Add three internal drives to the Mac Pro with the Sonnet Fusion Flex J3i

AppleInsider

Sonnet Technologies has announced the Fusion Flex J3i, which allows the user to mount three hard drives or SSDs internal to the 2019 Mac Pro.

Sonnet Fusion Flex J3i for Mac Pro

The Sonnet Fusion Flex for the Mac Pro comprises a custom mounting bracket and plates that support the installation of 3.5-inch SATA hard disk drives and 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, mounting hardware, plus the needed power and data cables. The bracket installs on the mount points near the Mac Pro PCIe slots, and connects the mounted drives to the internal USB and SATA ports.

The Fusion Flex J3i is sold without drives. Capacity is limited by the user's provided drives, with 6 gigabits per second max speed for the drives attached to the SATA ports, and 5 gigabits per second for the drive attached to the internal USB port.

Sonnet Fusion Flex J3i assembly for Mac Pro

The Fusion Flex J3i will be available by June 15 at a retail price of $199.99.

tht

Wow, the 3rd drive uses the internal USB port. What's with the crazy plug on the drive end?

There aren't any single wide PCIe cards that can hold 4 2.5" drives?

Mike Wuerthele

tht said:

Wow, the 3rd drive uses the internal USB port. What's with the crazy plug on the drive end?

There aren't any single wide PCIe cards that can hold 4 2.5" drives?

That is a fairly standard USB 3.0 to SATA cable.

The 2.5-inch drive height pretty much precludes a single-wide PCI-E card with four 2.5-inch drives, but I can't say for sure that there are none. However, I have seen cards that support four M.2 drives, though.

tht

Mike Wuerthele said:

tht said:

Wow, the 3rd drive uses the internal USB port. What's with the crazy plug on the drive end?

There aren't any single wide PCIe cards that can hold 4 2.5" drives?

That is a fairly standard USB 3.0 to SATA cable.

The 2.5-inch drive height pretty much precludes a single-wide PCI-E card with four 2.5-inch drives, but I can't say for sure that there are none. However, I have seen cards that support four M.2 drives, though.

It's an optical illusion that it doesn't look like the red SATA cable plugs?

As for mounting 2.5" form factor drives on PCIe cards, they are of course on the market. Here is one:
https://www.amazon.com/Sedna-Express-Extended-Connector-Included/dp/B07L5SPWNV


The thing with the Mac Pro is that it is much less height constrained for PCIe cards than "normal" PCIe cards. A 10 mm or less thick 2.5" drive will fit in a 1-wide PCIe card, as the picture shows. 15 mm can probably fit too, but it will be tight.

A full length PCIe card is 12.5". Apple's Mac Pro looks like it can hold 5" tall cards, at least. A 2.5" form factor has a 2.76 x 4 inch footprint. This means 4 can be mounted on a 1-wide 12.5" long PCIe card if some vendor wants to do it. Not sure what the worth of using a PCIe slot of 4 to 8 TB of HDD of however large slow SSD drives could be, but it's probably cheap, and probably faster in a RAID config that the SATA ports.

Mike Wuerthele

tht said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

tht said:

Wow, the 3rd drive uses the internal USB port. What's with the crazy plug on the drive end?

There aren't any single wide PCIe cards that can hold 4 2.5" drives?

That is a fairly standard USB 3.0 to SATA cable.

The 2.5-inch drive height pretty much precludes a single-wide PCI-E card with four 2.5-inch drives, but I can't say for sure that there are none. However, I have seen cards that support four M.2 drives, though.

It's an optical illusion that it doesn't look like the red SATA cable plugs?

As for mounting 2.5" form factor drives on PCIe cards, they are of course on the market. Here is one:
https://www.amazon.com/Sedna-Express-Extended-Connector-Included/dp/B07L5SPWNV


The thing with the Mac Pro is that it is much less height constrained for PCIe cards than "normal" PCIe cards. A 10 mm or less thick 2.5" drive will fit in a 1-wide PCIe card, as the picture shows. 15 mm can probably fit too, but it will be tight.

A full length PCIe card is 12.5". Apple's Mac Pro looks like it can hold 5" tall cards, at least. A 2.5" form factor has a 2.76 x 4 inch footprint. This means 4 can be mounted on a 1-wide 12.5" long PCIe card if some vendor wants to do it. Not sure what the worth of using a PCIe slot of 4 to 8 TB of HDD of however large slow SSD drives could be, but it's probably cheap, and probably faster in a RAID config that the SATA ports.

Wasn't this about four-drive cards? I know that two-drive cards exist. I don't think four-drive ones do.

Given that M.2 cards are very, very close in price to SATA ones, I don't foresee a four-drive card for 2.5-inch drives utilizing the extra volume in the Mac Pro.

bsbeamer

Mike Wuerthele said:

Wasn't this about four-drive cards? I know that two-drive cards exist. I don't think four-drive ones do.

Does NOT work with Mac, but 4x SATA SSD via PCIe adapters do exist:
 https://www.amazon.com/Sedna-Controller-HyperDuo-Technology-Connector/dp/B07SGQLTQS/

Mike Wuerthele

bsbeamer said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

Wasn't this about four-drive cards? I know that two-drive cards exist. I don't think four-drive ones do.

Does NOT work with Mac, but 4x SATA SSD via PCIe adapters do exist:
 https://www.amazon.com/Sedna-Controller-HyperDuo-Technology-Connector/dp/B07SGQLTQS/

Huh. Good to know.

mknelson

bsbeamer said:

Mike Wuerthele said:

Wasn't this about four-drive cards? I know that two-drive cards exist. I don't think four-drive ones do.

Does NOT work with Mac, but 4x SATA SSD via PCIe adapters do exist:
 https://www.amazon.com/Sedna-Controller-HyperDuo-Technology-Connector/dp/B07SGQLTQS/

Funny, the Sedna site doesn't list Mac compatibility (various Windows and Linux distributions) but Mac is in the tags list. 

http://sedna-shop.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=130
Tags:  pcie, pci express, ssd, pcie ssd, solid state disk, raid, sata, pcie sata adapter, mac, pc

cpsro

Apple should send one of these to every registered owner of a 2019 Mac Pro.

ITGUYINSD

cpsro said:

Apple should send one of these to every registered owner of a 2019 Mac Pro.

I was just getting ready to say something similar.  Shouldn't a $6000 computer have room for some 2.5 or 3.5" SATA drives?

jdb8167

cpsro said:

Apple should send one of these to every registered owner of a 2019 Mac Pro.

If you can afford a $6000+++ computer, I doubt $200 is going to faze you.

chasm

ITGUYINSD said:

cpsro said:

Apple should send one of these to every registered owner of a 2019 Mac Pro.

I was just getting ready to say something similar.  Shouldn't a $6000 computer have room for some 2.5 or 3.5" SATA drives?

They do. They have TB3 ports which can accommodate a far larger number of drives, at a speed approximately the same as you get from that third drive in the USB internal port.

fastasleep

ITGUYINSD said:

cpsro said:

Apple should send one of these to every registered owner of a 2019 Mac Pro.

I was just getting ready to say something similar.  Shouldn't a $6000 computer have room for some 2.5 or 3.5" SATA drives?

Plenty of people would never use 'em and might want that space for something else. Why would you use 2.5" SATA SSD drives if you could get a PCIe card that holds four m2 NVMe drives that are much faster for about the same price?

I was a bit confused at first when the details first came out, but gave it some thought and I think Apple did the right thing with providing the space for a variety of drive accommodations built by third parties here. 

I was actually wondering a while back if there was a practical way to run a Thunderbolt 3 drive or array internally off of a graphics card that provides TB3 ports, or some other card that had an internal TB3 ports among other features.