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I thought I would try and reinvigorate my old mac pro 1,1 desktop.

Made in about 2006, it's fairly old hardware, but I thought a new SSD might give it a new lease of life.

I put in a 500GB Samsung EVO 850, installed Windows 10, and after running HD Tune, reports an average read speed of just 180MB/Sec.

Comparing this to others with the same disk, I see that they are able to get more than twice this speed without breaking a sweat.

Am I being constrained by my old hardware (disk controller / small data bus)? Or is there something that can be done to speed it up?

maxp
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3 Answers3

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Your Mac Pro uses SATA-300, and that's bottlenecking you. You want to use a modern sata 3 port - and well, that's not something you can easily upgrade

This seems slowish, but fairly consistent with the speeds listed in this answer.

There's probably other bottlenecks with hardware that old, but you're probably getting better performance than with the old drive. I do suspect a pci-e/sata 3.0 card or a suitable raid controller might let you get more out of your SSD, but I've got no real, direct experience with those.

Community
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Journeyman Geek
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  • Yes, I think Mac Pro 1,1's have SATA 2 ports, but these are supposed to go up to 300MB/Sec – maxp Aug 11 '15 at 14:19
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    300MB/sec is the theoretical maximum. In practice you'll get a smidge over 250MB/sec under ideal conditions and only if *nothing else is accessing the disk at the same time*. Plus the major advantage of SSDs isn't sequential transfer rate anyway, it's the random speeds. – qasdfdsaq Aug 11 '15 at 14:23
  • I get around 250 read, 270 write on a Mac Pro 5,1 with SATA II, so that sounds about right. 180 does seem a bit slow, but the 1,1 has much slower architecture throughout, so I'd call it 'about OK' – Tetsujin Aug 11 '15 at 14:24
  • heh. *Completely* missed that this was a desktop. And yeah, those are best case speeds. – Journeyman Geek Aug 11 '15 at 14:25
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Enabling AHCI (http://www.bladedmink.com/windows-8-ahci-support-on-macbook-pro/) upped the average speed from 180MB/Sec to 225MB/Sec.

Note the following steps are actually for a Macbook Pro (laptop), but worked a charm on my Mac Pro (desktop).

Edit:

Crucial steps from bladedmink.com incase it ever disappears - Note, read through all these steps before actually performing them.

  • Login to Windows
  • Launch Regedit
  • Find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\
    • Edit the ErrorControl Data value from 3 to 0.

  • Find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\storahci\StartOverride\

    • Edit the 0 Data value from 3 to 0.

  • Shutdown and boot into OS X

  • Download and run https://www.bladedmink.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/AHCI_Enabler.zip on the NTFS drive.
  • Shutdown and boot into Windows
  • Prey you don't get a BSOD.

I am using the Standard Microsoft AHCI controller driver.

I tried to to install the Intel Matrix AHCI drivers, but they actually ran a few percent slower. When I tried to uninstall (and checked the 'also delete drivers') from Device Manager I got a boot loop and had to install windows from scratch.

maxp
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  • ah hah! Could you have some of that information in your answer? It would be useful should the link go down – Journeyman Geek Aug 12 '15 at 02:59
  • Sure thing - I didn't even realise it wasn't running in AHCI mode until I ran the 'AS SSD' benchmark tool. – maxp Aug 12 '15 at 15:13
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I can hit 828.06/682.93 MBs with apple ssd SMO128G installed on pcie slot 4th set as 4 lanes, MP 1,1/2,1 doesn't reconize M.2 nvme ssd. So i was using M.2 pcie adapter with 2nd adapter as bridge(apple ssd to m.2 adapter).by doing this i was able to install el capitan on pcie ssd and boot from it even my MP 2,1 reconized as external storage. With this setup i was able to take advantages of pcie lane's speed. Booted into desktop in 9s from the chime sound to complete boot.

Aaron
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  • Thank you for your detailed, personal story. However, this does not answer the question. Do you have any ideas on how OP can speed up their hard drive? – Jaap Joris Vens Jan 25 '21 at 18:36