QC out the window.

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

There was only one reason I dumped Windows in 2002 for OS X (10.2 – Jaguar, but not like the car at all as regards reliability). The value of my time. The instability of Windows and the constant blue screens had long ceased being a joke, becoming a massive time sink, and I moved on.

And this proved a sage move all the way through Snow Leopard – 10.6 in 2009 – which was the last version to include Apple’s superb Rosetta emulator. Apple had switched from power hungry IBM G3/4/5 PPC CPUs to Intel’s more capable hardware in the interim and had crafted Rosetta before the switch, to permit seamless use of PPC apps with the Intel CPUs. Rosetta was a masterpiece of coding, completely invisible to the user and never failed me, remaining essential to this day if you want to use the online printer management utility for the no less superb HP 90/130 wide carriage dye printers, as HP never upgraded that utility to work with Intel CPUs.

Then things started going off the rails. Sheer inanities like Launchpad (added in Lion – 10.7) and extremely buggy iMessage support (10.8 – Mountain Lion) only detracted from the user experience. Library directories started disappearing unless you knew where to look and ‘Save As’ in common applications had disappeared from the drop-down menus and required you to remember to hit the Option key to enable these. What was Apple thinking?

Mavericks (10.9) added little, mercifully, other than bug clean up but with Yosemite the ADD-afflicted programming team in Cupertino was back at it, adopting Jony Ive’s truly awful ‘flat’ icons for everything and adding Handoff so that you could take phone calls on your computer – one of the most irritating intrusions in any professional’s work day. Steve must be spinning in his grave. But Yosemite added one more borderline criminal ‘feature’, a switch in fan management from keeping it cool to keeping it quiet and hang longevity. You can see my test data here. Suffice it say that if you are involved in heavy duty audio or video processing that an aftermarket fan management utility is de riguer if you use Yosemite.

Then along came El Capitan. Clearly the OS X crew is under daily threat of unemployment if they do not come up with something new weekly, and they managed to make El Capitan (10.11) the worst OS X release ever in the process.

El Crapitan. Pull the other leg – it has bells on for the festive season.

Most of my professional customers use RAID – generally RAID0 – which allows two HDDs or two SSDs to be paired, doubling the i/o channel width and thus doubling speed. The result is near-Thunderbolt speeds at non-Thunderbolt prices, all effortlessly achieved though a few keystrokes in Disk Utility. Only there’s one snag in El Capitan – Disk Utility no longer supports this feature. So you have to go into Terminal with its unintelligible ‘language’ and try things there. Good luck with that.

Utter mendacity from Apple – and it’s ‘free’ only if your time is worthless.

Want to repair System Permissions in Disk Utility? No chance. It’s been deleted. Again, what is Apple thinking of, dumbing down the OS in this manner?

But there’s another great new ‘feature’ in El Capitan which, three months after introduction, Apple seems unwilling/uncaring/unable to fix. Ask any user and you will hear that he only needs three things from an OS – stable Mail, robust internet access and support for his aftermarket apps which does not break with every iteration of the OS. Well, Apple has managed to impugn all three principles. I’ll dwell on Mail.

I had stupidly set System Preferences in my 2015 MacBook Air to automatically update the OS, having become sick and tired of the constant nagging from the OS to do so. The other day my MBA was running red hot at the pace of an Irishman at closing time leaving his local boozer. Hopping into Activity Monitor I saw that Mail was using 222% of the CPU. Yup, the ADD set at Apple cannot even compute percentages, let alone make a stable OS. As a result Mail, which has become more problematic with every OS X release, was slowing to a crawl, reboots fixed nothing, old deleted drafts and messages constantly reappeared and the whole thing was unusable. I installed a fresh El Capitan which proved as effective as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and finally resorted to erasing the Mail setup for iCloud completely and resetting it up. A two hour process with scant feedback other than that a barely readable message that Mail was recovering “30,947 emails”, which gave me lots of confidence. Check the chat boards and you will see this is a common problem.

User feedback, the Apple way.

I confess that for the first time since 2002 I have started thinking of switching back to Windows, which I thought I would never write. Meanwhile I will revert my MBA to Yosemite (sadly, I cannot go to Mavericks – or better still Snow Leopard – as Apple’s mendacity prevents that) and suggest you do too.

I realize that the money is in mobile, Apple, but lots of your mobile users – maybe a majority? – use Mac hardware. Enough already with the OS – just leave it alone.

My Mac Pros remain happy and as reliable as a hammer on Mavericks and Yosemite (with the requisite fan management utility for the latter) and that is not likely to change any time soon as they will never see El Capitan.

Update 24 hours later:

See what I mean? This after doing the reinstall and finding my reproductive organs were being yet again fricassée‘d by the OS X team at Apple:

It’s Yosemite for me. The instructions appear here. You cannot just connect an external drive with a version of Yosemite and clone it over – Apple in its infinite arrogance really does not want you reverting to an earlier OS. Follow the instructions in the link and your MBA (or whatever) will revert to the OS it shipped with, Yosemite in my case. Sadly I cannot go back any earlier, but anything beats El Crap.

Sanity restored with Mail activity back to zero again, and everything cool once more.

Stop the nagging:

To turn off Apple’s thoroughly obnoxious, disruptive and dangerous (you click ‘Upgrade’ by accident) periodic nagging to ‘upgrade’ to Yosemite, go to the AppStore app, click on ‘Upgrades’ at the top of the screen, select Yosemite upgrade, then right click the circled icon below:

Right-click the circled icon for peace.

Supersize me.

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

Dual LG displays, each running at 3440 x 1440 pixels. 30″ Apple Cinema Display in back.

A custom Mac Pro build for a customer saw him requesting tests with two LG 34UM95C displays, which run $600 or so each at the time of writing. These are ultrawide IPS panels with definition just shy of 4K. The user is a video production professional and needs all the screen real estate he can get. The Mac Pro is a 2009 heavily modified by me, running dual X5690 3.46GHz 12-core CPUs, 64GB of 1333MHz registered server RAM, 4TB of mSATA SATA3 SSD drives on one PCIe card and 4 x 4TB WD Caviar Black 7200rpm HDD. The total investment of some $6,000 compares with an all in cost of $15,000 for like performance with the new (trash can) Mac Pro.

The displays are driven by an EVGA Nvidia GTX970 4GB card, model 04G-P4-3975-KR, which runs some $300 at Amazon. This card is distinguished by having no fewer than three DisplayPort sockets, in addition to DVI and HDMI. The GTX970 has the same performance capabilities as the earlier GTX680, but the latter comes with dual DVI, one DP and one HDMI sockets and while it will drive one of the LGs at maximum definition it will not drive two, both the HDMI and the DVI (using a DVI to HDMI cable) being limited to half a screen at 1720 x 720 pixels – useless. The GTX970 uses 25% less power than the GTX680 – 145 watts vs. 195 watts at full chat. That’s a non-trivial difference. If you can live with the issues in the next paragraph, this card is highly recommended.

The ports on the GTX970 – the three DisplayPort sockets are arrowed.

The stock GTX970 has two issues – there is no splash screen at start with the Mac Pro (no big deal unless you want to switch in and out of Boot Camp) and requires the use of Nvidia’s drivers which must first be installed (as a SysPrefs pane) or you will get a black screen. Further, as Apple does not include these drivers with OS X, any update to OS X may require the update of the driver first. Nvidia is very good about keeping these current as it helps them sell cards for the 9xx cards. By contrast, the 6xx and 7xx cards work with the native OS X drivers.

Nvidia driver loaded in the System Preferences pane.

If you need truly vast screen area, the LGs are recommended. There’s a costlier version with Thunderbolt sockets for the trash can Mac Pro, useless for classic Mac Pro users. The center base of the display sports a joystick which makes one-off tuning adjustments easy. The foot, a nice alloy match for the Mac Pro, is retained with two screws at one of two heights and limited tilt is provided. The displays have a very narrow frame and are both elegant and beautifully made. I would prefer the foot to be one inch taller, but that’s a personal preference.

Full definition on both, each running at 60Hz.

My copy of Unigine Heaven maxes out at 2560 x 1440, so the adjusted framing rate shown in the (stretched) screenshot below figures to 38fps – excellent performance especially when the number of pixels is taken into account.

Tested on a 12-core 3.06GHz 2009 Mac Pro which also sports an ancient GT120 card.

Performance of the displays is exemplary. There is absolutely no backlight bleed and the displays are easily tuned, being shipped far too bright for photo processing – as is the case with just about every display out there. If you need vast screen real estate – 23% more than on a 30″ Apple Cinema Display – these are a bargain, and involve none of the issues encountered with 4K displays (flickering, incompatibility, minuscule font sizes, etc.). The back is drilled for a standard 100mm VESA wall or arm mount plate. Surprisingly light for their size, each comes with a DP and an HDMI cable, and those are the only two graphics sockets on the display. A provided stick on clear sheet of plastic adds ‘slideability’ on your desktop of choice. I left it off. Unlike the current ghastly and horribly overpriced Apple 27″ Thunderbolt displays with their awful glossy screens, the LGs sport pleasantly matte screens and suffer no reflection issues. Ideal for professional use all day long.

Prices on all flat panel LED/LCD displays continue to fall rapidly – I would hate to be in that business. Here’s the trend for the LG:

A neat technology which preserves the Recovery Partition

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

If you are looking for the highest disk speeds in OS X then the way to go is either:

• A Samsung/Apple blade SSD in a PCIe slot – $800/TB with a limit of 1TB per PCIe slot. 1400MB/s.
• Two 2.5″ SSDs on an Apricorn Duo card, RAID0, in a single PCIe slot – $400/TB with a limit of 2TB per PCIe slot. 650MB/s.
• The Addonics mSATA card, RAID0, in a single PCIe slot – $400/TB with a limit of 4TB per PCIe slot. 700MB/s

I favor the last solution because of the maximum potential capacity, and to further speed things up from the stock 450MB/s I pair the SSDs on the Addonics in RAID0 using Disk Utility, which doubles the capacity (2 x 256GB SSDs become one 512GB drive with a 56% speed gain to 700MB/s).

But there is one snag with using RAID0 and it is that you lose Apple’s invaluable Recovery Partition technology.

Apple states the benefits of a Recovery partition are (my emphasis – that’s the option I really want):

• OS X Recovery includes a built in set of utilities as part of the Recovery System. You can use OS X Recovery to do the following:
  • Restore your Mac from a Time Machine backup.
  • Verify and repair connected drives using Disk Utility.
  • Check your Internet connection or get help online using Safari.
  • Install or reinstall OS X.

The complete Apple advisory is here.

Think of the Recovery Partition as the last resort when all else is lost and as one more invisible sentinel looking out for your interests.

I contacted Mike Bombich, the estimable author of CarbonCopyCloner – who else on earth could know more about this sort of thing? – and got the following explanation as to why I could not see a Recovery partition on my RAID0 paired mSATA SSDs:

Mike references this article on setting up of Fusion drives with two disks after the Recovery partition has been established. Adopting a Fusion Drive solution sidesteps the disappearance of the Recovery Partition in RAID0, albeit at the sacrifice of some speed. Read on.

You can create a Fusion Drive from any two internal disks; Apple cautions against doing this with external drives. Apple uses a largish SSD (larger than that found in hybrid drives) and a big HDD. I’m using two SSDs which act as my daily OS/Apps backup and that is where the Recovery Partition will be created before the rest of the drive pair is recreated as a single Fusion Drive. The Recovery Partition is invisible to Finder but can be seen as a boot drive if you do a Cmd-R or Option-boot start of your Mac Pro. The linked Apple document, above, tells you which version of OS X is required.

Set forth below – long and geeky – is the process of combining two mSATA SSDs mounted on the Addonics PCIe card into one Fusion Drive with a Recovery Partition. Without Mike Bombich’s help none of what follows could have been done.

Step 1 – Prepare two of the drives on the Addonics:

Format each drive in Disk Utility as OS X (journaled) – that’s 2 x 256GB drives in my case.

Step 2 – Install OS X on one of those two drives:

You cannot create a Recovery Partition on the drive until OS X is installed.

Step 3 – Create the Recovery partition on the OS X drive:

You use CarbonCopyCloner to do that; it create an invisible partition in Yosemite some 790MB in size in Yosemite.

Step 4 – Note the file names:

Go into Applications->Utilities->Terminal and note the drive names:

The SSD with OS X and the Recovery Partition is shown in the red rectangle (‘mSATA_BAK1’). One partition on that drive will become part of the Fusion Drive. The one in green is the second SSD, all of which will become part of the Fusion Drive (‘mSATA_BAK2’). Fusion Drive component drives do not need to be like sized to avoid space wastage, unlike with RAID0 where the size of the smallest drive dictates total space.

Step 5 – Create the Fusion Drive:

This process concatenates (strings together in sequential order) the two large open spaces on the two mSATA SSDs. It’s key to follow the instruction set in Terminal below (blue rectangle) – we are concatenating only the open partition of the first SSD (red, above) with the whole of the second drive (green above). The blue rectangle below is all you type, then hit enter. If you simply combine both drives the Recovery Partition will be erased (‘disk2 disk3’ instead of ‘disk2s disk3’):

Do NOT exit Terminal. You need that cryptic drive ID (cyan rectangle) in the following instruction.

Step 6 – Create the Fusion Drive volume:

Type the instruction in the cyan box and hit enter; it’s best to copy (Cmd-C) and paste (Cmd-V) the UUID to avoid typos. Hit enter:

Step 7 – Check in Drive Utility:

Go into Drive Utility and you will see:

In the above I have renamed the Fusion Drive to ‘m_SATA Backup’ for clarity.

Step 8 – Check on the Recovery Partition:

Restart while holding down the option key. You should see the Recovery ‘disk’. Click on that and you will enter OS X Disk Recovery Utilities which offer all the disaster recovery choices shown in the introduction to this article:

Step 9 – Add a nice icon:

My Desktop looks like this – before doing a full clone of the boot to the backup drive:

• mSata Boot is a RAID0 pair of mSATA SSDs on the Addonics PCIe
• HacProHD and BackupHD are two large WD 2TB Red spinning HDDs for data and data backup, respectively
• TimeMachine is the (restorable) 3TB WD Red HDD with sequential backups
• mSATA Backup is the Fusion Drive with the Recovery Partition created in this article.

Step 10 – Backup:

Boot into your usual boot drive and back it up using CarbonCopyCloner to the Fusion drive.

You are done.

Speed tests:

The Fusion Drive is a concatenation of two drives – they are strung end-to-end. This is unlike a RAID0 array where the two drives are written to in parallel – simultaneously – which results in far higher drive speeds than with concatenation. As speed is not of the essence in a backup drive, the lower performance is no big deal – compare to the 700MB/s I get with the RAID0 pair:

Speed of a dual SSD Fusion Drive.

Apple’s changes to fan management are a retrograde step.

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

I have expressed my frustration at Apple’s seemingly mindless and unending tinkering with OS X before. One of the strangest changes was made in the transition from OS X Mavericks to OS X Yosemite (10.9 to 10.10) and it relates to how the OS manages cooling fan speeds. My findings are based on over a hundred data sets and are statistically significant.

Yosemite vs. Mavericks fan management:

Set forth below are two stress test charts from CPU upgrades I performed on 2009 Dual CPU Mac Pros:

These charts display the temperatures of both CPUs (orange and red) as well as the power supply (green) and ambient temperatures (brown) and are logged over a 70 minute cycle during which a stress test utility loads up the CPUs to near 100%.

As you can see, the temperature chart for Yosemite differs dramatically from that for Mavericks (and indeed for earlier versions of OS X, not shown here).

What Apple has done in Yosemite is to set the OS to ramp up the cooling fans far later in the heat cycle than in Mavericks with the result that CPUs (and other cooled devices) get much warmer before the fans speed up, with the minor benefit that less energy is used at idle. (Of course, thinking holistically, your Mac Pro gets warmer and you have to crank up the air conditioning ….) The result is that everything runs hotter (bad) with the sole benefit being that the fans run slower and hence quieter. Awful engineering. A cool electronic component is a happy electronic component. What was Apple thinking of – an increasingly common question when it comes to OS X?

I have repeated the above measurements dozens and dozens of times on any number and variety of CPUs and the results are always the same. The charts above are neither in error nor do they represent statistical anomalies.

Now during normal, low stress use, this is no big deal. Components at idle rarely exceed 115F with only the hot running Northbridge chip (with an operating ceiling of 220F) running at some 125-140F. That is normal. The NB chip is the main ‘traffic cop’ which parcels computing labor out between the two CPUs and if you are wondering why CPU A always runs warmer than CPU B it’s that it also has additional traffic cop duties, so it works harder. The oft stated ‘fact’ that CPU A’s heatsink gets warm air from CPU B’s fan is nonsense propounded by dabblers who fancy themselves engineers – you will get the same differential with a cold Mac Pro as with a warm one, clearly disclosed in the above charts during the warming stage in the first few minutes of stress.

However, under heavy stress it is not exactly a comfort to see CPUs run up to over 160F before the fans spool up (the service limits are variously between 162F – E5520 2.26GHz 80 watt Nehalem 4-core – to 173F – X5690 3.46GHz 130 watt Westmere 6-core). For the technically inclined I am referring to what Intel calls TCASE, which is the temperature at the top of the Integrated Heat Spreader on the CPU. The actual internal components run a good deal warmer than this but TCASE is what the Mac Pro’s sensors measure, so we are comparing apples with err…. Apples. So while it’s fine in normal use to let the OS manage the fans, I recommend manual intervention when high stress use is contemplated.

Fan control utility:

The fan control utility I use to manually override the fans is named Macs Fan Control and it’s a free download, installing itself in the menu bar thus:

Macs Fan Control

Here’s what the fan names refer to:

• PCI – the large grey fan mounted with two screws on the backplane board which cools the PCIe slot devices (800rpm default)
• PS – the fan in the 980 watt power supply unit (600rpm)
• Exhaust – the rearmost grey fan in the processor cage (600rpm)
• Intake – the frontmost grey fan in the processor cage (600rpm)
• BOOSTA – the fan on the right side of the processor tray when it is removed, cooling CPU A. The CPU fans are buried in the heatsinks and are ordinarily invisible (800rpm)
• BOOSTB – the fan for CPU B (800rpm)

Your Mac Pro will also have one or more fans in the graphics card(s). Those are not shown above.

When freshly installed, Macs Fan Control runs all the fans at the factory defaults shown above – or higher if operating temperatures so dictate. If you are using your Mac Pro under heavy stress (typical in movie and advanced audio processing) I recommend that, as a minimum, you switch Macs Fan Control from Auto to Ambient thus:

This will adjust the fans to the ambient temperature inside the Mac Pro’s case (generally warmer than your room temperature) based on the related sensor inside the Mac Pro. As components heat up the ambient temperature inside the case rises and the fans will accelerate.

Your settings will look like this and it takes but a few moments to ‘flip the switch(es)’:

Optimal cooling:noise fan speeds:

In extremely stressful scenarios, I recommend completely overriding fan automation and setting all the fans to at least the settings below:

• PCI – set to 2500, which increases noise from 42 to 46 dB (max is 4500 – 57dB, loud at max)
• PS – set to 1500, 42 to 46dB (max is 2800, 60dB – sounds like a jet engine at max)
• Exhaust and Intake – set to 1500, 42 to 48dB (max is 2750, 60dB – these really roar at max)
• BOOSTA and BOOSTB – set to 3500, 43 to 45dB (max is 5200, 47dB – fairly quiet at max as they are buried within their respective heat sinks)

The noise levels above were measured at four feet from the front of the Mac Pro – a common distance for a machine on the floor next to a desk, and the recommended ‘high stress’ settings above are based on the maximum fan speeds consistent with a tolerable noise level. All the fans ramp up noise significantly as they approach the upper end of their working rpm range.

Here are the fans set in accordance with the above recommendations:

Stress settings for all the fans.

With these override settings, the normal 43dB noise level of the Mac Pro (a whisper) rises to 51dB (clearly audible but not intrusive). Fan wear? Fughedaboutit. Fans are dirt cheap. CPUs are not.

A caution on manual fan speed overrides:

If you use manual overrides for fan speeds there is a potential danger that you will be running your fans too low. For example, if your override sets a fan at 2,500 rpm where the system would ordinarily call for a higher speed, the 2,500 rpm override will prevail meaning that your fan will be running slower than the system would elect. To be safe, then, if using manual overrides check your component temperatures during the most stressful period of use and make sure all is in order. If any temperatures are too high, adjust the overrides for the related fan(s) upward.

How loud is the Mac Pro will all the fans maxed out? Intolerably so at 63dB. It’s an unlikely use case, but if it occurs you really want your Mac Pro is a separate room, well distant from your ears.

Mavericks (and earlier OS X) users do not need to interfere as much, as those versions of OS X have a far smarter approach to fan control, ramping up the fans earlier as the above charts disclose. It bears repeating that the best, leanest, meanest version of OS X ever was Snow Leopard 10.6. You can still buy Snow Leopard 10.6 from Apple for $19.99 and then update it online to 10.6.8, the final version. That version will give you access to the App Store and you will have everything a serious user needs. Later versions – Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks and Yosemite add little and, as the above discloses, delete common sense in the case of Yosemite.

Yet another case of form (quiet running) trumping function (keep it cool) in the continuning erosion of common sense in the engineering of OS X.

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:

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:

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.