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The Cheese Grater is back
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[Shane Ross] “And no, no slots. Only TWO drive slots for M2 SSD drives. “
Correct. That’s my concern. It appears that the intention is to mount drives into an MPX module, like Promise is planning to release. Therefore, I would presume that if you wanted to add your own raw drive(s), you would have to purchase the MPX chassis from Apple. Potentially there will be third-party MPX modules available. And, would you even be able to add a 3.5″ spinning hard drive or will you be limited to 2.5″ SSDs or only NVMe drives?
[Shane Ross] “That we all want external drives for everything!”
They have to justify Thunderbolt 3 somehow ☺
[Shane Ross] “What’s wrong with allowing for 4 internal drives?”
In fact, if you used the optical drive bays, you could do up to 6 drives on the older Mac Pros.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “Correct. That’s my concern. It appears that the intention is to mount drives into an MPX module, like Promise is planning to release. Therefore, I would presume that if you wanted to add your own raw drive(s), you would have to purchase the MPX chassis from Apple. Potentially there will be third-party MPX modules available. And, would you even be able to add a 3.5″ spinning hard drive or will you be limited to 2.5″ SSDs or only NVMe drives?”
This is something I’m confused about. Can you just put cards into the slots or do you always have to use an MPX chassis?
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[Oliver Peters] “In fact, if you used the optical drive bays, you could do up to 6 drives on the older Mac Pros.”
It would take a lot of drives to equal the capacity of one single HDD’ today.
Drives in the older Mac pro were typically less then 1TB.
With the Promise thingy announced, you can get 32 TBs inside the MacPro. Those capacities simply weren’t available in the old cheese grater days. Single hard drives can reach up to 14TBs. 4 of those would be 56TBs in one computer. I think we will be OK.
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[Oliver Peters] “I would presume that if you wanted to add your own raw drive(s), you would have to purchase the MPX chassis from Apple. Potentially there will be third-party MPX modules available. And, would you even be able to add a 3.5″ spinning hard drive or will you be limited to 2.5” SSDs or only NVMe drives?
“The Pegasus J2i appears to be a simple sled for two 3.5″ SATA HDDs. The announcement said it will use a “custom cable assembly”, getting data from the Mac Pro’s SATA header. While not mentioned, there are 6-pin PCIe power headers on the motherboard. It might get power from a PCIe 6-pin to SATA female cable, maybe something like this: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61iKLfXQl4L._SX425_.jpg
The J2i appears to be just a piece of sheet metal, so that would be the “old school” way of doing it – power and data via cables. It would also occupy the vertical space of an MPX module while holding only two 3.5″ drives.
The R4i MPX module is apparently “cable free”, getting all power and data from the PCIe slot and MPX extension slot. It appears to use 4 x 8TB SATA 3.5″ HDDs. The MPX extension slot also has Thunderbolt access, so I don’t know if Promise is using a PCIe host controller (more likely) or Thunderbolt. Also unknown is how many internal Thunderbolt busses the new Mac Pro has.
In theory you could swap out the R4i’s 8TB SATA hard drives with 4TB SATA SSDs in 2.5″ adapters. There are even 8TB SATA SSDs now available but they are expensive. Or if not compatible, some other mfg. could make an MPX module designed for higher density 2.5″ SATA SSDs. However SATA isn’t the best interface for SSDs, just saying it’s theoretically possible. But conceptually two MPX modules each with 4 x 8TB SATA SSDs would give 64TB SSD internal capacity, plus the 4TB on the motherboard.
PCIe-based NVMe cards are also available. The ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 Card V2 supports up to four PCIe NVMe daughter cards, for 8TB — per board. I don’t know if it’s compatible with the new Mac Pro but it illustrates the form factor and capacity exist for substantial PCIe-based SSD storage:
https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-7CT8Knh/0/6af36959/L/i-7CT8Knh-L.jpgBeyond this, Samsung has 8TB PCIe SSDs in a M.2-size but new NF1 form factor. If a compatible PCIe card with 4 x NF1 sockets were made, each PCIe slot could hold 32 TB SSD: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/insights/news-events/samsung-introduces-8tb-ssd-in-nf1-form-factor/
A maxed-out Mac Pro with 1.5TB RAM and stuffed full of 8TB PCIe SSD cards would be expensive. However the NF1 form factor SSDs will be widely used in data centers: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/insights/tech-leadership/server-scalability-enhanced-with-nf1-ssd/
If an MPX module was designed to accept the above 8TB NF1 cards for perpendicular insertion (see above photo), at 5mm width per card each MPX module might hold 30 8TB cards for a total of about 240TB. This of course assumes adequate cooling, power and bus bandwidth.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Drives in the older Mac pro were typically less then 1TB. “
You are talking about stock from Apple, not after market upgrades. I haven’t actually tested whether the power supplies would handle it, but a 2012 MP should be able to easily take 4 x 4TB, plus 1 or 2 SSDs up to 4TB each. You can get spinning disc drives up to 14TB these days, so in theory up to 4 x 14TB in an older tower, plus the SSDs. Again, the caveat being the power supply. I have personally run 2009 towers with 2 x 1TB SSDs, plus 2 x 2TB 7200RPM drives.
So yes, if this tower could take 4 x 14TB 7200 RPM drives, that would be great. But it doesn’t look like that’s possible.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Joe Marler] “The Pegasus J2i appears to be a simple sled for two 3.5” SATA HDDs. The announcement said it will use a “custom cable assembly”, getting data from the Mac Pro’s SATA header.”
Any links to that?
Edit: Never mind. I see it on Promise’s home page.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “So yes, if this tower could take 4 x 14TB 7200 RPM drives, that would be great. But it doesn’t look like that’s possible.”
Not sure if you read the rest of my post, but I mention the Promise card that hold 4 HDDs. Promise advertises 32TB Raw, preformatted to raid 5. The asterisk says there’s more capacities coming later. Same with J2i with 2 drives only.
https://www.promise.com/us/Promotion/PegasusStorage
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Not sure if you read the rest of my post”
I did. I was mainly talking about the old towers. The Promise products say more capacities to be announced. So we’ll see.
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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[Oliver Peters] “You are talking about stock from Apple, not after market upgrades.”
No, I am talking about how large HDDs were when the old cheesegrater MacPro was designed. The capacity simply wasn’t there. You needed to stuff 6 drives in it in order to get enough space.
Today, that issue is less of a problem, unless of course you are dealing exclusively in large format raw codecs.
I believe, if you need it, there will be plenty of storage opportunities inside the machine.
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