Can I make the 2010 Mac Pro as fast as the new one?! - 2TB NVMe Upgrade

hi guys welcome back to another huge Effy's video Apple has just recently released their new Mac Pro which brings back the upgrade ability to the Mac Pro lineup however with its $10,000 starting price many people are left with older models like me the decade old Mac Pro 5 comma 1 models are still high performance when it comes to CPU and memory but the biggest bottleneck being the SATA 2 interface which offers painfully slow speeds compared to modern computers so in this video I'm going to be taking my Mac Pro to the max just how fast can I make the storage in this old machine and can it exceed Apple's new Mac Pro I have done previous upgrades and videos on this Mac Pro and in the comment sections below many of you guys recommended I upgraded to nvme drives so I went out and purchased not one but two Samsung 970 Evo plus drives in one terabyte these drives are known to be really fast and of course that's exactly what I'm trying to do in this video so I picked up two of those to hopefully put in a raid zero but of course the Mac Pro doesn't have an nvme slot so I'm going to need a way to attach it to the machine now you can buy adapters to do just that and they connect a via the PCI bus these adapters can range anywhere between seven dollars and six hundred dollars for the sonnet card which has four slots in it this one here set me back three hundred dollars and you might think if you could get one for seven dollars why don't you spring out on one of these real expensive ones most cheap options offer no fan or heatsink for cooling slower speed and only one nvme port and because I'm going to be using this as my youtube scratch disk I need super reliable hardware because I don't want anything to go wrong well I think the adapter itself is a little bit overpriced I will link it in the description so if you have a Mac Pro 512 one and you're looking to do an upgrade and you've got some cash to spend then you can maybe give this one it go there is also an article I'll leave linked below of all of the tested adapters and SSDs that are known to work in the Mac Pro 5 cover 1 however the adapter I have right here at a first glance is built pretty well all I needed to do was attach these screws on the back of the card and the spacer for the nvme drives and then insert the two drives into their slots once you've inserted them at the correct angle I can then tighten them up with the Phillips screws included with the kit lastly I can remove the protective film over the heat transfer pads before I seal everything up pressing it down into place I can reinstall the four screws back holding the card into place and the process is as simple as that now that it's all ready to go it's time to open up the Mac Pro and get this card installed once we get the side panel out of the way we can take a look inside of the machine and see my current upgrades you can see there I have a SATA SSD installed on the PCI lanes and that is giving me six gigabit per second SATA on a SATA 2 machine if you're wanting to get faster speeds with an SSD you can do it that way however that's only going to be my boot drive as it's really not that fast I did remove it which gave me a little bit more space to get this new card installed I did have a little bit of trouble aligning it but with some wiggling I managed to get it all connected up reinstalling my boot drive back in I can reattach the PCI bracket this Apple way of securing the PCI cards isn't that effective as you can see some of them still wiggle around however they won't be running away too fast so putting the side panel back on we can finally test out the machine plugging it back in and pressing the power button and of course still boots up jumping back into Mac OS I was greeted with a couple of dialog boxes saying the discs inserted were not readable by the computer this is a good sign and it means that the discs themselves are detected by the machine so I just needed to erase them and program them into the format that I needed which of course was Mac OS extended journaled I did this for both drives as I wanted to test these speeds out before I put them in a raid 0 configuration running black magic disk speed test on the drive I got 1400 on the right and 1500 on the read while quite a lot faster than what this machine has ever seen before it still wasn't fast enough and is definitely nowhere near the 2019 Mac Pro so I decided to put the two disks in a raid zero configuration this will give me two terabytes and should theoretically improve the speed of the drive however if one of these drives was to fail you would lose all the data across both disks with that being said I put them in a raid configuration and strangely I got slightly slower speeds so have we hit the limit of this 2010 Mac Pro well not quite it turns out Apple released a firmware update for the five comma one Mac Pro with Mac OS Mohave as I'm still running high sierra given mine nvidia graphics card i'm not running the newest firmware to update the firmware i use the mojave installer and follow along with the steps according to some online articles the new firmware supports bootable and vme drives so I'm hoping that this new firmware upgrade will give a much-needed speed increase to my nvme drives the process itself was pretty painless and after the update was installed my nvme drives were now reaching speeds of up to 2,500 on the right and 2,800 on the read now it didn't actually matter whether I had the drives in a raid zero or just individually they were still getting the exact same speed so it appears we've completely maxed out the PCI bus on the 2010 Mac Pro because raid 0 caused no speed increase I'll put the drives in just a bunch of disks away which will expand the storage into one virtual drive and with that it's time for some statistics with the SATA 2 hard drive you can see just how slow that is all the way up to the nvme Drive with that new firmware it's amazing just how big a jump it was going from the old firmware to the new one I didn't have to install mac OS Mohave to run that firmware I just needed the install of itself the SATA 2 hard drive at the top of that chart is actually my current YouTube scratch disk which is a 4 terabyte Western Digital 5400 rpm drive but of course how does it stack up with the 2019 Mac Pro well it's about 800 megabytes a second slower on the right and 500 megabytes slower on the read but for a decade-old machine that is truly incredible and is definitely going to breathe some new life into this machine the total cost of this upgrade was $900 but that is going to depend on what SSDs what size SSDs and what adapter you use in your machine now this is a little bit of an investment of an upgrade because if I get the new 2019 Mac Pro or even a PC I can put that adapt a card in those nvme drives in it and it will work so I'm not limited or stuck with the upgrade in this machine so if you have a Mac Pro 5 comma one I would definitely recommend getting an nvme Drive maybe don't spend as much money as I did because you can't really harness the full power of those SSD drives and on that note this has been a huge aries video if you liked what you saw hit that subscribe button and consider checking out the Mac Pro playlist for more videos just like this one also make sure to follow me on my social media link for which is down in the description that's all for this video and I'll catch you guys next time

Channel: Hugh Jeffreys

Views: 958,383

Keywords: Hugh, Jeffreys, Apple, iPhone, iPad, iPod, technology, repair, restore, Mac Pro, NVMe, HDD, SSD, upgrade, m.2

Id: pPC4kl4qHbo

Length: 7min 54sec (474 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 11 2020