Mac Pro 2010 Read/Write Speed

Hi Yogin,

Even if you do not mention it, I assume you have a Silver Mac Pro, and not the black round one.

So there are several ways you can have your SSD :

- 1°) as a replacement in the optical drive bays : those are on a 1,5gbps SATA bus. That means you'll have a maximum of 180MB/s theoritiacal speed, which means a real life speed of about 130Mb/s.

- 2°) in one of the 4 dedicated HDD bays : those have each a 3gbps SATA bus. Maximum available speed is about 370 MB/s, but again : that's theory. In real life, you can depend on about 250 - 280 MB/s.

- 3°) using the external port , but those are really limited : 480mbps for the USB 2.0 ports (60MB/s max, but more about 35-40MB/s real) or FireWire800 (about 100MB/s max, about 65 - 75 MB/s real)

- 4°) connected to an added PCI card : depending on the cards, you can achieve up to 450MB/s for a single drive, and up to 900MB/s for 2 SSD's in RAID 0 mode. I use a Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro card with Intel DC S3500 600GB hard drives in RAID mode and get speeds close to 850MB/s. I also use an Addonics mSATA 4 bay card with a single Samsung 850EVO hard drive and I am able to get over 460MB/s in R/W on that drive.

So, to sum it up : using the Mac's internal ports, the only solution you have to break the 260MB/s speed barrier is :

- 1°) use the dedicated internal hard drives bay but configure your SSD's to be used as RAID. You will get speeds up to 550MB/s in this case, up to 750MB/s if you use a RAID array of 3 SSD's ;

- 2°) add a PCI card that will allow to add internal SSD's.

Regards.

The SSD-TS512B is a SATA 2.5" SSD. The Mac Pro 2010 model only has SATA-II drive bays which can run at a maximum of 3Gbps aka. 300MBps. To get the full performance of this drive you need a SATA-III connection which can run at a maximum of 6Gbps aka. 600MBps.

It is possible to fit a PCIe card with a SATA-III interface e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Apricorn-Velocity-Performance-Upgrade-VEL-SOLO-X1/dp/B0090 IA3AU and this would allow you to use your current SSD at theoretically its maximum speed. However SATA SSD drives are not as fast as newer more modern PCI SSD drives as these days fitted in laptops. So whereas you might get ~500MBps with a SATA SSD you can get up to ~1500MBps with a PCI SSD.

Again you would need a PCIe card but this time with an M2 connector for a PCI type SSD.

How is the SSD connected? Is it a PCle-blade SSD?

A 2 1/2 inch SSD connected to the Mac's SATA bus?

The subject line of the OP's post said Mac Pro 2010

Are you using TRIM? you should be.