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See specifications below for system and/or OS compatibility information
1) This is a PCIe x4 card (2000 MB/s In a PCIe gen 2 slot and 1000 MB/s in a PCIe gen 1 slot). Many PCIe cards are only x2 (1000 MB/s in a PCIe gen 2 slot and 500 MB/s in a PCIe gen 1 slot). However, the PCIe gen 1 slots in the Mac Pro 2008 cannot do x2, so an x2 card would only connect as x1 (250 MB/s). Max SSD speed is 600 MB/s so PCIe gen 1 x2 is a bottleneck in either case.
My Mac Pro 2008 has two gen 2 slots occupied by a graphics card and a USB 3.1 gen 2 card so I want to use this card in a gen 1 slot. That's why the x4 is important to me.
2) The card uses standard SSDs. Other PCIe cards may use proprietary blades which become useless when you want to upgrade them. An SSD can be moved to another computer with or without available PCIe slots.
Layout: The card uses a PES12T3G2 PCI Express Gen2 Switch, 4 lanes upstream (1000 MB/s in a gen 1 slot, 2000 MB/s in a gen 2 slot) and 4 lanes downstream split between two "Marvell 2-port SATA III PCIe 2.0 x2" controllers (1000 MB/s each). Each controller connects an internal SSD and an external SSD (600 MB/s each).
Therefore, for optimal software raid of two SATA devices (1200 MB/s) you would raid either two internal SSDs or two external SSDs or one internal SSD from one controller, and one external SSD from the other controller. Using two SSDs on the same controller would limit the speed to 1000 MB/s.
A raid of four SSDs (2400 MB/s) connected to this card would be limited by the controller's PCIe link speeds (1000 MB/s each) and by the PCIe slot's link speed (2000 MB/s).
Installation: This is a very long card. To install it into the top slot (Slot 4) of my Mac Pro 2008, I had to remove the fan assembly, insert the card, and then reinsert the fan assembly. The card has tabs that provide extra stability. They can be snapped off if they interfere with components on the motherboard. I had to snap off one of the tabs.
Testing: I used two 1.0TB Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSDs. I used Disk Utility.app to create a software raid of two partitions, one on each internal SSD. I used Blackmagic Speed Test.app to quickly measure the speed. With a non-raid partition, I got 416.4 MB/s Write and 496.3 MB/s Read. If the PCIe link was 500 MB/s, then that read speed would be much less, since it's impossible to get that close to the max link speed. With the raided partitions, I got 617.4 MB/s and 729.1 MB/s. The speed would be greater in a gen 2 slot since 729.1 MB/s is getting close to the 1000 MB/s limit of the gen 1 slot. The product page on Sonnet's website for the Tempo SSD Pro Plus has performance graphs that illustrate the relative performance levels of different slots.
The partitions appear in the Startup Manager (hold option during boot). This feature doesn't work with some other PCIe cards.
I have another disk with a Boot Camp partition. I was unable to boot into that. The issue may be with my other PCIe cards. Previously, I had my graphics card in slot 2 to make Boot Camp work, but that makes slot 3 unusable. I have not tried moving the graphics card with the Tempo card, since Boot Camp on my Mac Pro is no longer important to me. My graphics card is the EVGA GeForce GTX 680 Mac Edition. Other graphics cards may result in different behavior.
I would recommend this item to a friend!However, there is no denying that the 6Gb performance upgrade is remarkable, and the addition of 2 x 6Gb eSATA PCie ports adds superior expandability via externals. Not to forget, the convenient storage expansion capacity of 2 additional drives under the hood, and amped up scratch disk read/write speeds. Very straightforward installation is another plus. Worth stating here that those gains alone were sufficent to prevent an international return and alternative/replacement order. (mid 2010 Mac Pro 5.1, overclocked 3.2GHz 6-core intel xeon)