Can anyone provide a link to a usb 3.0 card that will work with my 2006 mac pro? Thanks alot.- Edward
Mac Pro
I am using Sonnet Allegro USB 3 in a 1,1 running 10.7.5
Many others are using CalDigit but check to see, seems some require 10.8.2 or later.
The Mac Pro 2006 only has PCIe 1.0 slots.
The Sonnet Allegro USB 3.0 PCIe card is only 1 lane which means it can work up to 250 MB/s in a PCIe 1.0 slot. The specs say that bus-powered 2.5" drives or SSDs are not supported. It also says it does not support non-storage USB devices.
The CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 card is 4 lanes and uses USB and eSATA controller chips that are PCIe 2.0 x1 (500 MB/s). This means the USB ports share a lane and the eSATA ports share a lane. The controller chips are connected to a switch chip which is connected to the Mac with 4 lanes (1000 MB/s in a PCIe 1.0 slot). This should allow the CalDigit to go beyond 250 MB/s up to 500 MB/s on a USB port in either a PCIe 1.0 slot or PCIe 2.0 slot. I don't know if you can get more than 500 MB/s from the card by raiding an eSATA and a USB drive together...
I've used the CalDigit and it supports bus powered drives and mice. It recognized an old iPod Touch but it didn't appear in iTunes like it does when connected to one of my Mac Pro 2008's USB 2.0 ports.
CalDigit seems to have dropped their USB3-only card. Not sure or everyone is out of it (not on OWC)
PCIe 1.x slots even with 4x card will never ever never see 1Gb bandwidth. Maybe in a PCIe 2.1+ 2009 or above and even then that has never been shown (900MB/sec seems to be the top and in a 5,1).
The rest is all such pure speculative theorizing I take it.
Of course all the numbers given are for maximum theoretical bandwidth and don't include overhead for processing or inefficiencies in the chipsets which can only be measured using benchmarks. Since overhead can't be zero, a 1000 MB/s interface can never do 1000 MB/s which is why I use words like "up to".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates
For example, a 6G SSD (6G = SATA III = 6 Gb/s = 600 MB/s) which can do about 500+ MB/s can only do 280 MB/s in a 3G drive bay (3G = SATA II = 3 Gb/s = 300 MB/s), or 211 MB/s in a PCIe 1.0 x1 slot (250 MB/s) or 140 MB/s in a SATA I drive bay (150 MB/s). Those number are from tests I did in my Mac Pro 2008 and an older Dell PC and may differ from other computers and OS's.
The description of the CalDigit card came from the output of an "ioreg -l -w 0" command and examining the vendor, device and subsystem ids, and the bits of the IOPCIExpressLinkCapabilities and IOPCIExpressLinkStatus fields.
The only speculation I made is that the CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 card doesn't suck so bad that it can't do 50% of it's theoritical maximum (or more simply that it can do at least 250 MB/s which your Sonnet Allegro cannot do in a PCIe 1.0 slot since that is the theoritcal max). I did pose the question of whether or not the FASTA card can do more than 500 MB/s by RAIDing a SATA and USB drive.
The CalDigit USB3 only card only has 1 lane which puts it in the same boat as the Allegro card.
Mine works. And gosh, sxxx got through the filters? well working at hdd speed (not at SSD speed) is working to me! But I do use my USB3 Docking station to clone to an SSD in it.
I see threads about "the sxxx state of USB3 on Mac Pro" and ricks and other comments that Apple's USB3 generally does do sxxx so there is that. USB3 on my non-Mac systems is rather fine, but even Intel and Haswell has said there were issues that even THEY had to work out.
All of the things I have read about the state of PCIe and the abomination of the 2008, the 1,1, the shared slots 3& 4 in a 2009... why oh why...
Usb 3.0 card for mac pro 1,1 2006?
