Will an SSD slot into the J2i? Or do you need an aftermarket sled/bracket?
This will work (with SATA SSDs) but you would be insane to do this. If you want to add SSDs, buy M.2 PCIe SSDs and put them on a carrier card, as discussed in other articles on the nnMP. If you want one with support for the Mac, get OWC's, but most should work just fine (I expect we'll see reviews here in the coming weeks). Real-world performance will be 5x better on sequential xfers and 3-5x better on random access, if you populate it with 4 SSDs.
If you are this kind of crazy, though, you'll presumably need 2.5"->3.5" brackets, which are widely available for a couple bucks.
They make good stuff. But since I decided to put off buying a new Mac Pro until late next year, when I hope they will go to PCIe 4, I can’t consider it. So for now I bought an iMac. To get all of the stuff from my old Mac Pro, I got an OWC Thunderbay 4 32TB RAID, which I set as a 10–two raid 0s. This way I can use it when I get the Mac Pro.
it’s always hard to decide how to do this. I love internal drives, but you still have to back a raid up. With raid 5, you have a write cache. If something goes down before that cache is written, then you can lose a lot of data. So with raid five, your raid and computer need to be on a ups. Or, you can disable the write cache and accept the slower writes. Dell Business Solutions doesn’t recommend raid 5 for business data. Instead they recommend raid 10, which would use two raid 5s.
No... that would be RAID 50. RAID 10 is mirrored stripes (RAID 0 to make a large volume, then mirror (RAID 1) to another RAID0). All of these have their place, along with even more complex schemes. For example, my company's larger volumes are too large for a single RAID, but they are approximately a three-way RAID 10 (there are three mirrors of each byte), just spread out over a bunch of servers (using a fancy cluster storage system called "Ceph").
What do you need PCIe4 for? It's definitely better, but there's enough bw available in the nnMP for most people to do most things.
I would love them to use PCIe4, but that's tantamount to switching to AMD (which I would *really* love, but sadly don't expect). IIRC, Intel has said that they will be jumping straight to PCIe5 for their Xeons, so that likely won't be until 2022. They do have blocks for PCIe4 in some of their other products, so it's not impossible that they'd change their minds, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Dell calls it a raid 10.
Maybe so, but that is unambiguously wrong.
Well, they’re the biggest business supplier, so they can call it what they like.
To follow up to @billalexander 's question on my wall (WTF, who knew AI even had such a thing?), the "other articles" I mentioned are other articles posted on AI, and more specifically comments made both by me and others in response. This is the OWC card: https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc-accelsior-4m2
I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
I asked them this exact question, and they are only selling it with an 8TB drive installed. There will be no other options at the moment, but that could change. I have two 12TB drives I'd like to put in there, but I'd have to buy an 8TB that I don't need. Doesn't make a lot of sense.
I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
But WHY would you do that? You're using a bunch of space in an expensive carrier to hold 2.5" SSDs using slower SATA connectors when you could just get a PCIe card with four M.2 slots, which would be faster, cheaper, and take up far less space.
I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
But WHY would you do that? You're using a bunch of space in an expensive carrier to hold 2.5" SSDs using slower SATA connectors when you could just get a PCIe card with four M.2 slots, which would be faster, cheaper, and take up far less space.
I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
But WHY would you do that? You're using a bunch of space in an expensive carrier to hold 2.5" SSDs using slower SATA connectors when you could just get a PCIe card with four M.2 slots, which would be faster, cheaper, and take up far less space.
They make good stuff. But since I decided to put off buying a new Mac Pro until late next year, when I hope they will go to PCIe 4, I can’t consider it. So for now I bought an iMac. To get all of the stuff from my old Mac Pro, I got an OWC Thunderbay 4 32TB RAID, which I set as a 10–two raid 0s. This way I can use it when I get the Mac Pro.
it’s always hard to decide how to do this. I love internal drives, but you still have to back a raid up. With raid 5, you have a write cache. If something goes down before that cache is written, then you can lose a lot of data. So with raid five, your raid and computer need to be on a ups. Or, you can disable the write cache and accept the slower writes. Dell Business Solutions doesn’t recommend raid 5 for business data. Instead they recommend raid 10, which would use two raid 5s.
No... that would be RAID 50. RAID 10 is mirrored stripes (RAID 0 to make a large volume, then mirror (RAID 1) to another RAID0). All of these have their place, along with even more complex schemes. For example, my company's larger volumes are too large for a single RAID, but they are approximately a three-way RAID 10 (there are three mirrors of each byte), just spread out over a bunch of servers (using a fancy cluster storage system called "Ceph").
What do you need PCIe4 for? It's definitely better, but there's enough bw available in the nnMP for most people to do most things.
I would love them to use PCIe4, but that's tantamount to switching to AMD (which I would *really* love, but sadly don't expect). IIRC, Intel has said that they will be jumping straight to PCIe5 for their Xeons, so that likely won't be until 2022. They do have blocks for PCIe4 in some of their other products, so it's not impossible that they'd change their minds, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Dell calls it a raid 10.
Maybe so, but that is unambiguously wrong.
Well, they’re the biggest business supplier, so they can call it what they like.
It's funny when you realized they usually don't make their own designs, XPS laptops are designed by Compal. I guess Dell is more of an IT company than OEM?
I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
But WHY would you do that? You're using a bunch of space in an expensive carrier to hold 2.5" SSDs using slower SATA connectors when you could just get a PCIe card with four M.2 slots, which would be faster, cheaper, and take up far less space.
I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
But WHY would you do that? You're using a bunch of space in an expensive carrier to hold 2.5" SSDs using slower SATA connectors when you could just get a PCIe card with four M.2 slots, which would be faster, cheaper, and take up far less space.
Whoa! I could get 28 TB SSD in my 4 drive TB2 RAID for under $3700. That would be 21 TB in RAID 5 configuration. If I ever need that much fast external storage, it’s impressive.
I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
But WHY would you do that? You're using a bunch of space in an expensive carrier to hold 2.5" SSDs using slower SATA connectors when you could just get a PCIe card with four M.2 slots, which would be faster, cheaper, and take up far less space.
I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
But WHY would you do that? You're using a bunch of space in an expensive carrier to hold 2.5" SSDs using slower SATA connectors when you could just get a PCIe card with four M.2 slots, which would be faster, cheaper, and take up far less space.
I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
But WHY would you do that? You're using a bunch of space in an expensive carrier to hold 2.5" SSDs using slower SATA connectors when you could just get a PCIe card with four M.2 slots, which would be faster, cheaper, and take up far less space.
They make them bigger than that. ~32TB drives are readily available, and have been for a while, but they're all SAS.
32TB in a 2.5" SSD?
Why ask me when you can ask Google? At least Micron, Toshiba, and Samsung, among the large vendors, have been selling them for a while.
(Edit: though some are more like ~31TB.)
Okay, I see it now. I had a Newegg window open and searched and didn't see anything, so I thought maybe it was a typo. Anyway, I don't know much about SAS but I assume you could throw a SAS host PCIe card in the Mac Pro and one or more of these huge drives as an option.
I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
But WHY would you do that? You're using a bunch of space in an expensive carrier to hold 2.5" SSDs using slower SATA connectors when you could just get a PCIe card with four M.2 slots, which would be faster, cheaper, and take up far less space.
They make them bigger than that. ~32TB drives are readily available, and have been for a while, but they're all SAS.
32TB in a 2.5" SSD?
Why ask me when you can ask Google? At least Micron, Toshiba, and Samsung, among the large vendors, have been selling them for a while.
(Edit: though some are more like ~31TB.)
Okay, I see it now. I had a Newegg window open and searched and didn't see anything, so I thought maybe it was a typo. Anyway, I don't know much about SAS but I assume you could throw a SAS host PCIe card in the Mac Pro and one or more of these huge drives as an option.
Maybe. You'd need drivers for the SAS card. I *think* MacOS ships with support for some, but I don't recall and can't check right now. That would be a really bad idea for most people though. Unless you had some sort of bizarre need for ridiculous capacity in a tiny space, almost any other solution would be better.
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I wish Promise would also offer the Pegasus J2i frame alone Vs load with drives. The J2i is one I would like to use SSD's Vs HDD's.
https://www.amazon.com/Micron-MTFDDAK7T6QDE-7-68TB-2-5-Inch-Enterprise/dp/B07JQ2F2WG