[Gianluca Mazzarolo]

I beg to disagree.

You can totally use your Mac Pro 5.1 as a file server.

There are 4 + 2 possible Sata (2) connections, which are plenty fast for regular harddrives even if you RAID them together (up to 260MB/s per SATA port, with a maximum of ~600MB/s all 6 combined because of BUS limitation).

If your Mac Pro 5.1 is upgraded with good CPUs you can just buy a 10Gb Ethernet card in it, and connect it to the 10GbE of the Mac Pro 7.1.

Otherwise, you could even install 2 x SATA SSDs in one of the PCie slot of the Mac Pro 5.1 on a dual-Sata->Pcie card and achieve about 500-800MB/s with those, and then also in this case connect them with 10GbE.

If you’re just waiting for a new drive solution (Thunderbolt 3 or USB-3 / C) then you could just connect to the built-in 1GbE port of the Mac Pro 5.1 and still achieve speeds up to 100-110MB/s which are OK for some proxy workflows.

Mac Pro Specialist and Technician @ Big Little Frank
• https://biglittlefrank.dk •

[Gianluca Mazzarolo]

Imho, that’s just another good reason not to use SoftRAID…

[Gianluca Mazzarolo]

Not sure if it might work in the latest VMs, but you could install a VM, install MacOS Mojave into it, and then just install FCPX + your older plugins there. Worth trying if you really need Mojave.

Or of course try to find alternatives to those plugins.

[Gianluca Mazzarolo]

Hi John,

we are a Danish company which builds professional, custom Mac Pro 5.1 with single or dual high-end GPUs, such as 1080Ti and Titan Xps.

I disagree with previous comment saying there is not much to gain.

1) the Pcie 2.0 is basically not a limit in any way for these machines, beside gaming, since there is more than enough bandwidth for anything, even on the x4 link (only 4-6% loss by putting a GPU in slot 3 and 4, and only under extreme stress)

2) the generation difference between Maxwell (9xx series) and Pascal (10×0 series) is amazing.

What is even more amazing is how the Mac Pro 6.1 cannot even compete at all, unless we sell eGPUs together with it.

As an example, a nice specced mac Por 6.1 (2013) 8 Core 3.3Ghz with D500s cannot even playback a 5K 72fps RED RAW clip.

A Mac Pro 5.1 with our modifications can run e.g. VEGA 16GB or 1080Ti, can play an 8K 48fps RED RAW clip at 24fps just fine.

Check us out at

https://www.biglittlefrank.dk
facebook.com/biglittlefrank
instagram.com/biglittlefrank

And if you need any help, drop us a message ☺

Have a nice day

Gianluca
// BIG LITTLE FRANK
https://www.biglittlefrank.dk