Open Letter to Apple

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Level 1

8 points

Open Letter to Apple

this is an open letter to the developers at Apple and Apple itself. Whoever can forward this to any person who can help in any way will have a warm welcome (sorry, but i don't have any money to spend cause i have a family 🙂)

We are people with Mac Pro's starting from 2009 and we are a lot of them.

We want to use technology which is now availabe and was not available when we bought our systems cause of missing crystall balls.

We want to ask you if you please be so kind to give us the ability to boot our Mac's from PCIe Cards using a SSD with NVMe protocol (e.g. Samsung SSD 950 Pro).

There a lot of people who are interested in and want to use it BUT we are not developers.

It would be a great thing if you can provide us an EFI update (or whatever is needed for) for our machines and i think we would love you more then ever before.

PLEASE don't leave us alone. PLEASE help us to be a part of todays technology. WE love our machines and we don't want to give them into retirement like old horses cause they are not old...

Best greetings from a user who is using Mac's since 1988 and wrote his first lines ever to Apple.

Mac Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5)

Posted on Jun 14, 2016 4:34 AM

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Answer 1

Jun 14, 2016 8:20 AM in response to Zielgruppe

The appropriate place for your message is not here. This is a User-to-User forum, and Apple makes no promise to read these threads, and rarely responds here.

If you want to move your cause forward, post your request here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/

.

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Answer 2

Jun 14, 2016 8:19 AM in response to Zielgruppe

I just installed a comparable SSD on a PCIe card, and it is working great and is bootable. It looks identical to a NVME stick. But it has an ACHI interface. There is no need for a Driver or any firmware changes in my Mac Pro 2009 silver tower.

It tests in the neighborhood of 1200 Mbytes/sec.

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Answer 3

Zielgruppe Author

Level 1

8 points

Jun 15, 2016 1:48 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Hi Grant,

thanks for your reply. I will forward this to the link you gave me.

About your installation: i know that there is the SM951 from Samsung and that i can drive it with AHCI - BUT...and this is the reason why i wrote this, its an unsupported OEM drive without any warranty. Sooner or later there will be just NVMe drives available.

So we as the users can't really choose which drive we want like with regular HDD's or 2.5" SSD's (i accept that we are limited to SATA 3GB if we connect directly to the board).

I think that the development or implementation would be easy for Apple cause they have/use already NVMe...ok, it's not like

the official standard, but they have it. 🙂

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Answer 4

Jun 15, 2016 3:43 AM in response to Zielgruppe

Firstly NVMe is promoted as the successor to AHCI and whereas AHCI was originally designed for traditional USB hard disks NVMe is supposedly designed purely for SSD drives. Therefore in theory NVMe should be faster/more efficient for SSD drives.

So far I have not seen any indications that NVMe drives are noticeably faster but this one could expect to change over time. However in this case we are talking about a classic Mac Pro. These are long discontinued and Apple have no interest in them anymore, in order for a Mac to support booting from an NVMe drive it needs a driver built-in to the Macs firmware, it needs to be in the firmware as it needs it available before the drive has been booted from and any drivers on it loaded.

Note: On a classic Mac Pro existing PCIe adapter cards for SSD drives are using 4 PCIe lanes and therefore have a built-in limit of about 1500MBps which current AHCI SSD drives are already close to maxing out.

I would expect that Apple will add firmware support for NVMe to newer Macs as they switch to using NVMe drives either for the benefits they offer or because like you indicate at some point AHCI drives will no longer be available. They may even have done this already for the latest models, I have seen for example an entry for NVMe in System Report even in Yosemite on a classic Mac Pro although of course a classic Mac Pro cannot boot from an NVMe drive.

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Answer 5

Nov 21, 2016 11:10 PM in response to Zielgruppe

I agree with the sentiment of the original poster, with some replies being lame. Once the inevitable march takes over then without such a driver Apple itself might become a 'legacy' computer company, like when external drives are also using NVMe drives only. 'Legacy' really is a cop out term. It just seems to me like Apple is being bloody minded on this similarly like they were with their vendetta against USB with Firewire, and that really worked out well now Firewire has become a, um, 'legacy' product.

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