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I bought this PCIe card, installed four 256GB Samsung SM951 M.2 SSDs in a striped RAID, placed my entire orchestral sample library collection on it and BAM! I can't believe my eyes.

AJA System Test measures it at 6000MB/s reads. My template loads in a blink of an eye and I have no more dropped voices or any kind of playback problems. Easily the best investment one can make at this level.

If you have a 4,1 or 5,1 MacPro with 16x PCIe 2.0 slot (Slot 2 in the 4,1 and 5,1), check out this card. It's a bit pricey but the SM951s are inexpensive. All in all it was a small price to pay for a terabyte worth of the fastest storage I've ever seen (especially for MacPro towers).

http://amfeltec.com/products/pci-expres ... d-modules/

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-SM951-256 ... B00VELD92U

And they both kill bugs... Dead.

Indeed.

http://barefeats.com/hard210.html

"Armed with the Amfeltec Squid PCI Express Carrier board with four Samsung M.2 SM951 flash blades and the ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Ti overclocked GPU, our 2010 Mac Pro tower can easily keep up with the best of the new Macs. All that's missing are the flames and exhaust pipes."

HCMarkus wrote:Indeed.

http://barefeats.com/hard210.html

"Armed with the Amfeltec Squid PCI Express Carrier board with four Samsung M.2 SM951 flash blades and the ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Ti overclocked GPU, our 2010 Mac Pro tower can easily keep up with the best of the new Macs. All that's missing are the flames and exhaust pipes."

Yes. In fact it was Rob who told me about the card just last week. I ordered immediately. We had been discussing ways to go beyond 1500MB/s. One way was to put a SM951 in slot 3 and a XP941 in Slot 2 for almost 2x the speed. For some reason that worked but two SM951s didn't. But that's an obvious waste of slots. And then magically this card showed up.

Even my 3.46GHz 12-core with 48GBs of RAM and one SM951 was hampered by slow SATA II SSD drive read speeds, even when using multiple SSDs to spread out sample libs. This card fixes all of that.

My orchestral template is about 40GBs (before optimization), and will get much larger once I get more RAM. With the Amfeltec card that template loads in the blink of an eye and there are no more disk stream or Kontakt DFD streaming issues. I know I could turn DFD completely off but I'd rather not. And now I don't need to.

I highly recommend this card. It's a jaw dropper.

I love how the cMP continues to impress; you have taken it to the next level!

What are you using for GPU Steve? I am disappointed in the performance I am seeing with video playback in DP on my aging 5770.

HCMarkus wrote:I love how the cMP continues to impress; you have taken it to the next level!

What are you using for GPU Steve? I am disappointed in the performance I am seeing with video playback in DP on my aging 5770.

I added a flashed AMD R9 280X. I considered the GTX 980 but I really only needed a somewhat good Open CL GPU. I might consider something better for my other MP.

But you're right. It's pretty amazing that you can buy a used 4,1 MacPro for cheap and mod it like crazy for not much money and it tops the nMP in almost every way (except Thunderbolt - would like that for sure).

Nice to see someone else took the plunge. I've had a single 941 on the PCIe slot as the main drive for about a year. It's 1100mbs and only the largest of libraries I have are even noticeable in terms of loading. Couldn't imagine how ridiculous 6X roughly that speed would be like!

Very curious about the adapter card? do you have to instal all four M.2's as raid or can you do what thou will with them? Also what was the price for the one in your Mac Pro? Haven't seen too many multiple card setups for the PCIe bus so I'm stoked.

Michael Canavan wrote:Nice to see someone else took the plunge. I've had a single 941 on the PCIe slot as the main drive for about a year. It's 1100mbs and only the largest of libraries I have are even noticeable in terms of loading. Couldn't imagine how ridiculous 6X roughly that speed would be like!

Very curious about the adapter card? do you have to instal all four M.2's as raid or can you do what thou will with them? Also what was the price for the one in your Mac Pro? Haven't seen too many multiple card setups for the PCIe bus so I'm stoked.

You don't have to raid them. Any config will work. You can raid two and keep the other two separate. Or only install one or two SSDs and leave the others blank. It's a compliant card that's completely passive so, yes do as thou will. However you configure it, it just works. My advice is if you're just going to store your sample libs on them then just stripe the SSDs because latency is much less an issue here than with SATA SSDs. But do what works for you.

I started out with two 951s and even just at 3000MB/s (Ha. Just 3000), it was insane. I loaded a Kontakt instrument and it loaded so fast I didn't see it load!

The price was $256.00 I believe. Oh yeah, if you're gonna buy, mention Bare Feats to get a 15% discount until Dec 5th. The card seems pricy when compared to the $30 4x single m.2 card PCIe cards. But it's totally worth it. A 16x card? Nobody else makes one that I know of. It's a Canadian product and it shipped from there so the exchange rate is in their favor I believe. Shipping was about $25.

I think I'm now going to buy a 512GB 951 or 950 Pro and stick it in my old card and use it as a boot drive I slot 3. That leaves all the internal bays available for my 3TB HDDs. Or maybe I'll get a good mini-sas card for slot 4 and get an enclosure for SATA III speeds.

Too bad there are no TB PCIe cards for OS X. HP makes one for their Z series workstations.

Steve Steele wrote: Too bad there are no TB PCIe cards for OS X. HP makes one for their Z series workstations.

There is, Intel make one, what you're doing is faster of course, but 2500mbs is nothing to sneeze at!
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... eries.html

Michael Canavan wrote:

Steve Steele wrote: Too bad there are no TB PCIe cards for OS X. HP makes one for their Z series workstations.

There is, Intel make one, what you're doing is faster of course, but 2500mbs is nothing to sneeze at!
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... eries.html

If TB means terabyte, then yes. If TB means Thunderbolt, then no.

mikehalloran wrote:

Michael Canavan wrote:

Steve Steele wrote: Too bad there are no TB PCIe cards for OS X. HP makes one for their Z series workstations.

There is, Intel make one, what you're doing is faster of course, but 2500mbs is nothing to sneeze at!
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... eries.html

If TB means terabyte, then yes. If TB means Thunderbolt, then no.

I think you read that too quickly. In the Capacity header it sez:

Capacities
 400GB, 800GB, 1.2TB

Unless GB is Gigabit Butternut or something?

Yeah, I was referring to Thunderbolt. I would like to have access to Thunderbolt interfaces and peripherals at some point. I was saying that HP makes a PCIe Thunderbolt card but nothing like this is possible for the 4,1 or 5,1 MacPros due to the lack of support on the logic board (pre-Thunderbolt chipset days).

For a Thunderbolt audio or video interface, I'll need Thunderbolt to be on my host Mac. The only Mac that Apple makes these days that's capable of being a worthy host for me would be a MacPro. I may buy a used 4-core nMP and replace the CPU with a 10-core or above and the flash drive with an SM951 or 950 Pro (works with an adapter). My 5,1 would make a great VEP slave.

If I just need Thunderbolt for storage, I could buy a Mac Mini and use it as a server with Thunderbolt based enclosures, etc, and still keep my 5,1 as host.

Just clarifying.

Btw, I know this isn't the place but since we're on the topic I have two MacPros for sale. One is a 2009 that I was in the process of pimping that I'm going to sell on ebay, but if anyone here is interested, I'll make you a "motu-bro" deal. I've also got a 2008 3.0GHz 8-core MacPro with 32GBs of RAM and two Samsung 830 256GB SSDs mounted in the lower optical drive that I'm about to list on ebay. It's super clean and has been uber-pampered in my studio. If any of my motunation bros want it, I'll take $100 of my asking price just to "keep it in the family". It rather enjoys running DP.

Steve Steele wrote:

HCMarkus wrote:I love how the cMP continues to impress; you have taken it to the next level!

What are you using for GPU Steve? I am disappointed in the performance I am seeing with video playback in DP on my aging 5770.

I added a flashed AMD R9 280X. I considered the GTX 980 but I really only needed a somewhat good Open CL GPU. I might consider something better for my other MP.

Steve, does this card remove some of the CPU load that video operation in DP imposes?

Steve Steele wrote:Yeah, I was referring to Thunderbolt. I would like to have access to Thunderbolt interfaces and peripherals at some point. I was saying that HP makes a PCIe Thunderbolt card but nothing like this is possible for the 4,1 or 5,1 MacPros due to the lack of support on the logic board (pre-Thunderbolt chipset days).

For a Thunderbolt audio or video interface, I'll need Thunderbolt to be on my host Mac. The only Mac that Apple makes these days that's capable of being a worthy host for me would be a MacPro. I may buy a used 4-core nMP and replace the CPU with a 10-core or above and the flash drive with an SM951 or 950 Pro (works with an adapter). My 5,1 would make a great VEP slave.

If I just need Thunderbolt for storage, I could buy a Mac Mini and use it as a server with Thunderbolt based enclosures, etc, and still keep my 5,1 as host.

Doh! I forgot Mike H. is never wrong.

USB 3.1 PCIe cards might be the solution on old Mac Pros, but the info is spotty at best, kinda looks like it gets recognized as regular USB 3.