Speed Boost Advice With a 2010 Mac Pro

Hi there,

Our studios have recently invested in some new mac gear (nMac Pro, iMac etc) but we're not ready to ditch our old 2010 Mac Pros just yet as we feel they could still prove useful for post production.

The problem is the internal Hard Drives are just standard 7200rpm drives throwing out read and write speeds at circa 80MB/s.

I've been looking at the OWC Mount Pro 2.5 option to replace the internal drives with 2.5 SSDs which would obviously boost things but the ports on the 2010 Mac Pro are only 3Gb/s and the SSD drives we have support 6Gb/s.

Is this the most efficient way to go or are there other options that will yield greater data speed improvements than the OWC Mount Pro option?

Our new Mac Pro is connected to a Promise Pegasus 8TB drive array and it absolutely zips at around 800MB/s in RAID5 mode and getting something anywhere near that for the older Mac Pros would be the ideal solution.

Any help and advice would be very much appreciated.

Cheers

Hi Damian,

Do you know Angel Bird? I just purchased an SSD from them for my MacBook Pro and I'm very happy with both their service and the performance of the product so far.

They have a few solutions for Mac Pro towers as well:

www.angelbird.com/en/prod/mac-pro-ssd-bay-19/
www.angelbird.com/en/prod/wings-pcie-165/

One advantage of using Angel Bird SSDs is that they come with native TRIM support on Yosemite. As far as I know, there are no other third party SSDs with this capability. If you plan on using an SSD as your system drive, this is clearly the best choice right now.

By the way, here is an interesting article that explains how to boost a mac pro tower. It's in Spanish but it has some interesting information. Maybe you can use Google translate?

www.finalcutpro.es/2013/12/hardware-dale...-a-tu-viejo-mac-pro/

I hope that helps. Good luck boosting your Mac Pros!

Cheers,

Jesús
@jesus_edits

damiangrady wrote: ...The problem is the internal Hard Drives are just standard 7200rpm drives throwing out read and write speeds at circa 80MB/s....OWC Mount Pro 2.5 option to replace the internal drives with 2.5 SSDs ...but the ports on the 2010 Mac Pro are only 3Gb/s and the SSD drives we have support 6Gb/s....

I don't know why your 7200 rpm drives are 80 megabytes/sec -- that is abnormally slow. Whatever the reason, a SSD upgrade is a good idea and will make a huge improvement.

6 gigabit/sec (aka SATA3) drives are backward compatible with 3 gigabit/sec (aka SATA2). SATA2 SSD drives will still be vastly faster than any rotating drive.

Re TRIM, the previously-listed Angel Bird drives don't require this, nor do OWC Mercury SSDs: blog.macsales.com/21641-with-an-owc-ssd-theres-no-need-for-trim This is confirmed by testing at Mac Performance Guide.

Hi Damian,
I think there is lots of life left in the MP5.1s. One of the greatest strengths of the older MPs is being able to reconfigure the hardware.
Adding a boot ssd is a good idea. There are also PCIe blade options out there as well.

As for media storage, your hdds are definitely slow and should be faster. Try an erase and reformat. Also newer large drives with lots of free space will be faster than older small hdds. Finally, you can RAID0 the internal drives.

You can also replace the GPU(s) for faster performance. There is this thread here… www.fcp.co/forum/hardware/18250-brucex-t...-cut-pro-x-benchmark

BareFeats has several articles on hot-roddin MPs and comparisons of different configurations … barefeats.com

There is this site which champions legacy MPs especially 5.1s… create.pro/blog/

The one thing you can't get on legacy MPs is Thunderbolt, but you can add USB3.

Hope this helps, Greg