May 16, 2019 “As far as other specifications, the Mac Pro is said to come with eight Thunderbolt 3 ports with ‘Thunderbolt 4’ compatibility, two HDMI 2.1 ports and support for 10-gigabit Ethernet and Bluetooth 5.1. The new Mac Pro is also expected to adopt a stackable module system. Sep 09, 2015 500Gb Samsung EVO SSD 1Tb Western Digital HDD DVD RW Apple BCM94360CD BT4.0 / WiFi Card With PCI-E Adaptor 3 Noctua 120mm Case Fans Lycom ST-187 Dual SFF8088 – SFF8087 SAS Converter Board SAS SF8088 – 4 SATA Cable NewerTech AdaptorDrive 2.5” – 3.5” Drive Converter Apple Wireless BT Keyboard & Mouse. The Mac Pro's hard drive bays were originally designed for 3.5in HDDs - but you can mount an SSD (which is smaller) using a 2.5in sled/adaptor. Instructions: How to install an SSD in a 2012 Mac.
- The bottom line- This adapter is the best option because 1.) The adapter will not allow shorting or static related issues to your drive. 2.) This adapter allows you to plug your 2.5' SSD or HHD directly into the motherboard without the use of 3rd party PCB that can damage or even short your logic board or SSD. 3.) all screws included.
- Oct 30, 2018 I had no time to hack so I went and bought 2010 5,1 Mac Pro. I did want to avoid all the installation and migration headaches so I just plugged the very same SSD and HDs into the Mac Pro not expecting much success, but to my surprise everything seemed to work all right and suddenly I didn't have to spend all evening re installing everything.
- 1 core, 2 cores, 4 cores, 8: How Much Difference Does It Make?, Dan Knight, Mac Musings, 2007.04.10. Geekbench scores make it possible to compare the newest 3 GHz 8-core Mac Pro with the 1.5 GHz Core Solo Mac mini – and all the models in between. The 8-core Mac Pro Value Equation, Dan Knight, Mac Musings, 2007.04.04. At US$4,000, is the 8.
Apple's new Mac Pro has some Mac users buzzing: the tiny machine appears to be crazy fast, and it's a total redesign of the system - replacing the giant aluminum box of yore with a tiny little black cylinder. But should you replace your Mac Pro with the new one? If you want to get as much bang for your buck, upgrade your aluminum Mac Pro with an Solid State Drive (SSD).
There are different options available for Mac Pro-compatible SSDs, and we're going to look at two of them here: a SATA-based SSD and a PCIe-based SSD. The bottom line is that you're going to see a huge increase in speed either way; it's just a question of what your budget will allow.
To give you some sense of how significant the difference in speed is, I've borrowed a couple of different products from Other World Computing (OWC). One is a SATA-based SSD - the Mercury Extreme 6G, the other is closer to what the new Mac Pro has - it's a PCIe card with SSDs on it, OWC's Mercury Accelsior_E2. Both the SATA SSD and the PCIe card have 240 gigabyte capacities, which were pretty comparable to the original 320GB 3.5-inch hard drive that came with this Mac Pro. All of them are running fresh copies of Mountain Lion 10.8.4, with up to date security patches.
Making the most of what you have
Obviously the older Mac Pro won't be as fast as the new one, but don't think that your aluminum monolith is completely useless. SSDs have come down in price quite a bit, and if you shop around it's now possible to pick one up (albeit with limited storage capacity) for under $100.
While SSDs cost a lot more per gigabyte than hard disk drives, the difference in speed is amazing. Your Mac Pro will be faster to boot, it will launch applications faster, and it will read and write data faster. How much faster? That depends on which option you choose: SATA or PCI Express (PCIe).
SATA
Serial ATA, or SATA, is the backbone of the aluminum Mac Pro's local data storage interface. Inside your Mac Pro are four SATA bays, each of which can accommodate a 3.5-inch hard disk drive. SATA is also used to connect the internal optical drive (or drives) your Mac Pro comes with.
What makes the SATA bays particularly easy to work with is the Mac Pro's 'sled' design - each drive mechanism is mounted on a tray that easily slides out and slides back in, locking the drive into place without needing to manually connect any ribbon cables. It's quick, it's easy and it's trademark Apple elegant, even within the brutalist architecture of the Mac Pro.
The various Mac Pros that have come out over the years differ in speed, interfaces and basic construction, but they all share common features. The internal drive bays are one of those features that's remained a constant through the Mac Pro's evolution, so regardless of which model of Mac Pro you use, it's going to be pretty similar.
Apple's made it very easy to get access to those drive bays, and to put in (and remove) drives. To get inside your Mac Pro, you just lift a lever on the back of the box, then slide out the side panel.
The only tool you'll need is a Philips head screwdriver. The screwdriver is used to actually mate the drive to the tray to hold it in place. But you don't need your own screws - they're built into the sled. The screws match up with mounting holes that are already pre-drilled onto all 3.5-inch hard disk mechanisms.
SATA SSDs are, by and large, designed with a 2.5-inch hard drive in mind, because that's what's used in most laptops - and laptops are very popular. Mounting a 2.5-inch SSD into a 3.5-inch hard drive sled isn't tricky - you just need a simple drive adapter to get the job done. OWC also offers a replacement drive sled that does the job, if you're using a 2009-era or later Mac Pro.
Once you've got the drive in, it's a simple matter of booting up the Mac and running Disk Utility in the Utilities folder. Create a partition map to your liking just like you would a hard drive and you're in business. Easy peasy.
PCIe
SATA is terrific because it's easy to work with and it's ubiquitous, so there are a lot of products - both hard drives and SSDs - designed to use it. But it has its limitations. One of them is its bandwidth. The SATA interface on the Mac Pro has a top transfer speed of 3 gigabits per second.
Mac 5 1 Hack 4 Ssd Bayshore
But there's another option if you're interested in maximum performance: go straight to PCI Express (PCIe). PCIe is the expansion card interface on the Mac Pro, the one you use for graphics cards and whatever other expansion cards you want to install. And there's a lot more bandwidth to work with - 10 gigabits per second.
By going PCIe, you're going to more closely align your Mac Pro with Apple's new black, cylindrical Mac Pro. It uses the same connection, eschewing SATA for a direct PCIe link. The same goes for the new Haswell-equipped MacBook Airs that shipped earlier this year.
Installing a PCIe card in the Mac Pro is, in some ways, easier even than a SATA drive. Once you've powered the Mac Pro down and have the side panel off, you simply unscrew a retaining plate near the back of the Mac Pro. Once it's out you can install the new card. You don't need any tools - the retaining bolt's screws can be finger-tightened (and untightened). Once installed and once the Mac is powered, you simply run Disk Utility, and you should see a fresh drive ready for formatting.
One nice thing about the Accelsior E2 and other PCIe-based cards - most of them have removable SSDs on them. Which means that over time, if you need more space, you should be able to simply buy larger SSDs and replace them without having to replace the card all together.
There are a few caveats, depending on the age of your Mac Pro. Early Mac Pros (models built in 2006 and 2007) sport PCIe 1.0 slots that don't perform as fast as later models, so you will be bandwidth-limited on those machines. 2008 models and beyond, like my eight-core Mac Pro, have faster PCIe 2.0 slots. The 2008 model has two 16x slots, and one is occupied by the stock video card. If you're only using one video card, you can use the other for the SSD and see maximum throughput. In any of the other 4x slots you're going to see slower performance. 2009 and newer Mac Pros will see the best performance out of any available slot.
Fast as hell
So what are the benefits of using an SSD? Let's take a look. For comparison's sake, I've run some tests using digital video hardware maker Blackmagic Design's free Disk Speed Test app, available for download from the Mac App Store. This will give you an idea of the devices' raw throughput.
First up is as close to bone stock as I can get: My 2008 Mac Pro with its factory-original 320GB Seagate hard disk drive, recently reformatted and running a fresh copy of Mountain Lion 10.8.4 with all the latest patches installed.
The drive registers about 101.3 megabytes per second write speed and about 94.4 megabytes read speed using Disk Speed Test. There were brief, sustained periods of faster write speed, but that's about where it settled - having said that, I expected better. Maybe it's because it's a five year old drive that's sat idle for a couple of years. Regardless, it's nowhere near the ceiling of a SATA interface, which is closer to 384 megabytes per second.
Next up is the Mercury Extreme 6G, OWC's fastest 2.5-inch SATA SSD.
As you can see, performance has more than doubled. Sustained writes clock in at 241.4 MB/sec, while sustained reads are even faster at 266.6 MB/sec. Again, this doesn't hit the ceiling of SATA bandwidth, but it comes much closer.
Last, but not least, is the PCIe-based Accelsior E2:
This thing smokes any other comers. Write speeds blast at about 332.8 MB/sec while read speeds peg the redline of the graphical needle on measurement tool, coming in at 630.9 MB/sec. Astonishing.
You get what you pay for
The performance difference between the average stock hard drive and any SSD is going to be distinct, so don't get too caught up in performance comparisons. You can spend a lot of money getting absolutely the fastest SSD you can afford, but whether it will be worth it is dependent on the age of your machine and its capabilities, as well as what you intend to do with it.
The real showstopper for most of us is price and capacity. For what you'll pay for a 128 gigabyte SSD, you can easily get a two terabyte hard disk drive. (That'd be 24 times the capacity of the 128 GB SSD). PCIe SSD is an even pricier and more specialized option. As a practical example: As I posted this article, you can buy a 2TB Seagate Barracuda hard drive for under $100 from Amazon.com. A 128GB SATA SSD from OWC costs $127.99. A 120GB PCIe SSD from OWC is priced at $329.99. Other manufacturer's prices will vary dramatically, but you get the point: the faster the storage system is, the more you pay.
That means you're not going to replace hard drives with SSD as a primary storage system any time soon. The price has to fall much further and chip density has to improve before there can be anything close to parity.
Best of both worlds
For now, SSDs are most economical and effective when they're used in conjunction with conventional hard drives, much as Apple has done with 'Fusion' drives on newer Mac models. You get the capacity of a regular hard disk with some of the benefits of an SSD.
It is possible to 'roll your own' Fusion-style device, though it requires using the Terminal and a command line interface. But even before you get to that, you can use your SSD as a regular boot volume. Use it to store a few critical applications and maybe a modest folder of frequently accessed documents, but continue to use SATA-based hard disk drives for everything else: a massive iTunes library, for example, or the apps and utilities that you want on hand but don't use every day.
For an added boost of performance, you can configure multiple drive mechanisms in a RAID - an array that you create using Apple's Disk Utility. You can also see a significant performance increases by 'striping' data across multiple drive mechanisms. Combine that with a fast SSD boot volume and you'll be amazed at how much fresher your Mac Pro feels.
Ssd Drive For Mac
The aluminum Mac Pro isn't perfect - it's big, it sucks up a lot of juice and it's been outclassed by Macs with newer features like USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt. But that doesn't mean the Mac Pro is entirely useless, either. It still crunches data hellaciously fast and it's built to last.
Putting in an SSD offers your Mac Pro a new lease on life with a dramatic improvement in performance that will be an eye opener. Consider the pros and cons and decide what your wallet will bear. But in the end, it may turn out that putting in an SSD is the best thing you've done to give your Mac Pro a bit more time before replacing it altogether.
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I'm targeting this at a very select group of readers: those of you, like me, who have Apple's most neglected Mac model. The red-headed stepchild of the Mac family. The Mac Pro. If you're limping along with an ever-aging Mac Pro, what's the best way to get some more life out of the old beast? Let's take a look.
The poor Mac Pro. It looks almost the same as it did when it first was first introduced in 2006, to replace the nearly-identical Power Mac G5. It's languished while other Macs have been refreshed and redesigned, updated with speedier processors, more efficient motherboard designs, and new features like Thunderbolt and USB 3.0.
It's a shame, too, because under the (enormous) hood, the Mac Pro is an impressive beast: workstation-class processors, industrial-strength RAM, four internal hard drive bays and gobs of expansion ports.
Despite all the advances in other Mac models, including the superlative iMac, when it comes to raw CPU benchmarks the Mac Pro remains Apple's highest-performance system. But if you've had yours for more than a couple of years, chances are you're starting to feel the machine's age. Maybe you're seeing a spinning beachball cursor pop up more frequently. Or maybe you're becoming keenly aware of all the hard drive chatter every time you open an application or access your files. Or maybe you've discovered that the graphics card the Mac Pro came with no longer meets minimum system requirements of games or other apps you want to use.
Whatever the case, there are things you can do to get more like out of your Mac Pro. It's limited mostly by your budget, though there are some hard technical limits you'll run into as well.
First off, if you have a first or second generation Mac Pro (identified as 'MacPro1,1' and 'MacPro2,1' in the System Information app), you're a bit stuck in the past. Neither of those machines has 64-bit EFI firmware, necessary to install Mountain Lion. That means the newest operating system software you'll ever be able to run is Lion, and the newest app software you can run will need to be Lion-compatible.
That's not a show-stopping problem for most people today, but more and more apps are optimized for Mountain Lion and the capabilities introduced therein. What comes after Mountain Lion will get into developers' hands next month at WWDC, and that's going to create further difficulty down the line. So if you haven't already started saving up for a new machine, get cracking, because the time is coming soon to put out old Bessie to pasture.
RAM
All Mac Pros from the 3,1 system onward (introduced in early 2008) don't suffer from this limitation, so they should have some life left in them for a bit longer. But to get them truly optimized for today's environment, you may need to do some tweaking.
One of the first things to consider is RAM. Those 2008 systems shipped stock with 2GB of RAM. By comparison, today's lowest-end Mac model, the $599 Mac mini, ships with 4GB RAM standard. So if you haven't upgraded the RAM, that's the first place to start.
Upgrading RAM on the Mac Pro is easy, but which RAM you need and how it should be installed varies from model to model. Fortunately, Apple has a support page with all the details you'll need. Bottom line is that 4GB should be your bare minimum, but if you can move it up to 8GB or more (depending on what you're doing) that might be wise.
The upper limit on installing RAM on a Mac Pro can be a bit ridiculous - even 2008 models can handle up to 32GB - so the limit on RAM should be governed by your wallet and your needs. Working on huge media files? It may be worth it to make out the Pro with as much memory as you an afford.
Storage
The Mac Pro has four internal SATA hard drive expansion bays. Over time some of us have filled those bays with second, third and fourth drives for increased storage or to build out a speedy internal RAID system. But if one of the drive bays is available, there's another great opportunity to improve performance by installing a Solid State Drive (SSD).
SSDs remain very expensive per gigabyte compared to a conventional hard drive, but the performance difference is stunning. If you have the spare room, you'd be nuts not to consider adding an SSD to your Mac Pro.
SSDs are available from a number of vendors. Speed and size is up to you and your wallet. You'll find that most of them are in 2.5-inch drive form, making them drop-in replacements for laptop hard drives. That means you'll need an adapter to get one to work in the Pro, whose SATA drive bays are designed for 3.5-inch drives instead. (NewerTech sells the AdaptaDrive for $19.99, which enables a 2.5-inch drive to fit in a 3.5-inch drive bay.)
Chances are that unless you're independently wealthy or have a corporate benefactor that can write off the cost, you're going to end up with an SSD that's a lot smaller than the hard disk it's replacing. So it's a smart idea to use that SSD only for specific purposes, like making it the boot volume and keeping only frequently used apps and files on it.
Infrequently used software or files that are mainly used for archival storage should remain on the regular hard drive. But by making the SSD the boot volume, the operating system will load lickety-split, and the OS will also use the SSD for memory swap files, which can be written and read much faster on SSD than a hard disk.
Latter day Mac minis and iMacs sport an option called Fusion Drive, which combines an SSD drive with a conventional hard drive to give you the best of both worlds. You can mimic that capability yourself if you install an SSD in your Mac Pro and use it alongside an existing hard drive. It requires a little work to get there, but the results are great. Step by step instructions for doing so are available from Other World Computing.
Expansion
Don't forget that the Mac Pro has expansion ports. If you haven't touched these yet, now might be a good time to upgrade and add some new functionality.
Your Mac Pro doesn't (and can't) accomodate Thunderbolt at this point, but you can get closer by adding an external Serial ATA (eSATA) expansion card. eSATA is a specialty interface that you find on some hard drives and external RAID arrays built for high performance. You can also bump up the Mac Pro to USB 3.0 by adding an expansion card.
To that end, HighPoint Technologies does a great job of qualifying their products for the Mac Pro. They sell all sorts of specialty expansion cards including SATA, eSATA, mini-SAS (Serial-Attached SCSI), dedicated RAID and RAID caching cards; and two and four-port USB 3.0 cards.
Graphics
If there's one sore point for most of us Mac Pro owners, it's that the device has an industry standard double-height 16x PCIe expansion slot for a graphics card, but Mac-specific graphics cards have remained damnably proprietary, damnably expensive and damnably slow.
Over the years various corners of the Internet have published guides to flashing the ROMs on PC graphics cards to get them to work or applying various other trickery to enable a bone-stock PC card to work on the Mac. All of them are hacks that can easily make the average user very uneasy. I never bothered. But my Mac Pro ran out of graphics gas a while ago; games started coming out that my machine was well within spec to play except for graphics.
The good news is that if you're willing to accept some compromise, you don't need to hack anything to get a PC graphics card to work in a Mac Pro. Since OS X 10.7.5, Mac Pros will work with plain vanilla PC cards that have Nvidia graphics processors on them. Apple's standard graphics drivers now support them.
There are a few limitations. Most notably, your Mac's display will stay black until the desktop or a login window appears. There's no 'boot screen' showing an Apple logo. This is because most PC graphics cards lack support for the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) needed to be recognized at startup.
This can make booting into a Windows partition using Boot Camp, using NetBoot or booting off another volume besides the startup volume a little tricky, but if you're on a tight budget and you want to give a big graphics boost to your Mac Pro without paying through the nose, it's probably your best bet. 'Asgorath' in the forums at MacRumors has posted a very informative FAQ discussing what works and what doesn't. Definitely check it out before ordering a new graphics card for your Mac Pro.
If you want a fully featured Mac Pro-compatible graphics card and using AMD graphics sounds appealing, it's worth noting that Sapphire Technology has recently introduced the HD 7950 Mac Edition, which uses AMD's GCN architecture. It comes equipped with an HDMI port, two mini DisplayPorts and one Dual-Link DVI port, but be prepared to fork over $434.99 for the privilege.
Keep on Truckin'
As you can see, there's a lot you can do with an aging Mac Pro to get it back on track and humming while Apple replaces it with whatever it's going to be replaced with. With the exception of a few hardware shortcomings, you're limited by your wallet, your definition of practicality and and your imagination.
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exposure notificationNational COVID-19 server to use Apple and Google's API, hosted by Microsoft
The Association of Public Health Laboratories has announced it is working with Apple, Google, and Microsoft to launch a national server that will securely store COVID-19 exposure notification data.