It is 8 years old, but my 2010 Mac Pro is still kicking some serious tail in terms of speed and power. Perhaps not in quite the same speed and style as some of the newer, more fancy systems out there… but it is a formidable beast for audio work nonetheless. It has been upgraded with a pair of 6 core, 3.33ghz CPUs & 64Gb of ram but to push it even further it is time for a Mac Pro 5,1 Hard Drive Upgrade. It really is a blissful system to use.
For several years people (including myself) placed extremely speedy M.2 style Samsung XP951 and SM951 SSDs into their systems via means of PCIe to M.2 adaptor cards. They were expensive when readily available, but since production stopped the prices have become astronomical compared to other SSD solutions… and I didn’t actually think it was that crash hot anyway! The reality that overshadowed the fancy looking screenshots of disk speed tests with tantalising figures is that these old Mac Pros are encased in USB2 and Sata II connectivity. Unless you have the capacity to move everything to M.2 drives, those old 2010 bottle necks will still loom over everything you do. Not that it is a deal breaker, but it means there is a strong likelihood that your M.2 drive will only ever run at 60% or 70% efficiency.
Running an SSD for your OS is a given in 2018, but beyond that I have come to understand that one of the biggest time consumers in a DAW is the pooling of audio files from multiple sources. I have a separate sample drive that contains extensive sample libraries from Vienna Sound Libraries and Native Instruments, as well as a large collection of impulse responses. Another drive contains over 400Gb of sound effects that are neatly sorted thanks to Soundly. And two more drives host my Pro Tools sessions. Load times and the snappiness of Pro Tools can be seriously affected by all these drives, depending on their speed.
In search of a solution I considered many options. eSata cards. USB3 cards. A full deck of SSD Sata drives. PCIe products like those by Sonnet. With the goal of avoiding the internal Sata II connectivity of the hard drive bays in the Mac Pro, and with only one PCIe slot spare thanks to a graphics card, HDX card and Blackmagic video card taking up the other three slots, the only real solution I can to was the Addonics Quad mSata PCIe SSD card. …and boy is it a beauty!
The Quad mSata PCIe SSD card is cheap, and features four mSata slots. While not as fast as newer M.2 solutions, it will allow all four slots to run at PCIe 2.0 speeds which means SATA III for everything… and! mSata SSDs are small and cheap. Cheaper than a standard SATA III SSD for the most part. I have installed a pair of 500Gb mSata SSDs for sessions, a 1Tb SSD for the operating system and a further 1Tb SSD is on it’s way for samples and sound effects. These little SSDs are recognised instantly by OSX and will happily run as the boot drive for the system. You can even raid them if you want faster speeds! The only downside is that they appear as external drives within OSX, rather than internal.
As a comparison for speed:
5400RPM HDD = 67.2MB/s Write & 76.0MB/s Read
7200RPM HDD = 93.4MB/s Write & 98.6MB/s Read
EVO 960 mSata = 478.8MB/s Write & 518.8MB/s Read
It isn’t exactly a modern M.2 based system, but OSX is booting faster, Pro Tools loads sessions much, much quicker and everything feels far snappier. If you are chasing an SSD solution for your old Mac Pro, I would definitely recommend the Quad mSata PCIe SSD card and a bunch of mSata SSDs!
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