With the nMacPro days if not hours from introduction, a small batch of the Samsung XP941 128GB SSD's showed up on EBAY and I jumped on the opportunity to be a first adopter of a bootable 4x SATA Express platform for the 2009 Mac Pro. This is the first of many NGFF Technologies I'll be pushing through the paces on the Mac Pro.
While there has been minimal coverage of the NGFF platform, Les Toker over at The SSD Review has had his pulse on the technology, most recently testing a Mac Pro bootable NGFF solution called Raijin from IOSwitch featuring a Plextor NGFF SSD solution. While extensive tests were completed on the Windows 8 x86 kernel, NGFF performance on the x58 based Mac Pro running OSX 10.9 has been an unknown. Until today.
I've assembled a test platform that I'll be sharing the results from the perspective from an App developer using a mix of Apple's tools.
Base Mac Pro Test Platform:
OS X Test Platform
Initial Results
The SSD appears as a Boot device, OS X installed without a problem.
There is no delay at boot. The spinner progresses for 2/3 of a turn before desktop
Black Magic Speed test reports approx 480 MB/S write and 880 MB/S READ
In XBench, the xp941 excels at small file performance.
Slow write speeds probably due to number of NAND cells. with higher performance in 256GB and greater.
detailed numbers and screenshots in progress.
While there has been minimal coverage of the NGFF platform, Les Toker over at The SSD Review has had his pulse on the technology, most recently testing a Mac Pro bootable NGFF solution called Raijin from IOSwitch featuring a Plextor NGFF SSD solution. While extensive tests were completed on the Windows 8 x86 kernel, NGFF performance on the x58 based Mac Pro running OSX 10.9 has been an unknown. Until today.
I've assembled a test platform that I'll be sharing the results from the perspective from an App developer using a mix of Apple's tools.
Base Mac Pro Test Platform:
- 2009 Mac Pro, Intel x58 based platform
- Intel 990x CPU, 6-core, 3.46Ghz
- 32GB 1066 RAM.
- nvidia 680GTX 2GB(slot 1)
OS X Test Platform
- Samsung XP941 128GB / 4x NGFF PCI 3.0 adapter
- Samsung 840 Pro 256GB / Software Raid - x58 SATA II
- Samsung 840 Pro 256GB / Software Raid - Velocity X2 (single)
- Samsung 840 Pro 256GB / Software Raid - Velocity X2 (dual)
- Samsung 840 Pro EVO 256GB / Velocity X2 (Single)
Initial Results
The SSD appears as a Boot device, OS X installed without a problem.
There is no delay at boot. The spinner progresses for 2/3 of a turn before desktop
Black Magic Speed test reports approx 480 MB/S write and 880 MB/S READ
In XBench, the xp941 excels at small file performance.
Slow write speeds probably due to number of NAND cells. with higher performance in 256GB and greater.
detailed numbers and screenshots in progress.