The Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card was in the past the fastest storage solution
for Apple Mac Pro available.
Now guess what, Sonnet released brand new version of this amazing monster card with
same name, just added the "Silent" word to it, because this time it's completely passive
with no fan.
Using this card you can now add up to insane 32TB of super fast NVME storage to your Apple
Mac Pro, Windows or Linux computer.
So, let's give it a test
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This not any sponsored video, Sonnet did not send me this card for free or to make a review.
I bought several of these cards myself, for myself, by my own money.
It’s a great card so I felt the need to share my experience and recommendation with you.
In higher end PC’s world you can get cards like this - this came to me as a part of expensive
MSI Creator TRX40 motherboard.
You can get almost similar cards on Amazon for as low as $60.
But, there's a big catch here.
These cheap cards requires so called PCI slot bifurbification which is part of higher end
PC motherboard BIOSes and obviously not present on any Apple Mac.
It enables to split the x16 PCIe slot into four independent x4 PCIe pieces, so each one
of four NVMe disks can be accessed separately.
So for Mac Pro or lower end PCs you cannot use these cheap cards at all.
So that's why here come's into place cards like the OWC Accelsior 4M2
and this Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe card.
These cards have built-in onboard PCIe switch.
That means you don't need to rely on the special bifurbification option on some motherboards
and you can simply connect it to really any motherboards with PCIe x16 slot.
So it's compatible with Cheesgrater Mac Pro, 2019 Mac Pro
Any Windows or Linux computer
I use these cards in my high performance file servers, it's insane.
But today I will for you install this card into my 2019 Apple Mac Pro.
But first, let's unbox it and install 4 nvme disks onto this card.
If you have single sided NVMe or double sided, here you have hint, what exact thermal pad
thickness you should use and where, so be careful and read it first :)
Apply appropriate thermal pads to the front and back position.
Actual NVMe disks are held by these 4 tiny screws.
And the last step is just to attach the big heatsink held by 5 screws.
And here we have the final setup.
NVMEs are cooled down from both sides, actual temperatures under load I will show you in a moment.
Now let’s create a stripe RAID 0 array in Disk Utility.
All 4 NVME disks are recognized out of the box.
Select new disks, be careful not to select any other disk, so you don’t loose data.
As format I chose APFS, more about it later.
Chunk size is very important.
Based on data you will store, small or big choose appropriate Chunk Size.
And here we go, our 8TB striped array is created.
Each disk in System Profiler has it’s own NVME controller, thanks to that PCIe switch.
The Sonnet card I placed in the x16 slot for best performance.
And let’s do a quick test in Blackmagic Speed Test app.
Write speed looks fine, but what the hell is wrong with the read speed?
That’s not what I want or expect.
Maybe bad disks?
No, I tested those first.
PCIe placement?
Also no, I placed the Sonnet card in the PCIe x16 slot.
Let me think.
Maybe those NVMe disks are throttling down due to high temperatures, can that be the
problem?
Let’s see.
No, temperatures 35 Degrees of Celsius are absolutely amazing.
So that’s not the problem.
So let’s destroy the array and start from scratch with different settings.
I’ve done lot of tests with lot of settings and found out this is the best one for my
use case.
MacOS Extended Journaled and chunk size 256K.
And as you can see results are much better now and most important is, absolutely consistent.
So I recommend test yourself what exact settings will work the best for your specific workflow.
Temperatures are still around 35 degrees of Celsius.
That’s maybe too cold for NVMes :) And quick test in Blackmagic Speed Test confirmed
my correct settings.
This is the performance which must satisfy even any high end video production.
Oh my Lord.
That's simply insanely fast card.
There's not much people who could utilise it's full potencial.
But studios with really massive 6K or 8K multicam productions will finaly be able to fully utilise
their high end CPUs and GPUs, because the system bottleneck will no more be on
the disk side.
Hundreds of CPU cores, dozens of high end GPUs, TerraBytes of memory
all of that will not help you to get better performance
if you will have bottleneck on the disk setup. That's why you need this card.
I installed four 2TB NVMe drives Corsair MP600, not just because they are of course very fast,
but mainly because they have massive value of 3600TBW.
TerraBytes written.
That means you can overwrite each of these 4 disks disks 1800 times.
And that's ideal for any high end video production where you have to deal with really huge amount
of data.
So can I recommend this Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe Card?
Absolutely! Of course.
If you want to fully maximise your video or audio editing performance, this card is necessary
for any high end production.
Link where you can buy it you can find right now in this video description.
So…
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