Fastest bootable SSD for the Mac Pro 5,1

I'm not sure which is the fastest but,

I have a MacPro 5,1 with 2 Kingston HyperX M.2 x4 PCIe SSD 480 GB Drives RAID 0 Striped and I am getting 1800 MBps Write and 2000MBps read and YES my Mac Pro boots off of it.

Thay are a bit pricey but when I was looking to beef up My older tower to handle 4k editing it was the most affordable option.

I got mine off eBay, I believe something like this http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Adapter-Card-to-PCI-E-X4-fr-apple-2013-2014-2015-MacBo ok-Air-A1465-A1466-SSD-/182416919204?has… is what your looking for.

It is specifically for the Apple connector and not the standard M2 connector.

Hi John, I'm also interested on this. If you read the description (at the link you posted), it does say: "2.The product only support read data and write data in SSD, not support as the system startup disk." Are you sure this card can host a bootable disk? If so, do you think the following SSD would work on that?http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/256GB-SSD-solid-state-drive-APPLE-655-1803A-for-MACBOO K-Pro-Air-A1502-A1466-/332363625431?epid…

Thanks so much in advance!! :-)

I'm not John... but I took John's advice and ordered a card similar to the one he linked to...
I ordered mine from here, and I can tell you it does boot off the SSD via this card.... though having said that, it does show up as an external drive, rather than internal... but that hasn't seemed to pose any issues yet.http://eshop.sintech.cn/20132014-macbook-pro-air-ssd-to-pcie-4x-adapter-p-1026. html

As for whether your particular SSD works in it, you would have to look that up, and if this particular one doesn't, they do have another one (1X PCIe I believe) that may.

You need to make sure you buy the right type of PCIe adapter, some are for standard M2 SSD drives, but if you are going to use a genuine Apple SSD drive you need one that is for Apple's proprietary connector. I got mine via eBay quite some time ago so that auction is long gone. Mine does indeed allow booting.

With regards to it showing as an external drive this is because the Mac operating system sees it is not connected via the standard SATA ports and anything not on the standard SATA ports is defacto treated as external. However there is a free third-party Kext which can override this. See http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/sata-pci-card-drives-show-as-external.188086 4/

This Kext is not signed so you need to turn off SIP to get it to load.

Samsung SM951-NVMe Versus AHCI Versus SATA 850 Pro.

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Booting is not supported. OSX does not even include the drivers to use a NVMe let alone the EFI/firmware

And what are your speeds using BlackMagic Disk Speed Test?
I'm using SM951 AHCI with Delock x4 PCIe m.2 adapter
I ended up with ~1100MB/s White and ~1300MB/s Read speed, but using windows and the same speed I got 1300/2500
trim is enabled

I am working on the same issue right now. Right now I think it is the Sonnet Tempo SSD Pro Plus. It is a PCIe carrier card for two 6 gb SSD which can be hardware put into Raid O. If you go to their performance page for this card which I believe is on their main web site, not the Store portal it puts a two card raid o at 950 read and 750 write if you put the card in slot 4(16 x lanes). That is about par for most solutions I have seen. The biggest surprise was the two carrier each with two SSD each. They can share the bandwidth between the 16 times lane in slot 4 and the 4 times slot three. The 4 times slot obviously carries throughput overhead but the speeds as confirmed by Bare Feats are 1700 read and 1325 write. BTW don't buy the one with external Thunderbolt if you want to boot. Only the esata external configuration will boot right now. They say there will be a fix but...

The other card I was looking at was the OWC card excelsior option but it, while cheaper, is barely above the SATA 2 speeds. Their technical support says you can't use two between the 16times lane. In fact, there is no difference in speed between the 16 times lane and the 4.

Then you have the price consideration. The Sonnet double drive card is 299.00 USD without an SSD. So you have 600 dollars into both carrier cards out of the gate. Say you buy 4 I TB SSD from OWC at 379 times 4 that would make 2116 USD all in. 1519 if you go with the 480 GB size. Still that would make a 2TB made of two hardware raid 0 comb indeed with OS X software raid O. Other than price, that is my main concern. I wonder if anyone knows about the long term data integrity of such a setup.

Decisions decisions, I was just going to buy the 649 OWC blade solution because I like their customer service but 1700 read and 1325 puts the OMP right up there with the nMP.

I was able to buy a refurb 2010 dual 2.4 in HK for 2500 USD(Brand new from the look of it). I found two boxed 3.43 X5690 Xeons for 600 each with a three year warranty so my core rig is under a three year umbrella. The SSD have a 5 year warranty from OWC. If I max out the ram at 128 GB from OWC that runs 878.

Hmm.... 2500+249 Apple care+ 878 128 GB is 3627. If I add in the Sonnet at 2,000 that makes 5627 and I still have to upgrade the HD I am slow whatever it ships with. I can get an EVGA GTX 980 for 55 new on Amazon and have macvid flash it for 170 USD. That rig should bench almost equal to the NMP. So 720 for all those Cuda cores. That makes 6327 all in. That is 3,000 USD less than Bare Feats Beauty V the Beast test and, at that time, neither this card nor the drive speeds were available.

6327..... anyway I am rambling now. If anyone has any feedback on macvids gtx 980 EFI flash it would help. I also wonder if anyone has any feedback about software raid on top of hardware raid.

Hehe a USB three card in slot 2?

Dang, I forgot to add the processors. I would be at 7547 with a 4 TB boot drive. 4 TB for a boot drive would be overkill with all the sata slots. 4 times 149.99 for the 240 GB size so 1200 USD instead of 2000 brings me back to 6747. So double the price for more than double the bandwidth compared to an excelsior 1 TB.

The NVME drive will give you no speed boost over the AHCI drive as the bottleneck of pcie 2.0 x4 is the limiting factor for both drives.

How did you get bootcamp to boot with the sm951 installed?

I have a genuine Apple 2015 model SSD a custom Samsung SSBUX fitted on a PCIe adapter card designed specifically for Apple's proprietary SSD connector. I get over 1400MBps with this and it does support booting in to OS X and also has native Apple TRIM support being a genuine Apple SSD. I believe this is still the fastest single SSD solution for a classic Mac Pro. It is the same SSD as used in the latest MacBook Pro Retina, iMac, and I believe latest Mac Pros.

Note: Most PCIe adapters are 4x lanes only and are therefore limited to about 1500MBps maximum throughput.

There is now a new 16 lane PCIe adapter designed to accept up to four M2 connector SSD drives like the Samsung 951. This cards supports using Apple's software RAID0 and with this you can get much, much faster speeds. See http://barefeats.com/hard210.html and http://amfeltec.com/products/pci-express-carrier-board-for-m-2-ssd-modules/

This Amfeltec Squid adapter does support booting in to OS X but if as intended you setup an Apple Software RAID on it then it cannot be used with FileVault2 or provide a RecoveryHD partition. I have no idea about Boot Camp support.

Therefore currently the above Amfeltec Squid solution would provide the fastest boot drive for OS X of any Mac in current existence, if fitted to either slot 1 or slot 2 in a classic Mac Pro.

With regards to NVMe there is now a driver to allow mounting and using such a drive but it cannot be booted from as the Mac EFI firmware does not include NVMe support. See http://www.macvidcards.com/nvme-driver1.html

I quite agree. There are adapters coming which will be able to combine the 4 and 16 lane for around a net 8x bandwidth. The only reason I did not buy one was that the revisions are 1.0. I will wait a year.