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Pci Ssd Boot Drives For Mac High Sierra: How to Install and Configure Them on Your Mac



I have a MBP 2011, with high sierra now. I remember not being able to use the web recovery mode so i had to re-install lion using an external bootable usb with lion on it and upgrading via the app store all the way up to yosemite and sierra. I am no expert but you could do the same with mavericks in your ssd and upgrade from there. good luck




Pci Ssd Boot Drives For Mac High Sierra



I second Chadbag's comment. The iMac is much more of a bear to open and modify than a vintage MBA, and the late 2015 iMac you must have (there were no new iMacs released in 2016) has Thunderbolt 2, which has throughput of up to 20Gbps. OWC has recently put out an affordable TB3 case (you'll need a TB3 to TB2 adapter) for NVME drives and you'll get decent results. I'm hoping that some other vendor offers such a case with a better controller, OWC's is rather speed-constrained but still capable of up to 1533MB/sec (not megabits, megabytes), which should still really put some spring in that iMac's step, especially if used as a boot drive. The OWC case is currently pre-ordering for US$75, so it's certainly something to consider for cheap external NVME expansion.


The Mac Pro can be configured with single or dual 64-bit Intel Xeon 'Westmere' 6-core processors. It supports Hyper-Threading which allows two threads to run simultaneously on each core - so macOS will recognize up to 24 total cores, 12 real and 12 virtual. It also supports "Turbo Boost" which automatically boosts the processor speed based on workload - so if an application is only using 1 of the 12 cores it will automatically increase the speed of the cores in use and turn off the unused cores.Single Processor 6-Core 3.46GHz Intel Xeon 'Westmere' [6-cores / 12-threads] $ more info Dual Processor Dual 6-Core 3.46GHz Intel Xeon 'Westmere' [12-cores / 24-threads] $ more info Memory When configured with dual processors, the Mac Pro supports up to 128GB of DDR3 1333MHz ECC memory in eight slots. When configured with a single processor, the Mac Pro supports up to 64GB of DDR3 1333MHz ECC memory in four slots. Single Processor 16GB (2x 8GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM $ 24GB (3x 8GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM $ 32GB (2x 16GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM $ 48GB (3x 16GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM $ 64GB (4x 16GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM $ Dual Processor 32GB (4x 8GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM $ 48GB (6x 8GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM $ 64GB (4x 16GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM $ 96GB (6x 16GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM $ 128GB (8x 16GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 ECC RAM $ PCIe SATA & NVMe Solid-State Drives The Mac Pro has a SATA II (3GB/s) drive bay controller. New solid-state drive (SSDs) are SATA III (6GB/s). Installing your SSD on a PCI-Express (PCIe) slot instead of the Drive Bay will allow the SSD to perform at full (SATA III) speed; achieving up to double the speed.Performance:SATA 2.5-inch SSD in the drive bay 250MB/sSATA 2.5-inch SSD in the PCIe slot 500MB/sNVMe M.2 SSD in the PCIe slot 1,500MB/s (Compatible on macOS High Sierra 10.13.6, Mojave 10.14, and Catalina 10.15)We recommend having your primary boot drive (macOS + Applications) installed on the PCIe slot for optimal performance.Video Production: If you will be editing 4K video, we recommend a second dedicated PCIe SSD for footage/projects/cache.Audio Production: If you have large sessions with lots of tracks, you can add a second dedicated PCIe SSD for sessions.All SSDs are new. In addition to the two PCIe SSD's, you can have four more SSDs or hard drives in the below drive bays.Primary Drive (Boot) Secondary Drive (Work) None $ 250GB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 500GB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 1TB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 2TB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 4TB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 8TB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 250GB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ 500GB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ 1TB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ 2TB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ 4TB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ 8TB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ None $ 250GB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 500GB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 1TB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 2TB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 4TB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 8TB PCIe SATA Solid-State Drive $ 250GB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ 500GB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ 1TB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ 2TB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ 4TB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ 8TB PCIe NVMe Solid-State Drive $ Hard Drive / Solid-State Drive Bays The Mac Pro includes four drive bays, allowing you to configure it with up to four hard drives or solid-state drives, in any combination. Configure each drive bay separately. All SSDs and HDDs are new.Hard drives read/write at 150Mb/s. Solid-State drives on the drive bay read/write at 250Mb/s. Selecting your boot drive as a solid-state drive instead of a hard drive will generate faster boot time, import/open/saving of large files, and application start-up.Drive Bay 1 Drive Bay 2 Drive Bay 3 Drive Bay 4 None $


Today, high-capacity SSDs are more affordable than ever. Replacing your old 500GB hard drive with a same-sized SSD from a reputable manufacturer costs only $150, while 1TB drives are under $330, each $100 less than only a couple of years ago. Once unthinkably huge 2TB and 4TB SSDs are now commonly available, too, albeit at eye-watering prices.


For whatever reason, there's an incorrect belief that modern GPUs require the bandwidth of a 16x PCIe 3.0 slot or would greatly benefit by using PCIe 4.0. This myth is persistent and wide, despite a lot of information that clearly demonstrates otherwise. When benchmarked in the real-world using an 8x vs. 16x PCIe 3.0 slot, the impact is minimal, pugetsystems.com performed this very test, and it comes out to be roughly 3%-4% impact. An 8x PCIe 3.0 slot has the same bandwidth as a 16x PCIe 2.0 slot. In gaming, this tends to be even lower. See this youtube vid comparing 16 4.0 vs. 3.0 vs. 2.0 and PCIe 4.0 vs. PCIe 3.0 GPU Benchmark Feat. GeForce RTX 3080 FE, which shows the impact of sticking the RTX 3080 in a 16 PCIe 4.0, 16x PCIe 3.0, and 8x PCIe 3.0 slots. The story is always the same: GPUs are not very bandwidth-intensive. Another common misconception is the Mac Pro's CPUs/bus isn't fast enough to benefit from a high-end GPU, which is patently false. Notably, when it comes to graphics performance, the Mac Pro 2010/2012 remains a performance monster, in most tests besting the iMac Pro running a VII. It may not be as fast as a modern gaming PC running a VII, but depending on the tasks (especially GPU compute), it'll be only 1%-4% slower. More interestingly, when an AMD Radeon 5700 XT was tested in PCIe 2.0 vs. 3.0 vs. 4.0, TechPowerup, after many tests, found a 2% average performance difference between PCIe 2.0 and PCIe 4.0. DigitalCitizen found similar results by comparing PCIe 3.0 to 4.0. GPUs are not nearly as bandwidth-intensive as most people assume (other hardware like SSDs can easily saturate a PCIe bus). I'll give another example, if "bottlenecking" existed in a sense most people visualize it, performance would be capped by bandwidth. Thunderbolt 3, which is also even more bandwidth constricted than a PCIe 2.0 16x slot, still finds improvements running a Radeon VII in a Thunderbolt 3 case over less powerful GPUs, including an iMac's own internal AMD Vega 64. The performance is more realized, though, when adequate bandwidth is available as opposed to a brick wall limitation. Also, in gaming, at high resolutions, the Mac Pro will be nearly as fast as a modern PC. At lower resolutions where the GPU can achieve extreme framerates, the number of calculations per second increases for the CPU to process, as data needs to be calculated per frame. 240 FPS means the CPU has more data to process per second than if a game was running at 60 FPS, regardless of the resolution. At higher resolutions, the frame rate goes down as the GPU becomes the limiter. The Mac Pro makes a fine entry-level 4k gaming machine if one desires to invest in a Vega series GPU or better and is willing to boot Windows 10.


Clever hardware hackers discovered how to enable bootable NVMe on Mac Pro. It requires making a custom firmware using ROMtool and EXEinject on the 3.1. Today, this path is no longer necessary for NVMe support as OpenCore can inject the proper drivers for NVMe support.. Note: this hack was initially performed on Mac Pro 5,1s but is unnecessary as Apple has released NVMe compatible bootROMs for them. Below is a collection of links related to the bootROM procedure. Below is a collection of links related to the bootROM procedure. However, this hack falls into adventure territory. See the Mac Pro 3,1 NVMe Drive Natively Booting post below. It's highly recommended to stay with AHCI SSDs with the Mac Pro 3,1s.


Despite the obvious age of the Mac Pro 5.1s, someone or at least a group of someones are/is managed to throw a few bones to the community by providing updates for the Mac Pros 8 years after their release, an olive branch. Stability-minded users should not use beta OSes. Both 10.13 and 10.14 have been welcome surprises for Mac Pro 5,1 users, including firmware updates to enable APFS support, and later NVMe booting. However, with macOS 10.15.x dropping 5,1 support, the Mac Pro 5,1s have hit the end of the road for EFI updates. Forum member, Tsialex of MacRumors (one of the experts on Mac Pros on the interwebs) has compiled and maintained a list of Firmware versions for the Mac Pro 5.1. I highly recommend this blog post as I've directly lifted his notes from it, but there's more info in his original blog post. I credit his work below. The BootROMs are distributed as part of the Mac OS upgrades. It is unlikely that we will see continued firmware updates for the Mac Pro 5.1s in Catalina.


Again, the Mini-Glossary covers EFI, but the short answer is that EFI that Apple used on its earliest Intel Macs predates the UEFI standard; thus, it creates issues around pre-boot graphics card drivers (hence lack of pictures before the drives fully load with aftermarket cards) and also with other OSes expecting UEFI. Typically, with PCs, before EFI, the boot order went: bios -> MBR (Master boot record) -> bootloader -> Kernel. With UEFI, this changed to UEFI -> EFI bootloader -> Kernel. Thus a properly partitioned drive for the EFI world has an EFI partition + GUID partition. However, Apple's implementation of both EFI and UEFI is unusual, to say the least, as as famed eclecticlight.co points out the EFI partitions aren't particularly used for anything besides perhaps firmware updates. OpenCore provides a way to modify EFI to provide UEFI-like functionality. It works by adding a middle step to the boot sequence that can be altered, Mac EFI bootloader -> OpenCore Bootloader -> Kernel. This additional step is crucial as it allows OpenCore to inject changes without physically modifying the OS. This is much more desirable than OS patching, as changes happen as part of the boot sequence and will not be overwritten when the OS is updated.


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