# NVMe on 5,1 macpro



## Dewdman42 (May 16, 2019)

So it just came to my attention that the 5,1 macpros got a firmware update just before the end of 2018 that apparently gave them NVMe capability natively.

I am wondering if anyone here has tried that or thoughts about NVMe performance compared to sata2 ssd


----------



## janisisok (May 16, 2019)

Dewdman42 said:


> So it just came to my attention that the 5,1 macpros got a firmware update just before the end of 2018 that apparently gave them NVMe capability natively.
> 
> I am wondering if anyone here has tried that or thoughts about NVMe performance compared to sata2 ssd



Yes, I use 4x NVMes as a 4TB raid0 in a Highpoint SSD7101A-1 controller in a 4,1->5,1 flashed Mac Pro. You need to do the Mojave Firmware update to get the most out of it and to do that you need a graphic card that supports metal.But it's damn fast, attached is a Diskspeed screenshot.


----------



## Dewdman42 (May 17, 2019)

Alright but do your projects actually load faster?


----------



## janisisok (May 17, 2019)

Dewdman42 said:


> Alright but do your projects actually load faster?


Yes, everything loads really fast!


----------



## JEPA (May 17, 2019)

OH MY GOODNESS, really? I have a Mac Pro 4.1>5.1 flashed, also 4TB raid. What should I do? should I buy metal and update to Mojave?


----------



## janisisok (May 17, 2019)

JEPA said:


> OH MY GOODNESS, really? I have a Mac Pro 4.1>5.1 flashed, also 4TB raid. What should I do? should I buy metal and update to Mojave?


What kind of raid do you have?


----------



## JEPA (May 17, 2019)

janisisok said:


> What kind of raid do you have?


distributed system RAID 0


----------



## janisisok (May 17, 2019)

JEPA said:


> distributed system RAID 0


Ok, so these speeds are only possible with NVMe raid controllers like the Highpoint SSD7101A-1 or Amfeltec Squid. If you have one of those you need to do the Mojave firmware upgrade to (at least) 138.0.0.0.0 but you don't need to upgrade your OS to Mojave, I'm still on HighSierra. And you will need a metal GPU to be able to do the fw upgrade. There are a lot of things to consider, please read here: 

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/highpoint-7101a-pcie-3-0-ssd-performance-for-the-cmp.2124253/

and here: 

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...requisite-to-disable-hyper-threading.2132317/


----------



## JEPA (May 17, 2019)

janisisok said:


> Highpoint SSD7101A-1 or Amfeltec Squid. If you have one of those


negative.. I read ST32000542AS


----------



## Dewdman42 (May 17, 2019)

Have you done any comparisons with actual numbers comparing the time it takes to load projects with your NVMe raid versus say a sata2 or sata3 raid ssd? I know the benchmark tools will show massive thruput gains but when I added a sata3 raid ssd’s the benchmark tools show massive gains compared to the normal sata2 bus but it still takes just as long to load an actual daw project due to other bottlenecks or perhaps longer seek times it’s not clear. I need quantifiable results to justify the expense


----------



## janisisok (May 17, 2019)

Dewdman42 said:


> Have you done any comparisons with actual numbers comparing the time it takes to load projects with your NVMe raid versus say a sata2 or sata3 raid ssd? I know the benchmark tools will show massive thruput gains but when I added a sata3 raid ssd’s the benchmark tools show massive gains compared to the normal sata2 bus but it still takes just as long to load an actual daw project due to other bottlenecks or perhaps longer seek times it’s not clear. I need quantifiable results to justify the expense


I used SATAII SSDs before but not as a raid, so I can't say how an SSD SATAII Raid compares to a NVME pcie3 Raid, perhaps you are right regarding loading times. But for me a pcie3 Raid controller makes more sense on the long term. Perhaps this helps to make a decision: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wL8XYGgd_O9fomMrK1EpSnZJeQwhVOAn91e82byj8s4/edit


----------



## Nick Batzdorf (May 17, 2019)

I'll never understand this obsession.


----------



## Dewdman42 (May 18, 2019)

janisisok said:


> I used SATAII SSDs before but not as a raid, so I can't say how an SSD SATAII Raid compares to a NVME pcie3 Raid, perhaps you are right regarding loading times. But for me a pcie3 Raid controller makes more sense on the long term. Perhaps this helps to make a decision: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wL8XYGgd_O9fomMrK1EpSnZJeQwhVOAn91e82byj8s4/edit



That's a great report, thanks for sharing. More or less that has been my experience also. DAW project load times seem encumbered by other bottlenecks. Guess its probably not worth the expense of chasing down NVMe, but its nice to know that the cheesegrater can now natively support NVMe drives...in the future if I ever need to replace my boot drive, I guess I'd go for NVMe, though...by the time I need to do that I'll probably be moving beyond cheese grater...


----------



## Shad0wLandsUK (May 18, 2019)

Dewdman42 said:


> So it just came to my attention that the 5,1 macpros got a firmware update just before the end of 2018 that apparently gave them NVMe capability natively.
> 
> I am wondering if anyone here has tried that or thoughts about NVMe performance compared to sata2 ssd


Yep, it's true.

I have had a 512GB Samsung 970 Pro NVMe in my Mac Pro 5,1 for a good few months now
Performs well and I have plans to get my Windows installation working on the same drive too. But hey ho...


----------



## bosDAW (Apr 21, 2020)

New member, just jumping here as I am also very curious about this... I have read most if not all of the old posts regarding NVMe vs SATA3, including the googledoc from @tack. It seems that NVMe [if used for system drive] will definitely make everything more snappy; however, some of the other reports have been mixed, and I was hoping some of the original contributers could elaborate a bit despite the age of those posts.

According to @tack, the loading times for instruments/templates in Kontakt may be slightly improved. Other platforms such as Play and Omnisphere have not been reported as widely or seem to vary. So I had a few questions:

1. Omnisphere -- If I recall, most people did not see much of a difference for loading time or live performance except for @chimuelo. chimuelo, you said loading times were noticeably faster and you rarely saw the progress bar; was this compared to SATA2 or SATA3? And was this only for live mode, or for a large (1GB+) multi, with general use as a DAW plugin?

I have a 2010 mac pro 5,1 12-core 2.93GHz and 64GB RAM running High Sierra 10.13.6. For me, most patches load immediately or with <1s wait where the green progress bar makes an appearance, but essentially at the same time the patch has already loaded (i.e. I would not be able to tell that it took "longer" except that the green "completed" bar is visible at the same time). Some of the larger patches, such as "Muted Expectations" (1229MB) and "Intimate Bouncing Mallets" (474MB) take just under 4s to load when browsing with an empty default template in standalone; this is despite their significantly different file size, even more so compared with "Drop Springs" (538MB) and "Phoenix Rising" (8.4MB) that open immediately for me (BTW these are all factory patches that appear at the very top of the "All Spectrasonics" list in the patch browser if anybody wanted to check this out for themselves). Obviously, the complexity must have a lot to do with loading time as these are all very different in size, and size does not always correlate with loading time. This is hardly an exhaustive or systematic testing protocol, but *would you or anyone else have a basis of comparison using an NVMe drive?*


2. Testing -- I am using a Samsung 860Pro 1TB in the internal SATA2 bay, and I repeated this (with about 15 different patch loads plus a multi) using the same drive on a PCIe card; there was zero difference in my very unscientific test. As discussed in other threads, throughput is less the issue compared with I/O and low QD (which is software dependent), and maybe the lower latency of NVMe is what makes the most difference. I am not that technically minded, but I know that Activity Monitor is very limited in what it tells you. *In order to determine CPU vs SSD bottleneck for myself, is there any way to measure performance under workload on a mac (i.e. to see transfer rates, %CPU/SSD activity, etc)?*

3. Play v6 -- I have found that loading a 2494MB template takes about 24s in EWHS Diamond in standalone, and pops/crack are audible pretty much right away (512 sample buffer) despite the Play performance meter reading about 35-40% CPU and sample streaming of ~140MB/s. I do not find these measures to be very reliable, or maybe I do not know how to interpret them (which brings me back to #2 above). However, if I choose to load everything into RAM (deselect "disk streaming" in player menu), and set the audio streaming to 0 (preferences), presumably everything is streamed from RAM.* If I am still getting distortion/clicks/pops even when using all RAM, does that necessarily mean that my system is clearly CPU bound? Or at least, if all-RAM is too "slow", is there any reason to expect NVMe be any different?*

With audio streaming set to 1 and "disk streaming" _selected_ in the player menu, the difference is only ~590MB. That is, using disk streaming (level 1, which is supposed to be mostly SSD streaming) the software still loads 1904MB into RAM according to the Play meter, and so only 590MB are streamed. I am not sure this is correct (?) as it does not seem like much but, again, I would think this should be relatively easy for a SATA2 or SATA3 SSD to handle unless I tried to play all the keys on my controller at the same time; *is this also a clear indication that the CPU is maxed out long before the SSD, or is this a complete misrepresentation of how the software is using computer resources?*


4. Falcon 2 -- I plan on getting Falcon 2 sometime soon. I have no reason to believe Falcon is optimized for NVMe (or even SATA3 for that matter), but *does anyone have experience using Falcon 2 with SSD vs NVMe?*



I apologize for the long post, but I have been considering getting one or more new storage drives and was wondering about NVMe. From the previous threads, flashing the bootROM and using NVMe for the OS would probably give the most practical performance bump, but it is hard for me to let go of any potential gains. I could certainly max out my RAM, but I rarely use more that 20GB for a single project so this seems unnecessary, unless there is something I am not understanding about how RAM works.

I would be curious to hear feedback. I would also be curious to know if there is any mac software besides Activity Monitor that would allow me to get real performance data so that I could better measure how hard the CPU and/or SSDs are working. Thanks everyone!


----------



## chimuelo (Apr 22, 2020)

I run Omnisphere totally different these days, and NVMe was compared to SATA 2 and the faster SATA 3. I was using Keyscape Lite.

These days I run multiple instances of Spectrasonics.

Using full samples I see the progress bar but can adjust the DRAM size so there‘s some cool smart loading mechanism because I load samples live during performances and it’s glitch free.

On early Z97 builds the M.2 could be directly routed to the CPU as could my PCI-e connector card. Transaction times are much faster. These days the PCH is an added stop adding latency. No -Robles in the studio, but live if it’s )very certain level it’s t0ugh loading Acoustic Grand and larger samples without hearing a note missed.

Unless your performing the NVMe M.2’s aren’t really needed, rather a luxury.
FWIW Smaller samples that are outside of Keyscape load really fast since 2.6.
I run Keyscape separately now which allows high polyphony outside of Omnisphere.

Id rather run multiple instances and use more RAM for slightly better performance. But again, live performance requirements are the priority.


----------



## bosDAW (Apr 22, 2020)

chimuelo said:


> I run Omnisphere totally different these days, and NVMe was compared to SATA 2 and the faster SATA 3. I was using Keyscape Lite.
> 
> These days I run multiple instances of Spectrasonics.
> 
> ...


Makes sense. I do primarily studio work rather than live, so I am looking for best performance in terms of speed of workflow (loading times) as well as "live" playback in a DAW where I can maybe avoid hitting the CPU limit quite as fast and/or getting a few more tracks or voices without dropouts.

The other reason was that I am looking to buy a new set of backup drives anyway, and the cost of SATA3 and NVMe is pretty similar right now for some of the 1TB drives. I thought why not just get the NVMe, and then I could see for myself if it makes a difference. It is kind of a waste to use NVMe as backups, but I could always decide to put the OS on it instead. As for NVMe as a boot drive, once your software is open (be it a DAW or a standalone), does it still make a noticeable difference? Or is it only in opening apps that you can tell?


----------

