Sonnet's Tempo SSD 6Gb SATA PCIe Cards Now Supported As Boot Drives in Mac Pros
Hanging onto your Mac Pro for dear life — at least until Apple makes good on its promised 2013 unveiling of a new pro workstation line-up? Sonnet Technologies has one more way for you to turbo-charge that system.
Sonnet said this week that its Tempo SSD and Tempo SSD Pro 2.5-inch 6 Gb/sec SATA PCIe SSD cards now support booting in Mac Pros from early 2008 and newer.
The Tempo SSD cards allow users to buy standard 2.5-inch SATA SSDs, mount them on the cards, and then use them as boot disks — even in a RAID 0 configuration if they choose. The 6 Gb/sec cards double the bandwidth of the Mac Pro's native 3 Gb/sec SATA bus.
How fast is it? Pretty fast. With the Tempo SSD, Sonnet claims sustained read speeds reach up to 500 MB/sec from one SSD, and climb to 660 MB/sec from a set of RAID 0 drives. (Using two SSDs requires that an included bracket be used to extend this half-length card to its full length.) The Tempo SSD Pro, which sports a higher-performance SATA controller, can hit sustained read speeds of up to 960 MB/sec from a set of RAID 0 drives, Sonnet said. Don't try that with spinning disks.
The cards can also be used with Macs connected via a Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis. They work in Windows 7 and 8, as well, but not in a RAID configuration.
The Tempo SSD is $149.95; the Tempo SSD Pro is $299..95. (At those prices, as you can imagine, the SSDs are not included.)
