Is Mac Pro 2007 compatible with new 6Gb/s SSD harddrive?

Hi,


I'm using my old Mac Pro from 2007 for music production. It works very well, but I want to upgrade it with a new SSD harddrive.


Is the Mac Pro from 2007 compatible with a new SSD SATA 6GB/s harddrive, like a Crucial MX100?


As I see it, there are three possibilities:

1) It will run fine.

2) It will run, but only on half the speed (3GB/s).

3) It will not run.


What will happen? 🙂


Thanks for helping me out.

All the best,

Anders from Denmark

Posted on Jun 16, 2014 10:23 AM

Reply
7 replies

Jan 23, 2017 2:51 AM in response to GenlydLydgen

The built-in drive bays of all classic Mac Pros including your 2007 model aka MacPro2,1 is only SATA II i.e. 3GBps. While SATA II speed is faster than any traditional spinning hard disk can achieve it is slower than what SSD drives can do.


You have three options to get round this -


  1. Get a PCIe SATA III controller card and cable to bypass the built-in SATA II logic board connection, this will upgrade your drive bays to SATA III (different and more expensive approach is needed for MacPro4,1 and 5,1)
  2. Get a PCIe SATA III adapter to which you directly fit your 2.5" SATA III SSD drive
  3. Get a PCIe SSD adapter to which you fit a PCIe style SSD not a SATA style SSD


The parts for each would be respectively -


  1. PCIe SATA controller and Mini-SAS extension
  2. PCIe SATA adapter and standard SATA SSD
  3. PCIe SSD adapter and PCIe SSD (SSD needs to be an M2 connector and AHCI type)


Other makes and resellers of the above exist. I know that the StarTech card works and can be used to boot both Mac OS X and Windows Boot Camp - but you need to have the Windows driver installed first before Windows can boot. No Mac driver is needed for the StarTech card.

Jun 16, 2014 12:17 PM in response to GenlydLydgen

Best upgrade I made - and I have made dozens in terms of RAM, 10K Raptors and later, gpu three times.


The Samsung EVO works fine, and on ANY Mac Pro until 2013 model, SATA II is fine for system. Only time you see real b enefit from 6G is scratch, Aperture and audio libraries, and that from PCIe SSD cards, but that also frees up drive bays not having to be used, the SSD fits on the controller, and moving high IO off t he slow limited native SATA II bus itself which has less than 800MB/sec of bandwidth to share.


I don't know about Crucial but for me, I have half a dozen Samsungs.


Put the system on its own SATA II bus - the ODD port for one is great, put audio on a PCIe SSD controller and go for one or two SSD (RAID0 for max) and use an 8x slot you have (Sonnet Tempo Pro is the only one they have certified for Mac Pro 2006-7) and one or two 250 or 500GB ($270 or $500 the pair) SSDs.


Having the system on a 250GB SSD - and audio on its own SSD - even if not on PCIe card to start with, is how I would approach solving and getting maximum I/O. SSD have near zero in latency, seeks, and high 100K IOPS for some, very high reads. Limited to 250MB/sec on SATA II bus though. Double that on PCIe and 800-900MB/sec in RAID0 on proper controller.

Jun 16, 2014 9:17 PM in response to GenlydLydgen

RE: SATA Bus speed:


Most 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.


.

Jun 17, 2014 11:33 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

SSDs andthe old architecture does though bottleneck users and even an ideal setup of two 6G controllers and higher thruput scratch + Lightroom or Aperture while seemingly good, is hundered on the 2009's PCIe 4x bus lanes; and using the faster 1.2-1.5GB/sec in the nMP 6,1 is reported to be much smoother for same work. Yes the new more efficient processors make some difference, yes, 1866MHz DDR3 helps too.


The 250GB and larger SSDs have their own controller and multiple channels, and that acts like a built in array, 8 channels instead of 4 for instance.


but it is not the same as current mobos with SATA III 6G and latest Intel chips. 2011 was a bad year for chips, controllers, firmwasre, SSDs, and Apple. This is 2014 and the transition to better SSDs and controllers and firmware in tghe last year help.


btw, over due to experiment or did you buy one or two SSDs to check out today's models?

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Is Mac Pro 2007 compatible with new 6Gb/s SSD harddrive?

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