hi everyone Aaron here for ZolloTech and I thought I'd add some super fast
storage to my new 2019 Mac Pro and Oh double you see has been providing high
quality products for Macs and PCs for quite some time and this uses four MDOT
two nvme SSDs in order to get the highest performance over the PCIe bus so
these come in with one terabyte of storage two terabytes for that we have
here and up to eight and if you go all the way up to eight terabytes of storage
you're going to spend about two thousand dollars
this one is about a thousand and it goes down from there but this is super fast
storage so let's go ahead and open it up and take a look at it now it's supposed
to come with a license for soft raid so let's open this up you'll see it's just
a little guide that comes with it and it should be ready to go just pop it in the
Mac Pro and we should be good so let's take this out of here it's actually
pretty heavy and you'll see it says Excelsior 4m2 I'll flip it over there's
the bottom and it just slots into your PCIe slot in the Mac Pro on the end
there's nothing really here but we do have these cooling vents or a heatsink
on top let's take this off and see what's underneath now there's five
screws total let me go ahead and remove them now let's go ahead and remove the
heatsink off the board carefully and there we go now you can see the four
MDOT two nvme drives and what this does is uses all four of them at the same
time to get the fastest speed using what's called raid zero now you can
configure it differently you can configure it to use one drive to boot
and use the other threes redundant storage however you'd like but I'm going
to use this for video editing and it'll be using all of them at the same time
now some people may say this could be unreliable but Apple actually uses this
themselves they'll use raid 0 on the Mac Pro to combine two terabyte drives into
one 4 terabyte drive and speed everything up and it's been pretty
reliable I've never had one fail I'm sure someone has but I'm going to use it
for video editing and this has a 5 year as well now each one of these can use
the full 4x bandwidth that we have available and that's because this has a
built-in PCIe switch so this should be the fastest way to get the most out of
each one of these drives now let's take a look at the heatsink here you can see
we have our thermal pad underneath and then there's a thermal pad left behind
here but let me go ahead and put this back on and then I'll install it into
the Mac Pro and we'll take a look at it
now we'll open up the Mac Pro by turning the handle and lifting the cover
straight up and once we have this off now we have access to our PCIe slot so
I'll start by removing the actual cover that secures it it's just held on with
two thumb screws and once I have that off now there's this clever switch we
just click this over it unlocks the PCIe cards and then we remove the PCIe slot
dust protection covers and this isn't stamped aluminum it's actually milled so
it's really nice so let's go ahead and slot in the Excelsior forum - we'll just
push it into the PCIe slot there click it into place then we'll lock them down
again with our switch now we can lock in the PCIe card with the two thumb screws
and that's really all there is to installing this so it's really simple
and easy and here's the back of the Mac Pro with the card installed just so you
get an idea of what it looks like even though you'll never see it now I booted
up the computer and the drive is ready to go now I'm not going to use it as a
time machine back up now the drive is configured by default and all you have
to do is go into your finder and you'll see it there it has soft raid already on
the drive so you can just install this right away I've already installed it so
let's take a look at what we can do with the drive we'll configure it the way I
want for video editing and then we'll do some speed tests now I have soft raid
open and I've initialized these or erase them so that I can configure them how I
want for video editing you'll see the first four here are the drives
themselves and they're 960 gigabytes each or basically one terabyte the
controller is the last one so I'll click on the first hold shift click the last
and then I'll right-click or option click and then click new volume now on
this I'm going to name the volume named FCPX scratch since I'm going to
use it as my scratch disk for Final Cut Pro it will be when I edit everything
off of and here we can set it up as raid 0 raid 1 1 + 0 4 or 5 I'm going to use 0
and I know this may not be the most reliable over time but I've never had
one fail like I said before so we can set it up as HFS+ I'll use that and then
we'll optimize it for digital video so that we can use it for video editing and
then we'll click create and then we'll click OK it's creating it and now it's
going to ask me do I want to use it as a backup disk and I don't
so I'll click don't use and now the drives ready to go so I'll go ahead and
close soft raid and let's see how fast this Drive actually is now the standard
drive built into the Mac Pro is on the left and the new OWCA I've is on the
right so I've got a Final Cut Pro library here I'm going to copy this to
this drive so let's go ahead and do that
and I'm copying it in real-time it's about 20 gigabytes and it's done so that
gives you an idea of how fast it is maybe I'll copy these YouTube videos as
well there's a bunch of compressed videos in there and it's about 50
gigabytes or 58 gigabytes and you'll see there's 10 seconds or so left so this is
incredibly fast so we'll just wait for it to complete and then we'll run some
disk speed test so we'll give it just a second here and now we've copied a total
of about 70 gigabytes in under 40 seconds or so so that's unbelievably
fast let's go ahead and take a look at what it's capable of now using black
magic disk speed test we can see the actual speed of the drive so we'll
select the target Drive and then we'll go down to our FCPX scratch disk and
click open' now we can change the stress that we put on the drive and I'll select
one gigabyte just initially so that we can see the actual speeds once we hit
start so we'll click start and let it run for just a moment and you can see
the right speeds are about four thousand eight hundred and twenty-eight give or
take a few and 5438 for the read speed this is
incredibly fast now I'll select five gigabytes and put the drive under more
stress and let it run for a little while so we can see how it performs when it
heats up the drive performed pretty well you'll see it did dip down to about
eight hundred and thirty megabytes per second at times but as it cooled down it
just went right back up so over time it performs well and I've been using it to
edit video on and have had no problems whatsoever so it seems like it can
handle the high data transfer rates over time with no problem now I'm in the
system report and you can see all of the different drives on the computer so here
the four different drives on the computer on the PCIe card and if we
click on one you'll see that we have a link width of times four and that times
four means that it's running at full speed because it has that PCIe switch or
the on-board controller that can handle the speed so it will run full speed no
matter which card you're accessing whether or not you're using it as a boot
drive or whether or not it's in raid zero or however you're using it now
we'll take a look at one other benchmarking tool and this is actually a
new called sensei that gives a nice visual
representation of what's going on so we'll click run benchmark we'll browse
for our FCPX scratch disk here and click open and then let it run and it's a
little bit slower than the speeds we were seeing with black magic but it's
close enough that it's incredibly fast so you'll see it's 3,600 read speed
about 3,800 write speed so this looks like a very nice solution for your Mac
Pro if you want to fill up those PCIe slots and get some extra storage that's
just superfast and thanks to OWCA or sending this along for review they
didn't pay for this video but they did send it so I could check it out if you
haven't subscribed already please subscribe and if you enjoyed the video
please give it a like as always thanks for watching this is Aaron I'll see you
next time