SATA 2 on Mac Pro Limiting?

[SwisherSweet]

I'm considering building a FreeNAS on a Mac Pro 12 core but concerned that the SATA 2 spec will impeed performance. If I have 64gb of RAM will I suffer from the older SATA spec?

Will I get much more benefit from 3.46 ghz cpu vs 2.4 ghz cpu on transcoding, vm, and file serving?

I plan to use it for home Plex server, Time Machine backups now and, and a few Window VMs when 11 is released.

Thank you.

 

[Ericloewe]

Not with spinning rust.

What will limit you is getting FreeNAS to boot in a Mac Pro. Whenever someone tries, they invariably say it's rather hard.

a few Window VMs

That's awfully optimistic. Are you sure Apple's firmware supports all of bhyve's requirements (EPT, VT-x with unrestricted guest)? Even then, you'll need the 32nm processors, because Nehalem didn't originally support these features.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I'm considering building a FreeNAS on a Mac Pro 12 core but concerned that the SATA 2 spec will impeed performance. If I have 64gb of RAM will I suffer from the older SATA spec?

Will I get much more benefit from 3.46 ghz cpu vs 2.4 ghz cpu on transcoding, vm, and file serving?

I plan to use it for home Plex server, Time Machine backups now and, and a few Window VMs when 11 is released.

Thank you.

I don't think it will even boot on your Mac.

I also doubt any virtualization will work.

Sata2 handles 300GB/s, how fast are your hdd's? I can tell you they are not that fast, usually 150MB/s.



Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[SwisherSweet]

Not with spinning rust.

What will limit you is getting FreeNAS to boot in a Mac Pro. Whenever someone tries, they invariably say it's rather hard.


That's awfully optimistic. Are you sure Apple's firmware supports all of bhyve's requirements (EPT, VT-x with unrestricted guest)? Even then, you'll need the 32nm processors, because Nehalem didn't originally support these features.

The Mac I'm looking at has two 3.46 Ghz 6 Core ‘Westmere’ processors. From my internet searches, it supports EPT, VT-x with unrestricted guest, and is 32nm. It does seem the 'Nehalem' CPUs would not fit the bill but the 'Westmere' will.

I read about others solving the Mac boot problem by installing FreeNAS on a physical drive. I'll have to weigh this into my decision and cost (both hard cost and space).

 

[SwisherSweet]

I don't think it will even boot on your Mac.

I also doubt any virtualization will work.

Sata2 handles 300GB/s, how fast are your hdd's? I can tell you they are not that fast, usually 150MB/s.



Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

Thanks for your reply. Are you suggesting that the drive is limited by it's ability to physically read/write data from the plater and not by the SATA 2 interface?

With that understanding, what benefit would SATA 3 have over SATA 2?

 

[Ericloewe]

Are you suggesting that the drive is limited by it's ability to physically read/write data from the plater and not by the SATA 2 interface?

Yes, performance differences are trivial on spinning rust.

 

[Stux]

SATA2 is only a problem on SSDs.

FWIW, I'd use a Mac Pro to run macOS. 12 core Mac Pro is still the best Mac ever made.

And they probably fetch a pretty penny on the 2nd hand market.