Q: Fastest bootable SSD for the Mac Pro 5,1
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May 9, 2016 5:18 PMby nbritton,The Lycom DT-120 board is only $23 USD on amazon.com. The board revision is F120-00B, it's sold under multiple trade names by multiple vendors. It is a "passive" adaptor board, there is no logic on the board, it is simply connects the wiring from the PCIe connector to the M.2 connector.
http://www.amazon.com/Lycom-DT-120-PCIe-Adapter-Support/dp/B00MYCQP38
http://www.amazon.com/Ableconn-PEXM2-SSD-NGFF-Express-Adapter/dp/B017JGVTAM
I purchased my 512GB Samsung SM951 AHCI used for $230 USD. Honestly, I'm not sure what you want to accomplish by having disks that fast, 1,300 MB/s is more than fast enough for everything that I want to do. In fact, I think 1,300 MB/s for $230 is absolutely amazing because I still remember the days when we had ultra slow IDE drives. If a single SM951 isn't fast enough for you then the next best solution is to setup a RAID 0 array and stripe it across two SM951 using two DT-120 boards, this will get you PCIe x8 performance. The Squid seems like overkill for anything that I would want to do on my Mac, it's a lot of money for diminishing returns. My advice is to save the money you would spend on a fancy disk solution and buy the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080.
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May 9, 2016 7:30 PMby nbritton,I would also like to add that the iozone benchmark says the SM951 write speed averages at 1820 MB/s. Also, when factoring in caching, iozone says the drive throughput is closer to 4,300 MB/s. Even if you had three Nvidia GTX 1080s in your system, I don't think you could render video fast enough to saturate the bus throughput on the SM951.
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May 10, 2016 4:05 PMby Pheidius1,Yes, I should have said wah wah not hehe. I can't return it because macvid cards has already pulled its epprom and soldered on a new one to flash it to EFI so I can see the boot screen and choose Mac, Windows, or free BSD. I also made a compromise on the boot drive as well so maybe I will get the lycome card and the the 1080 next year. I ended up going with the OWC excelsior V2 solution for a boot drive as I was leery about the durability track record on the faster cards. Had I known the lycomb board was simply a pass through device I might have jumped but life is filled with mistakes. THE OWC is just a little faster than 6G. Having just bought a 5 year old new/refurbished product my bias is clearly towards durability first and speed second. Thanks for your input. i will probably post here next year with teh same question and se how things progressed with these new adapters. By then maybe the 1080 willl have dropped in price and will have a mac flash avaiable by then. BTW, If you are technical how many layers of board do you think the lycom adapter has? 6 layer board? 4 layer board?
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Jul 30, 2016 10:46 AMby ashley karyl,I have just fitted an SM951 AHCI to my mid-2010 8 Core 2.4Ghz and while read/write speeds are clearly better I am somewhat confused by the big apparent drop in CPU usage on heavy tasks when checked in the activity monitor. Previously it could hit 1600% and now it hits little more than 600% for short bursts.
I am wondering if there is a logical explanation for this or whether the SM951 is actually limiting CPU on the Mac Pro. Does anybody know what is going on here?
