OSX 10.10.3 adds protocol support for the NVMe.
I know I can run the Samsung SM951 which uses the older ACHI protocol
but can I now run the new Samsung 950 Pro M.2 SSD on a MacPro5,1?
OS X Yosemite (10.10.3), MacPro5,1
You can boot from but this requires Clover or Refind NVMe driver injection. Worked on 2013 line (MBA 13", MBP 13" & nMP), so possible on others, especially cMP. Also boots without injection on nMP via thunderbolt.
If you can get a suitable adapter I would say the answer would be yes. However so far the adapters I have seen are only 4 PCIe lanes and as such do not have enough bandwidth to allow the full potential read speed of the SM951. As such you may see little or no improvement over a SM950.
You would need an 8 lane adapter and to fit it in slot 2 to fully exploit the potential of an SM951. So far I have not seen any 8 lane adapters.
I would tend to expect such adapter will become available but have no idea when. This after all is the very first product that can exceed the abilities of the current 4 lane adapters.
http://barefeats.com/hard200.html
One can get 1510 mb/sec read and write with the Samsung's SM951 when used with a $20 adapter on a MacPro 2010. However, the SM951 is an OEM model and doesn't come with a warranty unlike the new Samsung 950 Pro M.2 SSD which has a 5 year warranty. The wrinkle is that the new Samsung 950 Pro M.2 SSD ,which will be released on October 15, requires NVM express support. If i t works I'm not sure whether it would take advantage of its faster read speed and run faster.
Sorry yes I was getting the 951 and the new 950 Pro M.2 confused. The 951 can be fully exploited speed wise by the current adapters, the new 950 Pro M.2 cannot as it has a theoretical read speed of ~2500MB/s and this significantly exceeds the capability of current 4 lane adapters. As I mentioned you will need an 8 lane adapter and to use slot 2 to get the full benefits of a 950 Pro M.2 and such adapters do not seem to exist as yet.
Of course, it still pays to get the new 950 as it will be faster and cheaper than the SM951 and it carriesa warranty. It's insane that an SSD can simply consume an entire PCIe bus speed. What is the maximum bandwidth on the PCIe 2.0 4x bus? The whole thing confuses me - Is it 500 mb/sec per lane?
It really blows my mind how logarithmically faster storage speed has gone from the ATA hard drives. I wonder if it ever get simply ridiculous for even the power users.
Cliff+++ wrote:
It really blows my mind how logarithmically faster storage speed has gone from the ATA hard drives. I wonder if it ever get simply ridiculous for even the power users.
I can remember when the Macintosh ][ fx came out and for a handful of seconds that did seem fast enough even to impress me. However I personally find that no matter how fast they get they never are fast enough for me in that I still always end up waiting for operations to complete.
My first computer was a Mac Plus.
IMPORTANT UPDATE - NVME supposedly will not work as a boot drive on the MacPro5,1! Apparently, there are EFI bios issues that interfere with using an NVME protocol SSD as a startup drive - 😠
I not only won't work as a boot drive, the Samsung SM951 512GB NVMe M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 80mm SSD - OEM won't even mount in my 2010 Mac Pro tower using the Lycom M.2 PCIe SSD to PCIe 3.0 x4 adapter. The Samsung SM951 512GB AHCI M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 80mm SSD - OEM will both mount and will boot OS X. Has anyone been able to get it to mount using any other adapter -- even if it won't boot?
I decided that NVME was not important so I went and bought the SM951 AHCI version - runs well on the same Lycom adapter you bought - around 1400mb/sec. Perhaps it runs a little hot as it gets up to 160+ Farenheit according to the PCIe sensor. Anyone think I should add a heat sink?
Perhaps, you can exchange your NVME version for the AHCI version. Strangely, my system report indicates that it is possible to run an NVME device so perhaps you need a different adapter that is NVME capable = the whole matter perplexes me - there is someone at MacRumors.com forum who is trying to create the code to modify the bios of the MacPro5,1.
Funny you should mention heat. I ran a stress test using BlackMagic Disk Speed Test. Within 5 minutes the SM951's sensor reported 174F. The recommended max operating temp is 158F. Adding a heatsink kept it at 145F or below even after 30 miin of running the stess test.
BPlus makes an adapter with a heatsink. I know of one other company that is developing one. I will post the details here when it is available.
Mac Pro 5.1 El Capitan Samsung SM951 NVME MZVPV512HDGL not works... :-( I hope and expect that in the next few days a solution comes...
I tried Samsung SSD 950 PRO 512MB with an adapter on MacPro5,1 (Mac Pro 2010) yesterday, but it did not work.
After Mac's booting sound, the screen became white, but Apple logo never came.
It works on Windows 10 Pro PC flawlessly.
According to http://barefeats.com/hard210.html
"OS X does not support external, third party NVMe flash blades."
I hope that Apple would make OS X support external 3rd party NVMe drives such as Samsung SSD 950 PRO.
Barefeats can now verify that NVMe is working on 3rd party drives.
Just released by MacVidCards
http://www.macvidcards.com/blog
Looks like not useable for boot, but can work as Data
did you find the solution ? i have the same issue and I wanna use that SSD for data and not to boot from. any help ? I saw about installing NVMe driver but i couldn't figure out how to do so.
NVMe Protocol and MacPro5,1
