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Review on πŸ’ͺ SSD7101A-1 High Point NVMe RAID Controller: Enhancing Performance by Ryan Huhn

Revainrating 2 out of 5

New Speed/Life SSDs for Mac Pro Tower 4.1/5.1 models! Mojave and Win 10 can boot from this device!

When my Mac Pro 5.1 BIOS firmware/ROM update was enabled in macOS Apple Mojave (with this firmware/BIOS update, my Mac Pro 5.1 model now has a boot ROM version of 140.0. 0.0.0.0 instead of High Sierra Boot ROM version 138.0.0.0) this allowed my Mac Pro motherboard to use NVMe SSDs on a 1st gen Mac Pro where this is the case in High Sierra and all others earlier versions of macOS was not possible. Although High Point clarifies that their SSD7101A-1 was never designed or tested to boot, one of their SSD7101A-1 is outfitted with a Samsung 970 Pro NVMe SSD (1TB) and then installed in a PCIe 2.3 slot on my Mac Pro and my previous Mojave 10.14.2 SSD boot image are restored with Time Machine on a 970 Pro NVMe SSD, you know what? My Mac Pro 5.1 starts up without the High Point driver or other software. Mojave 10.14.2 is simply awesome! Split issues? no See attached Blackmagic Disk Speed Test results. I think that's just great (although High Point tech support still insists their SSD7101A-1 is just a RAID device and can't be used for any type of boot). Note that only Apple's latest iMac Pro can achieve the same speed on a boot SSD, but for that Apple uses a proprietary Samsung NVMe SSD on a custom motherboard. Just to be clear, my Mac Pro 5.1 can now boot Mojave from a 970 Pro 1TB NVMe SSD with around 3KB/s read/write speed and Win 10 Pro from another 970 Pro 1TB NVMe SSD with the same read/write speed. boot write speed. Both 970 Pros are installed on this High Point unit in slots 1 (top) and 2 (second from top) with no additional software or drivers. What should I do with the other two M.2 NVMe blade slots? Many Thanks. Climax (and apple)!

Pros
  • Internals
Cons
  • Frequency