Sonnet Technologies has unveiled the Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe Card, a new expansion card for the Mac Pro that can support up to two enterprise-class U.2 SSDs.
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Follow these steps to install expansion cards in your Mac Pro. Turn off your Mac Pro by choosing Apple menu Shut Down. Let it cool down for 5 to 10 minutes before you touch the internal components, which may be hot. Disconnect all cables except the power cord from your Mac Pro. Touch the metal on the outside of your Mac Pro to discharge any static electricity. Eight PCI Express expansion slots. Mac Pro is designed for pros who need to build high‑bandwidth capabilities into their systems. With four double‑wide slots, three single‑wide slots, and one half‑length slot preconfigured with the Apple I/O card, it has twice as many slots as the previous Mac.
The company says the Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe Card is the only product on the market that can support a direct connection to a pair of U.2 SSD cards, making it an ideal upgrade for professional users and Mac Pro owners.
Sonnet's new card allows for the installation of two cards in a single full-length x16 PCIe slot with no separate cables, adapters, or mounting trays required. It's compatible with both Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 2 ports via Thunderbolt to PCIe card expansion system.
- Like its predecessor, the Power Mac G5, the pre-2013 Mac Pro was Apple's only desktop with standard expansion slots for graphics adapters and other expansion cards. Apple received criticism after an incremental upgrade to the Mac Pro line following the 2012 WWDC.
- Provide seamless integration into the system, Mac Pro features the Mac Pro Expansion Module, or MPX Module. MPX Modules provide a larger form-factor, more power, and cableless integration into Mac Pro. Mac Pro provides the highest-performance, most flexible graphics options of any Mac.
- An alternative option is the Radeon Pro Vega II Duo, which has two Vega II GPUs working together on the same card. This gives the Mac Pro 128 compute units, 8,192 stream processors, 64GB of HBM2.
'The Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe Card offers many users the most economical way to add ultra-fast, extra-large-capacity storage to their computers — particularly so for 2019 Mac Pro users,' the company said of the upgrade.
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For context, U.2 NVMe PCIe SSDs share the same form factor as 2.5-inch SATA drives, but they deliver up to seven times the speed that SATA drives can provide. The U.2 SSDs are sold separately
With a pair of U.2 SSDs installed on the Sonnet card and configured as a RAID 0 setup, the company says that it can deliver sustained data transfer speeds of up to 6,250 megabits per second on the 2019 Mac Pro. The company also says a similar setup can deliver up to 184% faster data performance than a Mac Pro's built-in 8TB SSD.
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The Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe Card is compatible on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers, including mid-2010, mid-2012 towers, and the 2019 Mac Pro. It also works in Thunderbolt 3 enclosures — which would cut back on the maximum delivered speed. The card costs $199.99.
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