$1500 of SSDs in a Mac Pro.... with a Sonnet 4x4 M.2 Silent

[@dmug]

Thanks again to Sonnet for providing me with a Sonnet 4x4 M.2 Silent. It's great for the Mac Pro 2009-2012, 2019 and 2023. It even works in a Mac Pro 2008 ;) www.sonnettech.com/product/m2-4x4-pcie-card/overview.html

[@josemedeiros007]

Great job making the video Greg, it was very informative! You should add the Amazon links to your video details for the Western Digital SSD's that you used in your review.

I LOVE it when you clear your throat!!! It makes me feel so much less alone! ...and THANK YOU for the battlef**ld ear*h fun!! -CHOICE!!!!

[@ladeluff_]

A-Mazing Greg, you nailed it once more. i am in the process of mounting two 1TB kingstons on an asus PCIe 3 4-drive card.

[@ladeluff_]

AND to make things almost scary. i'm using my 2008 atm, and figured i would try that one first with RAID 0 ;P

[@ladeluff_]

Heck, i will likely not see the other drive, as you describe...but i will keep you posted

[@dmug]

@@ladeluff_if it doesn’t have a chipset, probably will be the the case. There’s always a wild chance that there’s a work around that I’m not aware of. I’ve learned not to speak in absolutes after people managed to get Thunderbolt on Mac Pro 5,1s

[@ladeluff_]

@@dmughehe. Time will show and tell. i ll keep you posted. its nighttime here in Norway. will try tomorrow. :D

[@dmug]

@@ladeluff_ if you find out anything will be really interesting

[@mvrck-pb5pk]

Thanks for the video. Cheers

[@WarriorsPhoto]

Hello Oregon's finest. Yes this is a great card. Niche and that's what makes it awesome. 😎 Be well and excited for your next video.

[@yjchoi17]

I have this exact card sitting in my “etc parts” box. Can’t be used as a bootable raid array, so I tried at least moving the user home folder onto the raid array and while it does boost speed significantly, it would act up every now and then. In the end, I opted for a High Point 6204 card and am very happy with it. This card is waiting to be repurposed or sold to someone that has better needs.

[@theformerkaiser9391]

Today I learned Sonnet still exists

[@dmug]

Still doing good work, Apple being Apple sadly made it that way

[@techpchouse]

@@dmug still producing great products :)

[@DarkTrapStudio]

Im glad I clicked on the video, it wasn't about distraction and I learned much. You always (or pretty much always) hit the right spot man. Nice beat also, still using mashine DAW ?

[@dmug]

Mostly just the Push 2, I had to reinstall my OS so I really need to install NI komplete and a ton of other stuff.

[@DarkTrapStudio]

@@dmug Push 2, sound like you need Ableton :P Tell me if you want a free copy of Live lite

[@AdamBuker]

And here not too long ago I spent $40 on a 256 GB AHCI M2 drive and a dumb PCIe card for my PowerMac G5 and am quite happy to see 700 MB/sec read/write speeds. Way faster than my SATA SSDs on that same machine.

[@dmug]

That’s pretty cool honestly, I was wondering if m2 even in the AHCI format worked in the g5

[@AdamBuker]

@@dmug It does under Leopard since it has AHCI support, but not Tiger and it cannot be used as a boot drive. Not sure if it could be used to boot a flavor of PPC linux though.

[@Doctaj54]

Thanks I wondered how well the Glotrends PA40 card worked for $180.

[@claytonberg721]

I've got an nvme enclosure from OWC that I bought 5 years ago to run my old 27 inch 2012 imac on an m.2 SSD. I tried buying one of those cheap 4 slot NVME m.2 cards off amazon, and nope, it would only recognize one drive. I ended up buying a four slot m.2 SSD enclosure thunderbolt enclosure from OWC for less than the sonnet card cost. It's too bad someone can't come up with a driver. Also I finally sprung for a decent thunderbolt dock as I'm sick and tired of the every two year ritual of figuring out why I'm having boot issues, unplugging everything to find it's the $50 amazon dock. OWC dropped their 14 port thunderbolt dock price to like $180 CAD.

[@claytonberg721]

yes that post was sponsored by OWC.

[@dmug]

Long term I’m probably going to build a NAS with 10 GBe as I can’t simply afford Apple’s PCIe Macs unless things change. The Mac Pro 2019 was a fluke and stupid purchase.

[@claytonberg721]

@@dmug I feel sad you bought that thing. Horrible timing.

[@noodlish]

Are you sure the Duplicate finder menu item copies the file on disk? I thought I read that it created a snapshot instead using copy-on-write.

[@dmug]

Hmm, that isn't clear but it does report 95 less GB on my drive and it takes a helluva lot longer on a non-RAID0 drive and a very long time on a spinny disk, if it does it might be limited to certain types of files.

[@noodlish]

@@dmug Found the article. It's APFS: Files and clones by Eclectic Light Co and it does seem to suggest the finder tries to avoid duplicating disk blocks. Maybe only under certain circumstances though, as you say. Definitely recommend that blog btw.

[@videocommenter235]

Prolly is CoW acting there. A better test would have doing a dump of /dev/urandom to the disk using dd.

[@hiuchingtam4278]

Good content!!! Keep up!!

[@dmug]

I keep thinking I don’t have more angles for Mac Pro content but here we are, and more planned.

[@TechTVusa]

I think your content is very good. You seem to have fun modifying the Mac Pros. I have fun tricking out my PC. Have you though about custom building a PC and putting off the wall devices into it? I think you might enjoy tinkering around with a PC just as much as the Mac Pro.

[@dmug]

I might one day branch into it but I’m not a big gamer, and by trade professionally tied to macOS. Right now, my dream is to buy a NAS with NVMe caching if my channel ever makes enough to justify it. It’ll certainly be a video if it happens.

[@TechTVusa]

@@dmug Who said anything about gaming? My computer is built from the ground up for video editing not gaming. For every 1 device for the Mac Pro there are 101 devices for the PC as seen in the link below. kzbin.info/www/bejne/npe3apysm8d9b5o

[@MSP612-ru2fi]

I don't know why i haven't seen your videos before but just got 2019 mac Pro with 96GB for 1,500 on ebay... i am trying to run Debian with proxmox and after long search i just came across your channel.. i love the jokes and such... absolutely subbed.

[@TheOriginalCollectorA1303]

Very cool, Mac Pro 2019 upgrades are cool, but it’s definitely worth it for the 2008! You should try the card out with something like Mac OS Lion. Honestly though, having all that SSD storage is crazy to see. Then again I’m using spinning rust all the time and it works great!

[@dmug]

For old OSes I’d had to format the drive as HFS+, but if I had to guess, it’d still work. Working with old OSes is a pain though as I have to revert my GPU as the RX 580 wasn’t supported on until like 10.11 (might be earlier). I’ll have more retro content in the future.

[@TheOriginalCollectorA1303]

I guess it’s a good reason to get another Mac Pro! But yeah, I would imagine it’ll take more time since it’s a newer card going into an older setup. Still, old or new, Macs are awesome machines!

[@michaelmelita2542]

Great video. Saw you have the sapphire nitro rx580 in the 3,1. Was wondering what cable you were using to power it. I’ve got a 2 mini 6 pin to 8 pin but it also has a vacant 6pin slot on the card. Yours looks populated from what I can see

[@dmug]

It’s the most haphazard setup because it used to have a Vega 56, which had 6 and 8 so I bought a y 6 to 8 pin adapter

[@MarkHyde]

Real time video editing from RAW video files incoming :)

[@dmug]

If I had a camera that nice... One of the great hopes for me is to at least save up enough from KZbin to get something better than just using my iPhone 14 Pro and an Olympus EM-5 MKIII.

[@MarkHyde]

@@dmug If I had that card and the SSDs for my 2023 MacPro that is what I would use. lol I only have a 2Tb model for music and video.

[@Halon1234]

The struggle is real, and Apple isn't alone in not supporting bifurcation. IBM's Power9 CPU doesn't seem to either, at least not with Raptor Computing's motherboards for them; I resorted to a HighPoint Rocket 1204 board of similar specifications to this Sonnet board for around $150 on Amazon, though it's PCIe 3.0 x8, and I populated only two of its four slots. People need to know these products exist, and I appreciate you making this video almost as much as dancing AI Tim Apple and the abrupt excerpt from Battlefield Earth. Cheers!

[@dmug]

I've always wanted to get my hands on the HighPoint cards as they seemed to have them waaaay before most others.

[@gamagama69]

i thought most boards dont support bifurcation

[@Halon1234]

@@gamagama69 I’m not really an authority here, but it’s weird that Apple doesn’t support bifurcation because Intel hardware has for years. A while ago I snagged a cheap 12 core Broadwell HP Z440 workstation from eBay, and that enterprise hardware from roughly a decade ago quietly supported it with a huge range of config options in the UEFI. Apple must have not wanted to bother, but the chipset-level support for bifurcation had to be there in the 2019 Mac Pro. They simply haven’t exposed it. Meanwhile the M2 Ultra Pro only enables its 16 lanes of PCIe traffic on a switch, so god only knows how performance holds up…

[@craigfuchs5464]

As I am getting into more 8k video I wonder if it would help make the Mac pro faster than a studio in Final Cut editing

[@dmug]

Almost certainly as 8k60 depending on ProRes is 1500 - 3000 MBs. Really the smarter move would be to edit off of 1080p proxies and then resync the EDL to the 8k media as generating preview proxies would be brutal storage wise. Also I’d imagine the other limiting factor is cpu. The media engine found on the M1 Pro/Max and all the m2 and above makes for the ability to offload all the codec mashing to leave the GPU and CPU free. Using ProRes 422 proxy can help a lot.

[@OTTOAUDIO]

it seems I have the same able conn card you have? How much faster is the sonnet? Or same if raid zero?

[@dmug]

The Ableconn is limited to 6000 MB/s reads and if I recall right, 4000 MB/s writes as it's only the ASM2824. Even on a Mac Pro 5,1 the Sonnet is faster.

[@OTTOAUDIO]

@@dmug thanks again!!!

[@QuinsTechCorner]

Battlefield earth gag is fantastic! Really really enjoyed your video and I think your ethics are fine. Boohoo poor bezos.

[@DarkTrapStudio]

5:12 Seems like any generic aliexpress part selled on Amazon by resellers as the standard practice we experience on the platfrom :P

[@dmug]

It’s something like that, I don’t think I’ve seen this exact board on AliExpress but there are an assload of white label rebadging companies out there.

[@DarkTrapStudio]

@@dmug Especially on Amazon, thats why I said this. To be correct maybe this card isn't on Aliexpress but it really seems like the stuff that happens usually with theses same brand unbranded items.

[@cosmo_y2k1]

You’d think Apple supporting PCIe of all things, they wouldn’t bother leaving anything out. 😅

[@shephusted2714]

why even bother with apple hw when you cn build a hackintosh that is 2x faster yet costs 1/2 as much - it makes no sense - qualcomm is going to overrun everybody - apple/amd/intel - that's what it looks like #benchmarks #arm roadmap #tonymac

[@dmug]

A lot of things said here: hackintoshes are a dead end and require a lot of guesswork in OpenCore, great for hobbyists, less so for working professionals. As far as claims about Qualcomm, they’ve been lagging in ARM behind Apple but I sincerely hope they are great as competition is nothing but good for consumers. I imagine moving forward both Apple and Qualcomm will have to focus on ancillary features like Apple’s Media engine and NPU and Qualcomm’s generative AI accelerator, as both will be using similar manufacturing.

[@manwithafork]

Hilarious 🤣

Abusing free return policy to make money is not the way. Doing this You are increasing prices for everyone, xause shop need to take account for such actions like You did. Shame on You.

[@dmug]

You’re not entirely wrong, I debated this (only buying directly from one certain company who’d open box resell). I planned to keep a drive or two but probably can get my money back (most of it) on eBay since prices have been on the increase for SSDs. Only point I might say is I don’t really make anything like you might think on KZbin seeing as I’m sponsor free, don’t have mid rolls and 20k views is a good video for me. Most of my videos are money pits. This is video is a bit of the dog who caught the car as I didn’t expect to get a review unit.

[@QuinsTechCorner]

The amount of views Greg would need to “make money” and even break even on a video like this would be insane. No shame is warranted here.

I don't know... maybe we should hold the SOY's for corporate amer*ca... No shame is warranted here.... IMO....

[@hamesparde9888]

LOL imagine using a Mac! 😂

[@dmug]

It’s part of my vision board.

[@shephusted2714]

this is basically early adopter tax - we will see more better cheaper solutions as the copycats get onboard - the bifurcated pci-e v5 cards should be like 150 bucks not 1500 - it is laughable - hold off and see prices drop quickly once there is some competition - which there will be

[@dmug]

Two things: the card is $299, it’s only $1500 when populated with the four 4 TB ssds I picked. There are copy cats and they’ve been out for a long time… just that use lesser chipsets like the ASM2824 (8x) instead of the PLX8732. If you want the performance, it’s Highpoint which is about $399 or Sonnet at $299. I have one in a drawer from AliExpress I bought 3+ years ago and it gets a little less than half of the Sonnet and a fractionally worse than the ableconn and requires a fan. These guys have been around at least 5+ years. The silent is the newer cheaper card.

[@shephusted2714]

@@dmug why even bother with apple hw when you cn build a hackintosh that is 2x faster yet costs 1/2 as much - it makes no sense - qualcomm is going to overrun everybody - apple/amd/intel - that's what it looks like #benchmarks #arm roadmap #tonymac

[@ripgirl9000]

super helpful, thank you!