior = 500 or 250 MB/s depending on the motherboard of the computer. e.g. Mac Pro 2008 = 250 MB/s, G5 = 500 MB/s).

- The 4 lanes also means it performs better than an Accelsior even in a PCIe 2.0 slot (since the two SSDs of the Accelsior may be bottlenecked by the PCIe 2.0x2 interface - compare 6Gb/s SSDs with 5GT/s of a single PCIe 2.0 lane).

- Uses standard 2.5" SSDs. (Accelsior uses proprietary SSD modules).

- Works on PowerMac G5. (Accelsior has no Open Firmware).

I don't know if Boot Camp is affected by the Tempo SSD Pro.

Note: The Tempo SSD Pro doesn't have hardware RAID which might be a bonus if you want to use the SSDs seperately. The Accelsior doesn't have an easy way to turn off its hardware RAID.

To test the battery, you could create another OS X partition on a normal hard disk, then use Startup Disk preferences panel to boot it. If it boots, then the battery is ok.

You could also try using rEFInd to boot OS X. I like to install rEFInd to a small (200 MB) HFS+ partition so that it's also selectable in the Startup Manager and doesn't affect the blessed settings of the OS X partition's file system. Don't forget to add a "scan_delay 1" to the rEFInd conf file. Do the same on the Accelsior and a normal hard disk.

When rEFInd boots, it scans your partitions for cetain EFI boot loaders (including OS X) and lists them. It also lists Boot Camp disks and partitions. It has a graphic UI and a text UI. You can also take screen shots of the UI, but the saved image is stored on the EFI partition which you have to mount manually to view the screen shots.

Hi,

Sorry to join in this conversation late. I have been through the thread and just wondered - excuse my lack of knowledge - after speaking to online guy at OWC, if I put the Mercury Accelsior PCIe in my Mac Pro 3,1 can I set it as the OSX boot drive in slot 1 or 2? The OWC guy seemed to suggest I couldn't. I also want to purchase GTX680 would there be space for that too?

Sorry I'm a complete novice....

thanks

You can install an acceslior with a GTX680 in a mac 3.1 and run OSX on the acceslior without trouble.

The only trouble you will get is if you want to boot on windows.

On my configuration (acceslior and GTX680) the only solution I found is too put the 680 on the slot 2 and the accelsior 1. It works good even with windows but the 680 obstruct the slot 3...

What icounil says is correct, however I should note that my mac pro 3,1 will no longer boot AT ALL from an accelsior in ANY slot. I have two different ones (accelsiors) and neither one boots at all in any slot. I had one in slot 4 for months working fine and then one day it stopped booting. I can select it as the startup drive, but it always boots to my backup HD instead. I think my tower is finally dying, which is pretty sad.

Yes the disk is not detected on the ALT boot but it's not a major issue, the disc can be used.

Hey, thanks to both for your replies. For the time being I have a 3G SSD on the way, before I save up for the GTX680 + Accelsior.

But am also curios about what @joevt said above about:

An alternative to the Accelsior is the Tempo SSD Pro

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempossdpro.html

- It's a 4 lane card so it will perform up to 1000 MB/s in a PCIe 1.0 slot (Accelsior = 500 or 250 MB/s depending on the motherboard of the computer. e.g. Mac Pro 2008 = 250 MB/s, G5 = 500 MB/s).

- The 4 lanes also means it performs better than an Accelsior even in a PCIe 2.0 slot (since the two SSDs of the Accelsior may be bottlenecked by the PCIe 2.0x2 interface - compare 6Gb/s SSDs with 5GT/s of a single PCIe 2.0 lane).

- Uses standard 2.5" SSDs. (Accelsior uses proprietary SSD modules).

- Works on PowerMac G5. (Accelsior has no Open Firmware).

Anyone now anymore about this? Is it preferable to the accelsior.....?

Cheers!

That Sonnet card is cool and all, but I'll share what I did -- I got a SAS card, put it in slot 2, and then filled one of the 5.25" optical bays with FOUR ssds. They all run at 6g speeds, and it was cheaper than that sonnet card.

I got this SAS card: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0050SLTPC/ref=oh_details_o02_s01_i00?ie=UTF8&p sc=1

and this little holder thingy: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133054 (it even has space for 2 small fans on the front of it)

You will also need a SAS to sata cable like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115064

The tricky part is wiring the cable from the 5.25" bay to the card, but I was able to do it by removing the IDE cables which I no longer need.

Fun project, and the results are AWESOME!

Heres the work in progress:

It works FANTASTIC! I don't even use my accelsiors anymore! (anyone want to buy one?)

EDIT to add: I do NOT boot from the SAS card, as it is not bootable on a mac pro. I use a 3G SSD in one of the built-in bays for that. It is still plenty fast enough for the OS.