SATA III With Mac Pro 2008

Hello Daniele,

Just as a matter of interest, what speeds are you getting with the single drive? They should be very impressive.

Leo

Executive summary: Most regular commercially-available drives you buy new today will install and work fine. It IS worthwhile to pay extra for a drive with a bigger buffer, but do not pay EXTRA for SATA-3 alone, it is all specsmanship.

If you buy a weird older drive, or you have a really old Mac, it may not work properly. [WD Raptors and VelociRaptors work fine.]

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RE: SATA Bus speed:

Rotating drives available today, whatever their SATA spec, can source data off the spinning platters no faster than about 125MBytes/sec.

SATA 3 is rated at 6G bits/sec, which theoretically is about 750 Mega Bytes/sec

SATA 2 is rated at 3G bits/sec, which is theoretically about 375 Mega Bytes/sec

SATA 1 is rated at 1.5G bits/sec, which is theoretically about 187.5 Meg Bytes/sec

None of the SATA Busses is a bottleneck for consumer Rotating drives you can buy today. Trying to speed up the SATA Bus will not provide any real-world performance increases for Rotating Drives.

Even most common SSD drives are not bottlenecked by SATA 2.

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If you put the drives on a PCIe card, they are not bottlenecked by the SATA on the card either, as it will typically be SATA 3.

But unless you have the very fastest SATA drives available, you are in no danger of having the existing main SATA 2 Bus in your Mac Pro slow you down. The card is only needed for the fastest SSD drives available today, and will not provide much current speed improvement even in that case.

Thanks Leo

I have also just dropped one of these Caldigit cards in my Mac Pro 2008 3,1 but not hooked anything up to it yet.

At the same time I am trying to install an Apricon Velocity X2 card with a MacSales SSD mounted on it.

I have tried clean installing OS X 10.8.4 onto the SSD and cloning with CCC and Super-Duper, but it won't boot.

Anyone successfully using the Apricorn and Caldigit cards in their Mac Pro?

I have an ATO 5770 Mac GPU in the bottom slot, then Apricorn, then Caldigit. Slowest slot at the top is empty.

Maybe I should switch slots? Remove the Caldigit card?

Cheers

Hamish

Hi

I just purchased the SOlo v2 card last week and i installed it yesterday in my Mac Pro late 2008 (Macpro3,1)

I have a Geforce 120GT in the first slot and the Solo in the next one with a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD

It booted right away but the only problem i have is. I don't think the speed is right ?

I only have around 250/250 (Around) and should have 500/500 read/write ??? Thats whats wondering me.

I didn't try to change slots or anything because i thought the graphic card had to be in slot 1 but then someone told me to swop the Geforce to slot 2 and Solo to slot 1 ?? I thought they was identical (Slot 1 and 2)

Maybe i should try that. I talked to another guy today who had the same. A solo v2 and a samsung 840 pro SSD and he had around 500/500 read/write with the solo card in slot 2, mmm.

I'm a little confused here what to do. We have 2 Mac pro late 2008 both with the Solo v2 card.

One Mac have the Samsung 840 128MB SSD and the other have the Pro Samsung 840 256MB and they have same ready/write speed. *****. The Pro should have much more read/write but i cant figure out why or what to do next. Both Mac's boots just fine from the card/ssd

Any help to get the Samsung 840 Pro SSD to run faster would gladly be heard 😉 should be faster than the Samsung 840 (Not pro)

Thanks everyone

Erik

Hi,

I also have the same problem, Samsung 840 PRO 256Gb should deliver 520-540 Write/reade but I only get 190 write and 260 read. I have no clue what to do.

That is the maximum your computer can transfer. There is nothing you can do about it.

If it were a only SATA transfer speed limit, I would expect the Read times and Write times to be very close to each other.

I think your drive is filling up with deleted data, and you have no free SuperBlocks in which to write, so writes take much longer.

If you can enable TRIM, with a third-party patch like TRIM Enabler, that would help. I am not certain it is supported for PCIe-based cards unless they are presenting as SATA Drives. [TRIM commands are SATA commands.]

The other thing I used to do before TRIM Enabler was to consolidate free space with a third-party utility, then immediately erase free space with Disk Utility. This may improve your write speeds.

Another method is to clone the contents off to another drive (TWO copies required for this operation) then use Disk Utility to ERASE the SSD (not just delete all the files) and clone back.

Both 840s should bench about the same. The larger the SSD the more concurrent IO's it can perform and the Pro has higher quality NAND but Samsung did not "cheapen" the non-Pro.

Even on SATA II bus forget the numbers it should be snappy and work and respond to your commands fluidly with out hesitation or delay. It should feel like a sports car with a 'fast' short stroke clutch and direct steering compared to a sedan (7.2K).

For non system uses like CS6, Aperture catalogue etc then put the SSD on a PCIe card.

And in both cases aim for 50% free. And do not write zero - that does not improve performance. Leaving it and the system idle helps.

There is a new SSD out that seems to love being used and does not even degrade writes like most over time, over 10's of hundreds of TBs of writes.

Also while numbers are helpful, for some tasks an array and having to write to both SSDs does not really help at all.

SSDs do use very massively large blocks of cells and pages and it is because of that it can take more work to TRIM and organize and remove used cells and deleted files as I read it. Some SSDs use 1.5MB and others even a 3MB cell. That is new to me and I need to read more about it.

Sorry folks please don't yell at me but I am brand new to the Mac World. Just picked up and early 2008 MacBook Pro from a friend and purchased a Seagate 600 250gb SSD.

Currently debating on updating the Sata so I can get the most out of the drive. I have read the comments here and am more interested in just how to use the Velocity x2.

I plan on opening up the Mac here soon to install the SSD and put some new thermal paste on the GPU and CPU seeing that this year was prone to logic board overheating failures due to the GPU.

So exactly what do I need to do? Just simply purchase the x2, install the SSD and waaalaaa or what? ALL help is sincerely appreciated. I am trying my best to ditch dang PC so I am trying to make this macbook my main laptop.

Thanks in advance

Am I reading this right? You have a Macbook Pro and not a Mac Pro? If so I wasn't aware the velocity 2 would work with a laptop. I thought it was just the bigger and more workeable Mac Pro. Are you on the correct forum?

You actually caught it before I could. I totally misread this thread thinking it was macbook pro not mac pro. Dag nabbit....guess that is not a good way to start into the Mac world.

Names are too close. Thanks anyways. I hope you all get the speed you are looking for.

Not to worry Mister 704, made the same mistake myself when I first started.

Open up the Macbook Pro and follow one of the many videos on line on how to replace an SSD. Dead easy. As for the overheating, make sure you clean the dust out of the fans and rear vents, that will go half way. Put some new heat paste on the chips and should be as good as new. Also if the GPU goes or the motherboard packs in., don't throw it away, again just follow the videos on how to cook the motherboard in the oven. Worked a treat for mine which now runs like a train with the SSD fitted. Mid 2007 Macbook Pro 2.4GHz fitted with crucial 128 SSD and 160HDD (in place of the optical drive). Should be even faster with your 250Gb SSD. Good luck

Yep I am sure I can replace it with ease, I am just trying to figure out how to install a fresh copy of 10.6 on it because I don't want to clone the old HDD since I don't know what the previous owner had or did on it. My plan is to take it a part and give it a little alcohol bath to clean the fans and components. As far as Thermal Paste, I picked up Arctic MX-4 and plan to apply to GPU and such components.

Watched a few videos already so I know about the cook the books. I THROW NOTHING AWAY without it being a last resort when it comes to computer stuff. So many ways to give life on most of them. The SSD I picked up was the Seagate 600 Sata III that was on sale on Newegg for $119.

If it's the Duo Core 2 chip you should be able to download Mavericks onto it together with all the free software. One word of advice though, download the latest previous editions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote before you download Mavericks as for some reason it won't load them after.

I may try Mavericks but for now I think I will just start with 10.6 so I can even learn this thing. I am so off right now.