New home NAS and Hypervisor setup

[PigLover]

I think you've got a great setup going here. After seeing the lower-power components you are working with and the small number of servers you are installing I don't think you'll have much problem with heat at all.

One comment on this for you to consider. Going back to my past days putting together quiet/near-silent systems for peo0ple. You've got a large case with lots of air volume in it. Using a fan to push air into it (positive pressure) will not do too much good to cool anything, especially with the PSU fan in the back sucking air out. You'd probably be a lot better off going to a fully negative-pressure approach by putting in a pair of slow 60mm fans on the rear fan brackets seen in the next photo.

 

[Patrick]

release of Broadwell K

One of the two releases I am most excited for this year: Xeon D. Maximum of 45w TDP SoC's with 10GbE integrated. That is the killer Broadwell release.

 

[TallGraham]

Well I have a bit of time on my hands for the next few weeks now so I am trying to tie this all together. Sadly, not being helped by Intel and their lack of support. The Intel Pro 1000 PT Quad Port PCIe NICs that I have will not work in any of the ports on the Intel DQ77MK motherboard. I have a thread running over in the networking forum for this. Waiting on Intel to come back to me now after sending pictures of both pieces of equipment showing model and serial numbers.

In the meantime I have a new toy

A Mac Pro 2010 Tower with 2 x 6-Core Intel Xeon processors. I have been looking for one of these for ages, but kept losing out on eBay. Finally tracked one down locally and got it for a steal

This is the Mac Pro 5,1 model. It can apparently take up to 128GB of RAM as well. So now I need to upgrade this lovely machine. First issue is the onboard SATA is only SATA-2 so 3Gb/s. I have an SSD that I want to run in there, Crucial 256GB. Now I have seen plenty of PCIe to SSD adapters that say they can run an SSD from a PCIe slot. Trouble is I can't seem to locate a decent one that will allow you to boot, and also show up in the "Option-Boot" at startup for the Mac Pro 5,1. Here is an example of a really good one, but it won't do the boot properly on the Mac Pro 5,1

Sonnet - Tempo SSD PCIe Card Adapter

Has anyone else got this working yet?

For info the Mac Pro 5,1 has a total of 4 PCIe v2.0 slots. There are 2 x16 slots and 2 x4 slots. With PCIe v2.0 you can shift 500MB/s data per lane in each direction. So a x2 card as this appears to be would be ideal for an SSD. Some of the adapters can take 2 SSDs. This would be awesome if they can both boot independently. I want to have 1 SSD for Mac OSX and another for Windows. Then I can just use the option boot at startup to choose which one to boot from. That will leave me the 4 internal SATA-2 bays for large storage drives.

The next update I want to add is USB 3.0. This is on the New Mac Pro 2013 model, but they never added it to the previous ones for some reason. Once again though I have found some cards that seem to do the trick for people. This is a nice page showing how to fit the card

Add USB 3 to a Mac Pro for less than 25 quid with this simple guide

The chipset is exactly the same as the one in the new Mac Pro 2013 so it should just work straight out of the box on newer versions of OSX. They also do a "special" Mac one that doesn't require the SATA power. Not sure which would be best really, but both apparently have been tested and work well.

Inateck KT4004 4-Port USB 3.0 PCI Express Card For MAC Pro No Additional Power Connection Needed

Next, I want to take out the DVD "Superdrive" and upgrade it to a BluRay drive. Does anyone know of any decent ones that work well with OSX? I have seen people talk about the LG models being good.

Finally, I want to upgrade the RAM to 128GB and add some "big" storage. Any suggestions on large drives that work well in the Mac Pro 5,1

Any input is always gratefully received

 

[rubylaser]

Congrats on your purchase! I have a 2009 Mac Pro upgraded to 5,1 firmware running a single 3.33GHz hex core (upgraded myself from a 2.8Ghz quad core) with 32GB of RAM, and an ATI 7850. I use this PCIe adapter for my SSD in my 2009 Mac Pro. I can option boot to it. I have this USB3 card in mine. I followed these directions to run power for it out of the optical bay. I have (4) 3TB Hitachi drives in the internal hard drive bays. I have not replaced the optical drive, but there really isn't a trick, just buy a decent brand and it should work. Even though my Mac Pro is "old" it is still a workhorse. With two hex cores, you will have a very powerful machine on your hands.

 

[nry]

Nice! Does it support Yosemite?

SATA wise I remember when I bought my Areca 1882ix-8 card that it supports the Mac Pro (does come with a silly price tag though). I bought it as part of a bundle which came with these adapters which allow you to use the 4 normal bays (including the power connectors) and break out the SATA connector for use with a RAID card.

http://lsnet.co/uploads/sale/IMG_7082.jpg

USB3 - I have been impressed with Sonnet and seen that they do a PCIe card, slightly more expensive than the £25 option you posted!
Sonnet Allegro Express USB3 USB3-4PME PCI-Express-x1, 4x USB3; Mac/Windows Buy now on SPAN.COM

You just need a 10GbE Myricom card now

 

[rubylaser]

Yes, the 2009 supports Yosemite. It can actually run all the CPUs from the 2010 model with the firmware update. The 3.33GHz CPU in mine was introduced in the 2010 model. I stumbled across that website I previously posted, and he has a number of tutorials to upgrade various components of Mac Pros and that's what got me into modding my old Mac. I don't use my Mac Pro as a large storage box (I have separate servers for that), but I have one of the drives for a Carbon Copy Clone, one as a TimeMachine target, and two drives together in a mirror as bulk storage for projects.

That Areca setup is pretty fancy, although I'm sure it was expensive. Also, Sonnet makes very nice hardware. Finally, I haven't bought a 10Gbe card for it yet, but I should take a look.

 

[nry]

If you keep an eye on eBay you can pick the Myricom cards up very cheaply, unfortunately they don't seem to pop up very often over here in the UK.
For my brand new Myricom 10G-PCIE-8B-S I paid £18.95
And the brand new Myricom 10G-PCIE2-8B2-2S with 2x Myricom SFP+ optics was around £210 IIRC

 

[TallGraham]

Wow! thanks for the links and info RubyLaser and nice to see you still checking out my thread too Nry

I would love a 10Gbe adapter but need a switch for that first sadly. I have 3 x Brocade BR-1020 cards that I intend to direct connect for my hypervisor stack when I can finally sort out the Intel PT NIC issues. Not looking good at present, Intel support have been utter rubbish and I have updated the post in the Networking section.

The final USB3 card that I linked to "for Mac with no extra power" is actually listed at the end of the link you gave me RubyLaser so I will probably still go with that one.

Still toying with options for the PCIe SSD converter type things. I have just been looking at the new M2 SSDs with PCIe cards, the Samsung ones seem to run at insane speeds and are Mac bootable too! I will keep you all posted.

 

[rubylaser]

Still toying with options for the PCIe SSD converter type things. I have just been looking at the new M2 SSDs with PCIe cards, the Samsung ones seem to run at insane speeds and are Mac bootable too! I will keep you all posted.

A PCIe based m.2 SSD would be a fantastic solution. At the time I bought mine, I had a few Samsung 840 Pros laying around, so I didn't want to spend anymore money than I add to.

Also, the Sonnet USB3 without power is definitely easier, than running power to the bay, but running power isn't too tricky.

 

[TallGraham]

Well the Samsung XP941 512MB M.2 NGFF PCIe SSD turned up today. Came with a PCIe x4 adapter.

A close up of the SSD

Worlds smallest screw for holding the SSD in place

All fitted together (I found out that I installed it in the wrong socket, should have been the top one. Luckily the company website is on the card so I Googled it and found out my mistake. Once in the top socket it the Mac Pro detected the SSD)

Card fitted into the Mac Pro

Finally ran a speed test using Black Magic Design Disk Speed Test

Speeds as advertised by Samsung. Super pleased with this upgrade

 

[rubylaser]

That is awesome! That's significantly faster than the SSD in my Mac Pro and even faster than the PCIe SSD in my new MacBook Air. It's amazing that the new 951 version is supposed to be significantly faster than even this speedy 941.

 

[Patrick]

@TallGraham I installed the XP941 in a Supermicro workstation in the lab recently. The sequential speeds are great. Random speeds are good too.

But I am even more excited about a new SAS drive that is coming next week!

 

[TallGraham]

The USB 3.0 bits I ordered turned up the other day and I got them all fitted.

Went with all inateck in the hope they would all play nicely together

1 x inateck KT4004 PCIe x1 USB 3.0 card
1 x inateck FEU3NS-1E USB 3.0 2.5" Portable HDD Enclosure
1 x inateck Carry Case for Portable HDD Enclosure
1 x 2m USB 3.0 extention lead to go in back on the Mac Pro

Box for the KT4004 doesn't appear to say Mac on there, but it lists it on the instructions inside so went ahead and plugged it in.

Quick close-up shot of the KT4004 card, note no SATA power required

Card all located nicely in the top PCIe slot of the Mac Pro

Shot of 4 USB 3.0 ports now available on the back of the Mac Pro

Shot of System Info in Yosemite showing the USB 3.0 card. I didn't have to install any drivers. Just worked straight out of the box.

Close up shot of the HDD Enclosure box

Fitting my 256GB Crucial SSD into the enclosure

Black Magic Disk Speed Test result on the Crucial 256GB SSD running in the inateck portable HDD enclosure, attached to the inateck KT4004 USB 3.0 card on the Mac Pro. Nice speeds. I am very impressed with that.

In contrast here is the same Crucial SSD, in the inateck portable HDD enclosure, attached to the on board USB 3.0 ports of the Intel DQ77MK motherboard. Interesting that the reads are much higher on the inateck KT4004 on the Mac Pro.