Let's hope the bottlenecks and limitations we encountered will be eventually overcome.64TB ThunderBay 4 RAID5 Edition with dual Thunderbolt 3 ports and softRAID
The addition of NVMe support by High Sierra opens the door for Mac users to take advantage of the latest, fastest flash blades like the Samsung 960 Pro.
Nor would it boot from the 960 Pro with High Sierra we built in the iMac.
However, we could not get the 2010 Mac Pro to install High Sierra on the 960 Pro. We were able to install macOS 10.13 High Sierra on the 960 Pro while connected to the iMac 5K's TB3 port and boot from it. For $30 you can get the DT-129A model with a heatsink.) For $16, that's a lot of 'bang for the buck' if you only plan to use one blade. (BTW, when testing a single 960 Pro blade, the Lycom DT-120 x4 PCIe 3.0 M.2 board was slightly faster than the Amfeltech M.2 x16 PCIe 3.0 board when installed in a Thunderbolt 3 expansion box. At least with FOUR 960 Pros, we clawed our way up to 1489MB/s. What was shocking was the lower than expected sequential WRITE speed of 722MB/s for the single and 1263MB/s for the dual striped 9600 Pro. When we shifted to Thunderbolt 3, the large sequential READ speed of the dual and single 960 Pro hovered at an understandable 2400MB/s. After all, we attained those results with two 960 Pros on a Hackintosh with a x16 PCie 3.0 slot." New Memo to Apple: "We still want a Mac Pro with PCIe 3.0 slots.
Quickbench's 1GB custom sequential test reported a 6108MB/s average READ and 5544MB/s average WRITE. HOWEVER, when we moved all FOUR 960 Pros to the Gen 2 version of the Amfeltec quad slot M.2 carrier board, the large sequential READ speed jumped to as high as 5872MB/s and WRITE speed to as high as 5341MB/s. FOUR striped 960 Pros also hit the wall at 3000MB/s. While the sequential WRITE speed rose from 2000 to 3000MB/s. The 3000MB/s large sequential READ speed and 2000MB/s WRITE speed of a ONE 960 Pro mounted in the x16 PCIe 2.0 slot of the 2010 Mac Pro equals the newest, fastest internal Apple PCIe based flash storage in the 2017 iMac 5K (and 2017 MacBook Pro).īut, when we stripe a pair of the 960 Pros mounted on the Amfeltec Gen3 PCIe M.2 Carrier board in the same x16 PCIe 2.0 slot of the 2010 Mac Pro, the top sequential READ speed was still 3000MB/s. After all, a lot of data transfers are small and random. The speeds are not as impressive as large sequential transfers, it is still a useful metric. The graph shows an average of 5 test cycles. Quickbench's Standard Test includes random transfer test sizes from 4 KBytes to 1024 KBytes. HIGHER number in megabytes per second = FASTEST We used AJA System Test to benchmark file level sequential transfer speed using a 16GB test file.
Will re-post results once we upgrade to High Sierra. NOTE: The Hackintosh results were pulled on October 10th because they were done under El Capitan with third party NVMe driver. Lycom TB3 960Pro - Lycom DT-120 PCIe 3.0 x4 single slot M.2 carrier board with one Samsung 960 Pro 512G NVMe PCIe based flash blade, installed in AKiTiO Node Thunderbolt 3 expansion box, and connected to the Thunderbolt 3 port of a 2017 iMac 5K Squid3 TB3 960Pro*2 - Amfeltec Gen 3 x16 PCIe quad slot M.2 carrier board with dual Samsung 960 Pro 512G NVMe PCIe based flash blades striped (RAID 0) using SoftRAID 5.6.3, installed in AKiTiO Node Thunderbolt 3 expansion box, and connected to the Thunderbolt 3 port of a 2017 iMac 5K Squid3 TB3 960Pro*4 - Amfeltec Gen 3 x16 PCIe quad slot M.2 carrier board with four Samsung 960 Pro 512G NVMe PCIe based flash blades striped (RAID 0) using SoftRAID 5.6.3, installed in AKiTiO Node Thunderbolt 3 expansion box, and connected to the Thunderbolt 3 port of a 2017 iMac 5K IMac5K Internal - Apple factory 1TB PCIe based flash storage in 2017 iMac 5K Squid3 cMP 960 Pro - Amfeltec Gen 3 x16 PCIe quad slot M.2 carrier board with one Samsung 960 Pro 512G NVMe PCIe based flash blade and installed in x16 PCIe 2.0 slot #2 of a 2010 Mac Pro tower
Squid3 cMP 960 Pro*2 - Amfeltec Gen 3 x16 PCIe quad slot M.2 carrier board with dual Samsung 960 Pro 512G NVMe PCIe based flash blades striped (RAID 0) using SoftRAID 5.6.3 and installed in x16 PCIe 2.0 slot #2 of a 2010 Mac Pro tower Squid3 cMP 960 Pro*4 - Amfeltec Gen 3 x16 PCIe quad slot M.2 carrier board with four Samsung 960 Pro 512G NVMe PCIe based flash blades striped (RAID 0) using SoftRAID 5.6.3 and installed in x16 PCIe 2.0 slot #2 of a 2010 Mac Pro tower Squid2 cMP 960 Pro*4 - Amfeltec Gen 2 x16 PCIe quad slot M.2 carrier board with four Samsung 960 Pro 512G NVMe PCIe based flash blades striped (RAID 0) using SoftRAID 5.6.3 and installed in x16 PCIe 2.0 slot #2 of a 2010 Mac Pro tower