But as it applies to SSDs, if you’re not using a SATA III connection, it’s safe to assume you’re limiting the potential of your drive. This can cause some confusion in the event that you connect a hard drive that supports the SATA III standard into a SATA II connector, creating a bottleneck at the SATA II interface that will limit the potential bandwidth of the drive. The SATA standard has now undergone three major revisions, resulting in connectors that are identical in appearance (hurray for backwards compatibility), but with bandwidth doubling each time. The SATA standard’s been in use for many years and is still the most prevalent interface for connecting internal storage drives. SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) refers to the technology standard for connecting hard drives, solid state drive, and optical drives to the computer’s motherboard. Luckily, advances in host interfaces invariably stay ahead of the pace of drive technologies, always allowing room to push speeds a bit farther. If you are, it’s time to get up to speed!Įver faster drive technology, brought about by faster spinning disks, increased cache, advances in controller architecture, and a host of other factors keeps pushing the host interface to become the bottleneck for read and write speeds. If you’re into vintage computers and you think patience is a virtue that can only be honed by waiting for programs to respond, maybe you’re still rocking a drive with a PATA interface. 5AĮvery hard drive or solid state drive you’ve used in the past ten years is likely to have used either a SATA interface, or more recently a PCI Express interface.
SSD UPGRADE FOR 2013 MAC PRO PRO
Using the Lycom M.2 PCIe SSD to PCIe adapter, we were able to test it inside our 2010 Mac Pro as well as inside a Thunderbolt 2.0 expansion box (OWC Helios2) connected to the 2013 Mac Pro's Thunderbolt 2.0 port.Īnandtech has a detailed review of the SM951 with the M.2 connector. Thanks to RamCity, we obtained a sample of the SM951 with M.2 connector. Our sample SM951 with Apple connector came courtesy of MacVidCards who is negotiating with a source in hopes of offering it to you as an upgrade option. UPDATE: OS X El Capitan's 'trimforce' command enables TRIM on the SM951 M.2 and other 'non-Apple' flash storage. The PCIe boards with the generic M.2 connector will not work.
SSD UPGRADE FOR 2013 MAC PRO INSTALL
If you plan to install it in a your 2009-2012 Mac Pro tower's PCIe bay or in a Thunderbolt-to-PCIe expansion box, you will need a PCIe board with the matching connector. That is why we were able to install it inside the 2013 Mac Pro. The first sample we tested had the proprietary connector that Apple uses in the newest Macs with flash storage. If you install it in slot 2, it will work but the link speed drops from 5.0GT/s to 2.5GT/s resulting in a maximum transfer speed of 786MB/s.Ģ. If you are installing it in the PCIe bay of your 2009-2012 Mac Pro tower, you must use slot 3 or 4 to get the transfer rates we reported. It is a compelling option to boost the storage speed of your Mac Pro 2009+.ġ.
The Samsung SM951 flash blade is the bomb.