{"id":25065,"date":"2014-06-18T09:15:32","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T14:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/?p=25065"},"modified":"2014-06-18T16:44:58","modified_gmt":"2014-06-18T21:44:58","slug":"maxpower-hba-improves-performance-in-2006-2012-mac-pro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/25065-maxpower-hba-improves-performance-in-2006-2012-mac-pro\/","title":{"rendered":"MAXPower HBA Improves Performance, Capabilities In 2006-2012 Mac Pro"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"nwtmxpcie2e2u3_gall1\"By Dennis Kulpa, Guest Blogger<\/p>\n

The NewerTech MAXPower eSATA\/USB 3.0 Host Bus Controller<\/a> is a simple yet effective way to upgrade a 2006-2012 Mac Pro to today’s needs by adding two USB 3.0 ports and two external 6Gb\/s SATA ports. Installation is simple; just power down the computer, insert the card into an available PCIe slot, power up and you’re ready to go. No drivers are needed; just plug in the external device and OS X instantly recognizes it.<\/p>\n

To evaluate the controller, I used diglloydTools Disktester<\/a> Fill-Volume from Lloyd Chambers. For me, the major benefit of this adapter is the USB 3.0 ports. I have several external hard drives that I use for a variety of tasks. Without this new card, I was always forced to use USB 2.0 or FireWire. As seen is the graph below, I was able to achieve up to twice the transfer speed of FireWire 800 and four times that of USB 2.0 using a conventional hard drive.<\/p>\n

\"KulpaPic1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The hard drive used for the test is rated at 164 MB\/s maximum sustained rate by the manufacturer so the performance achieved on the USB 3.0 bus is great.<\/p>\n

To test the limits of the USB ports, I tried an OWC 480GB Aura Pro Solid State Drive<\/a> that I normally use attached to a MacBook Pro Retina with native USB 3.0 ports. The results can be seen in the accompanying graph:<\/p>\n

\"KulpaPic2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When connected to the Mac Pro’s USB 2.0 bus, data transfer “crawls” along at a mere 34 MB\/s, while the NewerTech USB 3.0 ports give a tenfold increase in data transfer \u2013 375 MB\/s write and 347 MB\/s read. For reference, I’ve also plotted the results with the Aura Pro connected to the native USB 3.0 bus on the MacBook Pro \u2013 410 MB\/s write and 434 MB\/s read. An observation here, for what it’s worth; with the NewerTech card in the Mac Pro, the write speed is higher than the read speed, while on the MacBook Pro read is higher than write.<\/p>\n

Of course, the USB ports are not the only advantage of this adapter as it also provides two external SATA Revision 3.0 ports. The boot drive for my Mac Pro is a 240GB OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2<\/a> card, which also has two external SATA Revision 3.0 ports. For comparison, I used an OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual<\/a> enclosure with two 2GB hard drives as a RAID 0. The results are shown below:<\/p>\n

\"KulpaPic3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

YES, there are four lines there; the performance is identical for all practical purposes. I wish I had a couple of four-drive RAID units or a few more SSDs to push these cards to their limits!<\/p>\n

Overall, the NewerTech MAXPower eSATA\/USB 3.0 HBA<\/a> is a great way to improve the performance of your Mac Pro in a cost effective manner, and I highly recommend it.<\/p>\n

\"SunPhoto\"<\/a>\u2022 Dennis Kulpa, now retired, has spent 42 years as a process\/project\/plant engineer, primarily in the chemical industries. He is also interested in astronomy and astrophotography. He uses a 2012 Mac Pro with 48GB of OWC memory and a 240GB OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 PCIe card as the boot drive. He runs Windows 7 Pro 64-bit on a 120GB OWC Mercury Electra 3G SSD. (Right:\u00a0An image of Sunspot 1087. Photo is property of Dennis Kulpa, all rights reserved)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dennis Kulpa, Guest Blogger The NewerTech MAXPower eSATA\/USB 3.0 Host Bus Controller is a simple yet effective way to upgrade a 2006-2012 Mac Pro to today’s needs by adding two USB 3.0 ports and two external 6Gb\/s SATA ports. Installation is simple; just power down the computer, insert the card into an available PCIe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":25079,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[119,339,3766],"class_list":["post-25065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-benchmarkingperformance","category-product-spotlight","category-testing-lab"],"yoast_head":"\nMAXPower HBA Improves Performance In 2006-2012 Mac Pro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Bring new capabilities to your previous generation Mac Pro.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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