Q: New OWC PCIe Express SSD and Mac Pro 3.1

I have MP1,1 (2006/2007) and have purchased OWC PCIE SSD (this one - http://www.amazon.com/OWC-Mercury-Accelsior-internal-Warranty/dp/B008961R68)

The card works fine, but I am experiencing issues when tyring to do multi-boot by holding Option key when booting the machine. I can switch between bootable partitions using "Startup Disk" System Preferences applet though.

A 2006 or 2007 Mac Pro only has PCIe 1.0 slots so the card will only do a maximum 380 MB/s in slot 1 or 2 (because PCIe 1.0 is half the speed as PCIe 2.0; but that's still faster than the Mac Pro's SATA II drive bays) and 190 MB/s in slot 3 and 4 (because those slots will not negotiate x2). You can't get the full benefit of 700+ MB/s. That's for sequential reads and writes though. You'll still benefit from the random reads and writes of an SSD.

What issues do you see when using the Startup Manager (hold Option key during startup)? When I use the Startup Manager on my Mac Pro 2008 (3,1), it does not show any partitions on the Accelsior card but all the bootable partitions from my other disks will appear and are selectable and will boot (except for the Windows options which do appear but do not boot). Do you see the same thing?

Have you tried Boot Camp while the Accelsior is installed? Do you see the BIOS cursor blink for a second, then a black screen forever? Or do you see any messages?

I received a 240GB Accelsior on Friday for my 2006 Mac Pro 1,1.

Unfortunately, it appears to be defective.

I've got a replacement RMA, but I'm starting to think I might just try and return it.

It seems 2x 6G SSD's (running @ 3G) striped / RAID 0 would give me better performance in the short-term, and be somewhat future-proof for the 2013 Mac Pro.

How is it defective? Does it cause your Mac to not boot? Is the drive not recognized in Mac OS X? Is it slower than the 380 MB/s you would expect from slot 2 of the Mac Pro 2006? Do you get read/write errors?

The card seems to show up, but no sign of the SSD.

I wound up paying a restocking fee and returning the 240GB Accelsior.

Today, I have a 240GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro (3G / 12/2010) as my boot drive.  ~40GB free.

Installed in the 2nd optical bay. 

Also 2x 2TB older ST32000641AS (12/2010) mirrored for data / Parallel's VM's.  ~188GB used. 

Everything else is on NAS.

My initial thinking for the Accelsior was to make it my primary / OS / boot drive and put data on the existing SSD and pull those two 2TB drives out.

Assuming the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro mentioned above supports RAID-0, I'm now thinking the better solution is to just buy another 240GB SSD and stripe them.

If I can that route:

Still bootable

Don't have to drop my ATI 5770 from 16x to 8x

Less expensive

Potentially faster than the 380MBytes/sec of the Accelsior

Single "bucket" with ~90GB free instead of 40GB free on one and 50GB free on the other

Can still pull the hot, slow, spinning drives out

One thing I'm not clear on...

A "big win" with the SSD's is the speed of random 4K read / writes.

Is an SSD rated at 60,000 IOPS for random 4K reads / writes faster -- or noticebly faster -- than an SSD rated at 100,000 IOPS?  Is IOPS a function of the SSD media, or the SATA 3G / 6G interface?

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Sorry to butt in here, but you all seem very knowledgable about the Accelsior PCI SSD. I purchased one from OWC a week ago and installed it in my Early 2008 Mac Pro. Since then I've had multiple crashes, corruption of files and one internal drive, and other issues like the computer waking from sleep without me telling it to.

The most obvious explanation is that the PCI card is to blame, but I'm not sure why/how it could be responsible.

The other disappointing thing is that I didn't see a huge performance boost compared to the 120 GB Mercury SSD I was using as a boot drive before. I didn't do any specific tests, but in my normal photography (Photoshop & Lightroom) workflow I didn't notice that much of a difference.

My Mac Pro 2008 occasionally wakes from sleep but goes back to sleep again after a couple seconds. This also happened before I installed the Accelsior card. I think it's probably some periodic task it needs to perform but I haven't checked. I don't think it happened when I was using Snow Leopard. I'm using Lion now.

I haven't experienced any kind of corruption except for an info.plist file in a kext file but I don't think it was due to the Accelsior (at least I hope not).

I don't think you're going to notice a difference between SSDs except when working with large files where the raid will help alot. Remember that the application will not be using the disk all the time so you're not going to see a big difference during normal use.

In a Mac Pro 2008, the card needs to be in slot 1 or 2 for full performance (the bottom slot where the graphics card goes or the slot beside that). In "About this Mac" -> "More Info" -> "System Report" -> "Hardware" -> "PCI Cards" -> "pci1b4b,9230" you should see:

Link Width:          x2

Link Speed:   5.0 GT/s

Hi,

I am new to the Mac world and to this forum. So to you all: Greetings from The Netherlands/Europe.

I did buy a Mac Pro 2010 (5.1) Westmere 12 core.

I am loving this machine and also bought the Acceslior 240GB from OWC. The MAC pro has all the latest updates. I have tried running os version 10.6 and now 10.7.

I was doing a Google search and found this topic here.

I am also having issues with the OWC. Sometimes the OWC shows up, sometimes it doesn´t when booting and trying to find out what the problem is. I have the same revisioncode:0x0010 (OWC) like you have, and everything looks the same : 5.0 GT/s x2 etc.

I did contact some people i know in the computer world and they all had the same conclusion that it has something to do with firmware issues.

I contacted OWC and they want me to send it back for RMA, but after reading this topic i guess it must be a firmware issue. I don´t know what to do right now.

Greetings

Hi there,

Could you post us your revision code of the OWC?

Mine has code:  0x0010 and does have issues.

Thanks

I ended up returning mine for a refund. I'll wait until they get these issues worked out. Strangely enough, I don't notice a huge difference (or any at all, really) in speed/performance between it and my 120 GB SSD as boot drive.

Did you remember the revision code?

What a shame that you had to return it.

No, I never checked the revision code. I will probably try again in a few months.

I will be receiving a new Accelsior the end of this week. I will keep you updated if everything works fine.