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my 2012 12 core 5.1 arrives next week and I have to set it up right.
I have two 500Gb evo SSDs in my current 3.1, one boot one not, connected to one SATA bay and to the second optical drive.
My intention was to clone the boot drive to another 500Gb SSD and have a 1Tb SSD for data, and attach both to a PCIe card which would go into my one remaining slot. Cloning the boot drive instead of using the existing one was so that I could experiment with OS upgrades (currently running Yosemite) and keep my 3.1 operational as a back up.
Through my copious reading and studying forums, it seemed to be the most recommended process so I thought it would be childplay to find the right card...not so. Tech lingo seems to change daily, some PCIe cards connect through the sata bus (probably the wrong term), some through the PCIe bus, some drives/cards won’t boot, some will only boot if using High Sierra, I’m supposed to be concerned with lanes, throughput, 6gb, NVME, and blades...I’m overwhelmed.
So I’m hoping that upon reading this desperate plea, some kind soul on this site could say: get this card, stick your two SSDs on it, upgrade to OS 10.xxx and you’re done till you can afford a Mac pro 7.1
I use DP, Kontakt 5.x, Spectrasonics stuff, Synthogy and Garritan pianos, 2 UAD2 audio cards. I commonly run 30 tracks of audio and four or five VIs simultaneously. Specs only mean so much to me so they can’t really factor in my decision process.
Thanks in advance for pointing me in the right direction, and for that matter, pointing out whatever mistake might reside in my plan.
Cheers
Alain Mallet

You will have 4 drive bays. The SATA II bus is 3G which is pretty fast.

A PCIe SATA card like the Accelsior S will give you a SATA III 6G bus for that card only while a PCIe blade like the Accelsior Pro Q bypasses the 6G limit. The Accelsior E2 is a blade that adds two eSATA ports.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc ... /2009-2012

Any of this will make a 5.1 Mac Pro a bit zippier but not as much as it will appear on paper. There are other limits including the CPU and overall data load on the PCI bus.

OWC charges a lot for average performance but they do have it all in one place.

I am not a fan of having a bunch of drives that are too small. With APFS, there are advantages to having all your apps and work files on your boot drive. There is no advantage to having additional drives for streaming your VIs but it doesn’t hurt performance either and, since VI streaming works fine at USB speeds there is no reason to go high performance for anything other than the boot drive.

My recommendation is the largest Accelsior Pro Q you can afford while using your other SSDs for VIs and offloading projects. There is no reason to put those anywhere but the drive bays.

Throw a big WD Red HHD in for Time Capsule. If you don’t have room inside, I recommend a networked unit like the WD My Cloud that connects via Ethernet.
https://www.wdc.com/products/personal-c ... orage.html

Thanks Mike.
On my 3.1, the Sata drives average 150 mb/s read and write, the SSDs average 250 MB/s
But sometimes, the system chokes a bit, VIs overload the performance meter as I need to keep the buffer relative low because I play in real time into the computer. From previous posts of yours, I got that going from 8 to 12 cores will help with that a bit, but wouldn’t having the VIs on PCIe SSD card also help with that issue?

The 5.1 has nearly 4x the system bus speed of the 3.1.

With the advent of SATA, there is no advantage to streaming VIs from a separate drive anymore (unlike PPCs through the G4) but many of us have enough that it is more practical to do so.

My 2T libraries drive is nearly full, for example and I don’t feel like spending over a grand on a 4T for an obsolete iMac just to put everything on one SSD and give myself more room. 2T SSDs can be had for $300 nowadays and the pair I have are fine. My 2010 has the same SATA II bus speed but I have no direct access to the system bus like you will with a PCIe blade.

Get the 2T blade. Do not partition it. If you have the room, throw some of your VIs on it. You will not notice a performance difference between streaming from the internal vs doing so over SATA II.

Yes, on paper and speed tests for moving large chunks of data from one drive to another... but that is not what happens when streaming audio live. Bouncing a huge project to disk is another issue but the improvement is slight.

If you were doing video, my recommendations would be different beginning with “Don’t buy a 5.1 Mac Pro”

If you just need another SATA port, and you don't want to drop a lot of cash, you might try something like this $14 card:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/PCI-E-Express- ... SwHUhaEMXT

If you order directly from China, you can get one for about $10.

I've been running one for several years now. Although cards (like this one) using the ASM1061 chipset reportedly allow booting from attached drives, I cannot comment because I have never tried it. For data delivery, my card has worked perfectly.

You may note that cards using the ASM chip operate at 1x PCIe 2.0 speed. This means the card's theoretical maximum data transfer rate is 500 MB/s, just shy of the theoretical maximum SATA3 transfer rate. As such, although the card can connect two drives, if both are operating simultaneously, you have a possible bottleneck.

The referenced card has four ports and allows SATA or eSATA operation via jumpers; two drives max in any combination.

More info on PCIe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express
Your new Mac Pro uses the PCIe 2.0 standard:

MacPro 4,1 (2009) and 5,1 (2010):

Slot 1: PCIe 2.0 (x16)
Slot 2: PCIe 2.0 (x16)
Slot 3: PCIe 2.0 (x4)
Slot 4: PCIe 2.0 (x4)