Monthly Archives: May 2015

Apple changes – 10 years

A mixed bag.

Desktop and laptop hardware:

When I started using Apple hardware in 1999 it was a disgust with Windows and PCs which drove there. My first iMac was the classic G4 ‘screen on a stick’ design, an ergonomic bull’s eye, which is still in use to this day. It was a revelation, never locking up, recognizing all manner of peripherals instantly and came with an OS which was night-and-day compared to the horrors of Windows.

As my time becomes more valuable daily , seeing as it’s a pot amortizing at an accelerating rate, I see no way that I would revert to Windows, something I have not touched since 2004 when I commenced self-employment. All of my work and computing leisure are spent on Macs or iOS devices. If my son so much as mentions Windows, I threaten him with my will and an eraser.

A decade ago that great CEO/marketer/carnival barker/charlatan/thief Steve Jobs was well into the AAPL revival, which peaked on his death when the business became the most valuable public company on earth. I published a picture taken the day of his death in downtown San Francisco and it remains as moving today as it was then:


Pacific Stock Exchange building, Pine and Sansome, San Francisco.
G3, kit lens @ 71mm, 1/1250, f/7.1, ISO 1600

You can read that piece here.

But, I’m afraid to say, since then Apple has gone nowhere as regards the pro video/audio/photography user set. Sure they sell lots of phones, but for pros it’s all been downhill. The obsession with thinness and looks, driven by designer Jony Ive, has lost its governor on reality, one Saint Steve. With everything but looks sacrificed on the Altar of Thin, today’s iMac 5K is every bit as bad when it comes to thermal management as the iMacs which ushered in the Intel era, purportedly running CPUs much cooler than the IBM G4/5 ones which preceded them.

However, bad as the early Intel iMacs were, if any iMac takes the prize for multi-purpose machine, it has to be the pre-Intel G5. Computer and toaster in one. My new one was sold so fast that I think I left the bread in it – its fans would roar at the slightest provocation and, often as not, the machine would also leak coolant all over the place as soldered joints melted in the inferno. An abomination. It looked nice, of course.


The worst Mac of the past decade – the iMac G5.

Thus, when I wrote Putting out the Garbage five years ago I simultaneously abandoned desktop Macs in favor of a Hackintosh, a machine using common PC parts but hacked to run OS X. The machine was a blast to build, the hacking was a nice challenge (and sweet revenge), fast, infinitely upgradable and robust as it comes except …. when Apple made changes to OS X. Each saw the Hackintosh gurus scrambling for a fix as a host of new things was broken. After a while this began to get really old. That emotion coincided with the classic Mac Pro becoming very affordable on the used market and the 2009 model I specialize in upgrading is easily modified to current performance at modest cost.


The best Mac of the past decade – the 2009 dual CPU Mac Pro.

And the Mac Pro, introduced in 2006, really was a nod to Apple’s roots, comprised of movie makers, sound artists and photographers. Not cellphone dabblers but rather people who used the Mac Pro to make a living, with all the attendant demands on robustness and coolness (literally) under pressure. And it bears repeating – for heavy processing, especially video, you must be certifiable to use an iMac. Only the classic or new Mac Pros (the latter also thermally well managed, albeit at a high price) are up to the task.

And even in the new Mac Pro you see the invidious creep of form over function in Ive’s designs. I mean, all the storage is external? The GPUs cannot be upgraded? The CPU is difficult and costly to upgrade? And it looks like a garbage can? What was Ive thinking? And it’s doubly tough for those working pros who really do not want to build Hacks or join the PC world, preferring to work on their clients’ projects rather than spending time endlessly debugging their machines.


The 2013 Mac Pro – form and function. but at a price.

The other change to Macs since the white Intel iMac machines melted down is that every Mac screen out there has a ghastly, glossy finish. There used to be an option for the MacBook Pro of a matte screen, but I have not the energy to check the fine print to determine if that still exists. Even their Cinema Displays are glossy. Again, what are they thinking of?

In fairness, Apple’s laptops are superb in every way. Take into account annual depreciation of maybe 20% and an annual or biennial upgrade is perfectly feasible economically for just about anyone. People who talk of the ‘Apple premium’ probably failed finance classes. Then again, they mostly use PCs. Every Mac today runs Windows if that’s your thing, many buying them for just that purpose, they are fast and so long as you do not overtax them, stay reasonably cool. Battery lives only get better, keyboards and trackpads are the best in the business and there seem to be no reports of fundamental design flaws. Even the glossy screen intrudes little for who, after all, would use that for serious work? You switch to closed lid mode and procure a mouse, keyboard and (non-Apple branded) display with a matte screen. Just lay off the heavy video stuff.


The MacBook Pro – Retina Display. The best laptop in the business.

So if the pro user has a beef with Apple’s hardware it’s easy to see why.

OS X:

More troubling is the direction OS X has taken. I recall all the bloatware which PCs came with when new and while OS X is not in that league, we are constantly seeing insanely frustrating changes which seem to deny the platform-agnostic nature of the Unix core on which OS X is built.

OS X arguably peaked with Snow Leopard OS 10.6 in 2008 which took Leopard, shook out all the bugs, introduced nothing new and was lean and mean. That’s what I call software development. Since then we have had Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite and none has added anything useful over Snow Leopard, except for a lot of feature bloat and sheer stupidity (making icons monochrome in Finder, for heaven’s sake? Hiding Library directories? Translucent menus? Backward scrolling? The arrant idiocy of the ‘fly away’ option on cursor hover over a dock icon?). And you really want to take phone calls on your computer or hop off the desktop and take over on the laptop in mid-sentence? Really?


Snow Leopard – the best OS X ever.

It’s as if there is a child with Attention Deficit Disorder running OS X development, ignorant of when it’s best to just leave things alone. And the constant dumbing down, directionally pointing to iOS, is insanely frustrating, no less than the constant rounds of application upgrades with every major release. I do not want OS X to look like my iPhone and know no one who does. So far that idiot child has not managed to break the main reason for using OS X in the first place, its rock solid reliability, but give him enough room and he will get there. Apple, please, just leave OS X alone. No one ever bought a Mac because a new version of OS X just came out and no one ever will.

The iPhone:

Today’s Apple is a cell phone maker. Nearly all of its revenue and net profit is from the iPhone. The iPad is doomed to no growth owing to its long life cycle and the tablet craze has rather faded.

And in that regard it’s fair to say that the original iPhone was the technological product of the new century so far. I bought mine on July 31, 2007, the day it became available, doing so in the college town of San Luis Obispo where the predominantly student population had either not seen the keynote some six months earlier or was too stoned to go to the Apple Store. I queued all of 5 minutes, with the news full of mile long lines elsewhere. Some people, whose time was worth nothing at all, even lined up in San Francisco. Only in America do the unemployed line up for cell phones.


The first iPhone. Apple’s greatest product ever.

Sure, later iPhones added the App Store, sharper screens, 3G, 4G, a better camera and on and on. And, of course, they became thinner and thinner. But inside every iPhone is that first iPhone with its no less brilliant operating system, iOS. iOS may see constant tinkering by Cupertino but, unlike with OS X, you are free to largely disregard bloat features you do not need. And in the iPhone 5 and 6 it’s no exaggeration to say that the camera is superb. The iPhone destroyed Blackberry and Nokia, arguably made Samsung (a work in progress, that one, as Sammy finds it increasingly difficult to steal/copy/clone), and bankrupted Nokia and Motorola. It will eventually destroy Canon and Nikon as camera makers.

Steve Jobs’s roll out presentation of the iPhone is perhaps the greatest display of marketing prowess ever and you can (and should) watch it here, even if your parents dropped you on your head when you were knee high to a grasshopper, leaving you hating all things Apple. “A widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough internet communicator. Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone”. Genius. And true. As thrilling to see today as it was in early 2007. And, of course, “You had me at scrolling”.


The author’s iPhones – now and then.

Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Westinghouse …. Jobs. A pantheon of American capitalists and originals all.

Here’s hoping:

So my hope for Apple is that they leave OS X alone, at least make some effort to maintain a professional computer product in their increasingly bloated product line (Gil Amelio, anyone?) and continue to improve the camera in the iPhone. Of these three, only the last is a realistic expectation, and that’s sad.

Oh, that and have its CEO stick to talking about what he is paid to do during business hours, not about what he does in his bedroom. And enough already with that dumb watch.

Top class

The best marketing campaign ever.

I have written before about the lovely photographs the Swiss watchmaker Patek Philippe has been running seemingly for ever.

Their latest father-and-son image maintains the high standards of the campaign and is suffused with charm and class.

The price of entry for the world’s best wristwatch is about the same as the cost of a new Leica M240 and a couple of lenses. The Leica will be useless junk by the time your son comes of age. The Patek will have doubled in value. I dumped my Leicas years ago ….

Technology changes – 10 years

The decade reviewed.

As the tenth anniversary of this journal approaches, it’s appropriate to review the revolutionary changes in photographic technology during the past decade.

Full frame cameras:

When I wrote the first column here on June 15, 2005, my staple camera was a Leica M2. With 35mm, 50mm and 90mm Summicron lenses it was all any street snapper ever wanted. ‘Summicron’ remains as magical a word today as it did in the 1950s when Walter Mandler and his team at Ernst Leitz in Wetzlar conceived their baby and in its second iteration – after the collapsible version – it remains one of the most beautiful pieces of engineering ever. 

 For me the 35mm final aspherical Summicron lens version was as good as it got with film and if your Leica and its lens were finished in anything other than that ne plus ultra satin chrome, you were either Larry Burrows or a poseur.


Leica M2, 50mm Summicron. A look
and feel not recaptured since by Leica.

While Canon had earlier introduced the first full frame DSLR the price was astronomical. Then, in September 2005, along came the 5D which to this day remains useable in every way and is the first classic of the digital era. The organic shape of the body shell could not be more different from the machine shell of the M2, but it worked well. It’s available for pennies now yet its $3,000 introductory price for the body only was deemed a bargain a decade ago. 

 I owned one for many years and absolutely rejoiced at the lovely color rendition. As for definition, it left anything film could do in the dust. Those who pontificate about the superior resolving power of film are people whose company you really want to avoid. And all of this from a 12mp sensor, modest by today’s standards. There was not an awful lot wrong with Canon’s lenses, either, dirt cheap after Leica optics.


Canon 5D – an instant digital classic.

Once I saw the first results from the 5D in Photoshop, I realized that film could not hold a candle to the results. Film is Dead. Not only was the digital processing cycle an order of magnitude – nay, two orders of magnitude – shorter, the image could be manipulated this way and that when necessary (and it was rarely necessary) and you never ran out of film. A spare battery looked after the main consumable, electrical power.

The results from that Canon were so good, in fact, that I realized I was no more turning to my workhorse of 35 years, a 1959 Leica M3. I am anything but an equipment collector or gear fetishist, adhering to the ‘if you don’t use it, sell it’ school of thought. So the M3 and I parted, although not without a tear. The M2 followed soon after. As the saying on Wall Street goes, “If you want loyalty, get a dog”.

I sold that Canon and a couple of lenses to a friend of this blog (who very kindly gifted me a bunch of boxes of printing paper) and it remains in fine shape and happily used to this day.

Small cameras:

If asked which camera gave me the most intense pleasure in use this past decade the answer would unhesitatingly be the Panasonic G1. When Olympus first made Micro-Four Thirds bodies they were ridiculously huge, the same size as a full frame body and lens. Why on earth would anyone accept 25% of the sensor area of full frame for the same bulk and weight? 

 Panasonic, co-founder of MFT with Olympus, shaking the tree seemingly owned by Canon and Nikon, came up with a perfect, small, interchangeable lens camera with outstanding lenses to match, the Panasonic G1. I took more pictures with mine, mostly with the kit zoom, than with all other cameras combined during the decade, and so good was it that it prompted me to sell the Canon 5D. The 12mp sensor easily delivered 13″ x 19″ prints, with 18″ x 24″ at a stretch from the best images. The camera was quiet, unobtrusive but, above all, small

Suddenly, the concept of the Barnack Leica, the original screw thread range, was realized anew. You always had the camera with you, no excuses about weight, bad backs, room and so on.  And, unlike that $10k rangefinder Leica, the Panny was quiet and much faster to use, courtesy of auto focus. 


The ‘Bluemix’, as one of my readers dubbed the G1.
The kit zoom is a real corker.

And Panny only moved to strength thereafter, so much so that I now enjoy two GX7s, which added a Leica rangefinder body format and a truly silent electronic shutter. On occasion I borrow my son’s LX100 which may just be the most perfect all around camera ever made, with a fast lens, optional manual controls, excellent ergonomics and with a newer 16mp sensor which makes those 18″ x 24″ prints a breeze. 

The zoom lens is fixed, designed appropriately enough by Leica, and it’s the perfect recreation of that original Leica M2/35/50/90 outfit, in 25% of the volume and with like savings in weight. The lens quality of the LX100 yields little to that Summicron of yore. Cost is less than one used Leica lens. At that price who cares if it lasts? The world had forever changed from engineering masterpieces with long lives supported by expert technicians, to throw away cheap.

Anyone who has driven a 1980s S Class Mercedes compared to the ‘3 year-lease-and-forget-it’ garbage Stuttgart churns out today will know the feeling. Come to think of it, my 1983 S Class lasted me 17 years and a quarter of a million miles. I wouldn’t own one of today’s MBs if you gave it to me and the same goes for the digital Leica.

The Leica rangefinder ideal recreated for today – the GX7 and the LX100.

Very small cameras:

Schoolboys of my era reveled in cold war movie spies (although the stars looked more like Richard Burton than Ivan Bollockoff) using Minox cameras to copy sundry secret plans for sale to the Russkies. The Minox may well lay claim to having propelled the Soviet war machine further and faster than any resource until the Chinese started stealing all our technological secrets.  Their approach was far more basic. They simple enrolled at Stanford, capitalizing on American naïveté. 

But the quality of that execrable 8 x 11mm negative left lots to be desired. Read that blueprint incorrectly through the fog and grain and the missile Ivan just launched at NYC, purportedly a clone of that US Titan, ends up hitting bloody Vladivostok on his own mainland. “I could have sworn that was an 8, not a 9” and there go a few more tens of thousands joyously suffering Soviets. Thank you, Minox.

Today’s vodka swiller has no such issues. He steals the blueprints after hacking the network on his $5 flash drive (bought with your hacked Visa card from B&H in NYC) which FedEx and UPS kindly mail for him, expedited if needed, to Mother Russia. Heck, “Charge it, premium rate” he says, handing your card over. Capitalism is hanging itself with its own flash drive and credit card. No, Sergei and his like have no more use for cameras. Those are now most prized by the paparazzi at the National Enquirer.

But Joe Six Pack most certainly has discovered photography because it was foisted upon him by his cell phone maker, and now he can send images of his puking kids and Bud-sodden baseball events to all and sundry (where they are promptly deleted on receipt, never viewed) at what he imagines is no cost. Never mind the $100 a month the telco is soaking him for.

However, as I have written here before, the writing for traditional cameras is very much on the wall. When I can make 18″ x 24″ prints (and I do, regularly) from my iPhone with little effort, adding a few moments to blur the backgrounds in post processing before hitting ‘Print’, and with the camera being free and always in my pocket, what on earth would I want with a bulky point and shoot? 

 Add movie capability and the outstanding optics and image stabilization in the likes of the iPhone 6, and the next to go will be the big DSLR, with a remaining niche market share comprised of sports snappers, nerds who want to be taken seriously and, yes, the lads at the National Enquirer. A working population of 1,000, plus a few nerds. Not what you call a lucrative market.


The cutting edge – the iPhone 6 camera.

I expect that within a year or two we will see much larger sensors, automatic optional blurring of backgrounds conferred digitally and true optical folded zooms, all in the confines of that 1/4″ thick technological marvel, the cellphone.

Printing:

And speaking of printing, it was pretty much all over a decade ago. A little earlier HP had introduced their bargain priced wide format dye printers in 18″ and 24″ formats (the DesignJet 90 and 130) and their replacements, pigment ink printers from Canon, Epson and HP never could hold a candle to the funereal blacks only good printing dyes can deliver.

The snag with the HP is not repair parts, which remain easily available, HP having sold many of these to draughtsmen, map makers and print shops, it’s that the paper is becoming unavailable. Yes you can still get 24″ rolls (a design of the devil himself, for uncurling roll paper after printing makes a winter vacation in North Korea seem preferable). To work with ink dyes, paper must have a porous, swellable surface to absorb those dyes and, indeed, DJ 90/130 prints need a couple of hours of drying time to take on their final color palette and surface texture.

My series of articles over the years addressing use and repair of the DesignJet are the definitive ones anywhere – there’s no point in false modesty here – and my constant communication with HP users and (so far) successful efforts to keep those printers running testify to my commitment to the finest domestic printer ever made for photographers. The 50+ large prints on my walls at home testify both to the printer’s longevity, the wonderful color fastness of the result and, of course, to my great photography.


The HP DesignJet 130.

Incidentally, it will come as no surprise that not a one of my DJ correspondents would ever buy an HP product again. Not that there’s anything wrong with the dye jet DJs. It’s the abomination of a once great American company behind these products which is something we all seek to avoid. Why do business with a business whose board of directors and senior management commit grand larceny every time they endorse a pay check?

Hardly anyone prints any more. When I was a lad the touchstone of great technique was a 16″ x 20″ monochrome print from your Leica or Rollei negative, all processed in the home darkroom, of course, and properly mounted and framed. 

Today it’s a miserable, color distorted, miniscule apparition on someone’s ill profiled computer or tablet display. Quite why anyone spends on a camera other than the one in his cell phone for this purpose defeats me. Printing is finished, albeit not chez Pindelski. I routinely give my subjects large color prints and the sense of delight and joy they display on receipt is intensely gratifying. You don’t get that from an emailed snap.

In the next column celebrating this journal’s decade I will look at that key engine underlying much of what photographers do, Apple.

Mary Ellen Mark

Grit and toughness.

Mary Ellen Mark’s uncompromising style made a huge impact on photojournalism. Cartier-Bresson with acid added, if you like. She passed away the other day and clicking the image below will tell you more.


Click the image.

Using mSATA drives in the Mac Pro – Part XXVIII

The classic Mac Pro again challenges the new Mac Pro.

For an index of all my Mac Pro articles, click here.

We did not have to wait too long for the overpriced new Mac Pro to be shown a clean pair of heels by the ‘obsolete’ classic Mac Pro. You know, the machine built to withstand nuclear catastrophe with unbeaten upgradeability. SSD storage, GPUs, CPUs, RAM – you name it.

The nMP’s graphics, limited to the D700 ATI GPUs in the top end (and extremely costly) model use firmware embedded on the chips themselves for Apple. This means that faster aftermarket GPUs cannot be installed to replace the Apple modified ones, and the latest GPUs for the cMP are already faster than the D700s. Rather than go on about it I have installed one of those – a flashed Nvidia Gigabyte GTX980 (with dual DVI ports for my twin 30″ Apple Cinema Displays – no adapters needed this way). Findings, issues and data are here.

My CPU upgrade service – click the logo above – already provides Intel CPU upgrades for the cMP which easily match the performance of the costliest CPU available for the nMP.

Maximum RAM in the nMP is 64GB. Many of my cMP upgrade customers are happily running 128GB in their 12-core Mac Pros.

Now it’s time for the nMP to be shown the ropes in the SSD storage arena. The most SSD storage you can order in your $9,000 top-of-the-line nMP is 1TB of flash storage. Thereafter it’s external Thunderbolt drives and costly enclosures for nMP owners. Until now I have been recommending the Apricorn Duo PCIe card with two 2.5″ SSDs installed (so up to 2TB of storage) in the cMP. Set up using Disk Utility in RAID0 this installation provides near Thunderbolt speeds at an attractive price – $150 for the Apricorn Duo plus SSDs of choice. The card uses regular SSDs. mSATA SSDs make regular SSDs look positively huge.

However, Addonics has announced a four bay PCIe card which will accommodate up to 4 mSATA SSDs using just one PCIe slot and here’s the best bit: it costs just $55! mSATA mini-PCIe SSDs cost 10% more than the regular SSDs used in the Apricorn but given that two Apricorn Duos would cost $300, the net cost for like capacity is a good deal less using the Addonics card. (The even faster Samsung/Apple long ‘blade’ type SSDs deliver a reported 1400 mb/s, but cost $700+ for a 1TB stick and are limited to one stick per PCIe slot – those are not addressed here).


The Addonics Quad mSATA PCIe card.

I have ordered one card ($66.41 shipped to CA) and four of these from Amazon at a cost of $423.80. My total cost for the card and four mSATA SSDs was $490.21:


Crucial 256GB mSATA blade SSD.

For those interested, the flash chips in Crucial’s mSATA cards are made by Micron.

Here’s an mSATA drive being installed:

The flexibility is great here, and note that 4 x 250GB in RAID0 will be faster than 1 x 1TB unRAIDed.

The beauty of this approach is also that the Addonics card will only take up one PCIe slot and as cMP users know, PCIe slots are rare as hens’ teeth in these great machines. Slot #1, the double width one, is dedicated to the GPU, leaving just three slots. One of those is used by an USB3 card, so things are getting a bit slim, especially is you use sound processing cards.

Before committing to purchase I took the precaution of asking Addonics some questions – those, with their techie’s response, appear below:

For the benefit of those who do not speak geek, ‘AHCI support’ is geek for ‘any version of OS X or any Windows Vista or later’. So that’s great. You can use the Addonics with just one drive, adding more later and you can boot OS X from it. What you do with Windows on it is of zero interest to this writer.

Installation:

Installation of the mSATA SSDs in the Addonics card is, literally, a snap. After inserting the card in the connector, it is snapped down onto two retaining posts. The miniscule retaining screws provided are mercifully unnecessary. (Update: Addonics has gone backwards in it’s latest variation of this card – the one now linked – and requires the use of the miniscule screws provided to retain the mSata card. Use a magnetized screwdriver if you want to retain your sanity).


Traditional 2.5″ SSD for comparison – 2 of the mSATA drives are installed here.

Inside the Mac Pro the Addonics card is notable for its slim profile, which helps in keeping the airflow to the graphics card on the right optimized:


The Addonics is in the red rectangle. The card is short and does not interfere with the PCIe fan.

RAID0:

Disk Utility is used to set up the striped RAID0 sets:


2 striped disks seen as one 512GB drive.


4 striped disks seen as one 1TB drive.


How to vary stripe sizes – the narrative is clear.

Should I use TRIM?

These SSDs do not support TRIM as shipped but tools like TrimEnabler can add it. I used to install TE on my 2.5″ SSDs without much thought, which is wrong.

TRIM, which performs garbage management, is slavishly adopted by many to cure what ails SSDs, though finding analytical writing on the benefits of TRIM is much harder than just jumping to the conclusion that it’s required.

One interesting site frequented by industrial users and database administrators suggests there are more problems with TRIM than there are benefits so I have opted to not install TRIM for these mSATA SSDs. Much more hard data is needed here.

Further, in a year or two I expect that 2 and 4TB SSDs will be selling for what 0.5TB and 1TB ones are today, and I very much doubt I will have stressed the disks’ garbage sectors when it comes time to upgrade.

Boot speed:

My Mac Pro variously has 48 or 64GB of memory installed (6 or 8 sticks). That is germane to boot times as all that RAM has to be checked by the OS as part of the start-up cycle – the more memory, the more time. My machine takes maybe 20 seconds from power-on to the start-up chime and another 15-20 seconds (dual 3.06GHz CPUS) from the chime to the login screen. If yours is taking much longer, I recommend doing both SMC and PRAM resets.

Test data:

In practice, DiskSpeedTest speeds are very high and the other advantages of the Addonics – slim factor promoting ventilation, only one PCIe slot used for two RAID0 drives, ease of installation – are icing on the cake; further, I have increased the space available for scratch disks, after duly repointing Photoshop to the new mSATA RAID0 striped pair, as well as freeing up drive slots elsewhere inside the Mac Pro’s chassis:


Two drives in striped RAID0 with Stripe=32


Four drives in striped RAID0 with Stripe=16.


Four drives in RAID0 with Stripe=16

The temperatures below were measured during a clone of the OS and apps from my former boot drive. The first two hot mSATA drives are the ones being written to by CarbonCopyCloner, the other two are dormant. The latter will become a RAID0 striped pair to backup to OS and apps. All these readings are very conservative


mSATA drive temperatures.

Technical note:

The Addonics Quad mSATA PCIe card uses the Marvell 88SE9230 chipset which is limited to PCIe two lane speeds and thus maxes out at a 700mb/s transfer speed. One day maybe someone will make a four lane cards and we should see closer to 1400 mb/s.

Booting and partial slot use:

I confirm that Addonics’ responses, above, are correct. Once I had used CCC to clone over my OS and apps, I set the new mSATA RAID0 drive up as the Start-up Disk in System Preferences, and the Mac Pro restarted from it first time. After now many dozens of boots (July, 2015) I have never experienced a refusal to boot.

I also confirm that not all the four slots on the Addonics card have to be populated. The card was happily recognized by OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 with either two or four mSATA drives installed. I did not test with one or three, but as Disk Utility discloses four individual drives, that should not be a problem.

Smart Reporter:

This useful utility, which keeps an eye on the health of your disk drives, needs updating at the AppStore, for all of $6, to monitor the health of your mSata drives:


Version 3.6.1 of DiskReporter.

After the Addonics upgrade:

Here’s my desktop now – two mSATA SSDs (comprised of two paired RAID0 SSDs each), a large HDD data drive (the legacy name dates from my Hackintosh days!) with a like backup and a TimeMachine versioned HDD:

If you change drive names, be sure to change your settings in CarbonCopyCloner and/or CrashPlan or your backups will fail.