OWC Accelsior S PCIe Adapter for 2.5-inch SATA 6G Expansion Card Compatible with Mac Pro (2006-2012), Mac Pro 2019 and PC Towers

Installed in a MSI X58 Pro 1366 socket with tri-channel memory, a system I built in 2009. This Motherboard/system was limited to SATA II (3Gbps) so after buying a Samsung 850 EVO SSD I wanted to get full speed. My system is dual boot (Win 10 & Fedora 25). I installed the card in a PCIe x16 slot that operated at a max of PCIe X4. Basically no issues. I was concern there was going to be an issue with the Samsung SSD being dual boot but definitely plug and play couldn't be easier. I noticed during boot that the PCIe bus speeds registers as PCIe 2.0 x2 and NOT PCIe 2.0 x4 but not an issue as both speeds are faster that SATA III (6Gbps). My speed measured using the Samsung Magician software went from approximate: (284 read, 271 write randoms; 52409 read, 41961 write IOPS on SATA II to 553 read, 526 write; 88649, 71680 respectively with the OWC adapter card). Yes I can tell the difference in boot to both Windows 10 and Fedora Linux is about half but it was very fast anyways after upgrading to SSD from Hard Drive. Windows 10 went from 15 seconds to 8 seconds on the boot while Linux went from 8 seconds to 5 seconds but in the Linux boot there is a program that is configured to take 6 seconds on boot so very fast if I was to turn it off or reduce it! Note: CPU i7 920 OC to 3GHz from 2.6GHz, OCZ DDR3 1333 ram OC from 1066 to 1500 MHz. Graphics is now Radeon RX 460 OC with 2GB Ram, 500W power supply, and 2 DVD drives, Creative XFi sound card and old Zoom modem 3025C that doesn't work with Windows 10. I have one PCIe x16 slot left and 1 old PCI slot left all in a ELITE Mid or Medium tower case. In all honesty I didn't need the upgrade as the system was very fast already for mainly browsing the internet but the OWC card performs as advertised. I would definitely rate this as a buy to extend the life of an older computer.

Purchased to install in my Poweredge R710. Currently have the 6 drive bays populated, and swapped the optical drive out for a 2.5 inch HDD. I wanted to install a cache SSD in my system for the faster read/writes than my 7200RPM HDDs. Installed this in an available PCIe slot (keep in mind, does not work in the RAID card slot) with a 480GB ADATA SSD. System found the PCIe card on boot, shows BIOS splash for the device and boots right up into unRAID. unRAID reads the drive with it's normal GUID and functions as expected with no issues. The only caveat is the SSD keeps getting a bit warm in my server 60 degrees Celsius and higher, while other components are not. This is most likely an issue with my personal setup and not something with the card itself, but keep in mind that you'll want good ventilation in your system. Works great on a R710 running unRAID.

Added my SSD to the card and installed into my 2010 Mac Pro 5,1 single CPU upgrade from 2.8 GHz to 3.46 GHz and configured it to be the start up disc and worked very well. The instructions were simple and easy to follow. Very impressive and ordered another card for my 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 upgraded to the 5,1 model recently CPU upgrade from single 2.93 GHz to 3.46 GHz. It is performing exceptionally well with this card and SSD in the PCIe slot as the boot drive in my Mac Pro. The boot time has been exceptionally fast and application response time is much quicker than HDD and the computer is quieter and cooler than ever before. The card comes with the four screws to attach the SSD and instruction and requires no drivers and it’s just simple plug the card along with the SSD into PCIe slot and boot your Mac Pro as you see fit. You would actually see the results as it begins to boot up. Also, I do not use neither of my Mac Pros for gaming so I can not see fit to talk about that agenda.

I installed this card with an SSD in a new video editing build. Recognized immediately. Works as it should. My motherboard has plenty of PCIE slots and this slim device takes up very little room, allowing for good air flow. So now, I have an SSD as a scratch drive for sample edits that cost me very little and yet has the best speed it can get.

I was getting around ~285mbps read/write on my Samsung evo 500gb SSD using the built in sata 2 bus on the 5,1 Mac Pro backplane. After installing the OCW card, I'm getting about what everyone is posting. Low to mid 500s and thats not too shabby for a 50 dollar drop in card. It wasn't that it was painfully slow with the ssd parked in the sled but since moving from a raid 0 SSD array to sata 2, I could certianly feel it. I was looking at the Sonnet Tempo Pro plus and some NVME solutions but they both had a few hard to swallow drawbacks. One was expense and the other system instability. First, I'll talk about price. I've been doing some serious research about finding a reasonable sub ~300 dollar NVME solution that BOOTS and it came down to transplanting a 2013 MacBook Pro ssd into a PCIE card and depending on the revision number of the salvaged ssd blah blah. It was too many variables for me to take a risk buying everything on eBay and depending on the seller to know what he or she is looking at. Would it be faster if could hunt down all the right parts? no doubt. Is it worth the fiddling around when I have actual work to do, nope. The Sonnet is a raid 0/1 SSD PCIE Card that runs around ~$300 after tax and I've been reading about sometimes it boots in raid 0 and sometimes it just does what it wants. Again, over budget anyway. **before anyone tells me about raid 0 - 15 years in the industry and I have a very robust backup solution. I'm looking for speed. I have redundancy on the backend and backup offsite.** Second Point: fragility. As these cheese grater Mac Pros age, the more we have to cobble crap together to keep them running as a professional workstation. All 4 of my expansion slots are full. 780 ti (lets hear it for over amping the stock mb 6pin ports) , now this OWC SSD Card, cheap USB 3.0 card (yes they still have usb 2.0 on board and you can't boot from the card), and an Intel 10gb network card. All of these things can and will randomly start acting up. GPU will start flickering because Apple hasn't supported a desktop Nvidia GPU since the 600 series and we're using drivers for a 4 year old card. Flakey usb connections that cut out but I'm sure that can fixed with a better card like the Sonnet USB 3.0 flavor. On top of those two gripes, the cMP has a poor pci-e mounting solutions that cause my damn 10gb card in the top slot to wiggle around when my cat walks by dropping conneciton. Crap like that we have to deal with. So my point being... I popped this thing into my system, walked away to grab a drink fully expecting to mess around with getting it to work for the next 2 hours and I think my reaction when I came back was, "holy sH*t it booted." Thats it. Simple, easy and worth 50 bucks. Trim says it works. IDK if it actually does but I'm going off the system report. Downsides: It shows up as an external drive. Not a big deal to me but it may cause problems with some programs not wanting to install to "external hardware". I'm not sure how that works because the OS is on it but I'l update if I find any issues in the future. Due to my setup (see photos) and being squished against a very hot running card due to Apple holding fan speeds back to keep noise down and Nvidia just making a stupidly hot card to begin with, I'm only seeing a few degrees higher temps over hanging out in the sled.

Purchased this card recently for a 2009 Mac Pro 4,1. General Installation - Super easy and straightforward. Attach the SSD to the Accelsior, place it in PCIe lane 1 or 2(x16 2009 Mac Pro), close up your baby and you're done. My specific installation(you can skip this if you don't care for OWC drives or plan to use one with this card) - This is where things get interesting. I tested/used this card with a OWC Mercury Extreme 6G 480GB and a Samsung 850 EVO 500GB. The OWC SSD is being returned. Before the Accelsior S I was using the OWC SSD as my main drive. I experienced intermittent freezing and the need for hard restarts, programs quitting and a few other issues but really and truly it was intermittent. Then I got the idea of doing yet another OS X install on the Samsung EVO and I have not experienced any of the issues since. At first I did consider the possibility of a bad migration but some other symptoms the OWC displayed suggests otherwise. Using DriveDX it states that the OWC SSD now has a overall health rating of 64.3%. I have seen this number fluctuate but the mean or general reading is 64.3%. There are 17 errors and the most concerning and highest are the read/write errors. This possibly explains a few things. The drive is 8 days old and has not been abused. Putting it in any of the 4 bays or where the optical drive was, basically any sata connection, causes the computer to go into a black screen on reboot with a small loading bar in the left corner of my screen. After about a minute it finally goes to the desktop where all programs are open and the desktop is loaded. Prior to this it would load normally but then the desktop wouldn't be built. I could open programs etc but it would be a minute before the desktop would show drives, folders etc. Erasing the disk now takes longer than I have ever seen any disk take to format using Disk Utility. Those Read/Write errors? After doing some more research I decided to return the drive for a refund and got my RMA yesterday. Performance - Attached I have some BlackMagic screenshots of the read and write tests before the Accelsior with the Samsung EVO in Bay 1 and then after with it on the Accelsior. Another 50% gain but since it was needling out what were the true peaks? I used Disk Sensei and then got 540 Read and 525 Write. I'll take it! In earlier tests without the card I was only getting half the read and writes as shown in the screenshots and I knew something wasn't right. I also did some work tests involving PS and moving large 2gb, 4gb, 6gb and So if you're looking for a performance boost I would highly recommend this card. My SSD scratch disks for programs like AE, PS etc and additional 16GB of RAM aren't even here yet and this card alone has already made a world of difference. My extremely large PS files just open now after a second. Literally. No beachballs, loading bars, nothing. It just appears. MAJOR Note - While I've only seen this affect one thing it's worth noting. The card and Samsung SSD in PCIe lane 1 is seen as an external drive. I haven't and don't want to attempt ejecting it to "see what happens". Some things like trying to eject the main drive your OS is on should probably be left to the imagination. the Same in lane 2 and for performance reasons I didn't bother testing lane 3 and 4 which are only x4. If they were x8 that might have been worth a test or two. The thing I've seen it affect is sometimes when I click into my main drive my user profile folder, application folder etc takes maybe a second to load. Very weird as I don't see this latency or pause in anything else I've done with this configuration so far. I apologize for the long winded part about the OWC drive and review in general but it's really important to cover those aspects for several reasons. If anything changes with the card, performance or otherwise I'll make some updates.

If you want to get a little more life out of your old motherboard and it supports PCIe drive booting this card adapter is your ticket. Looking for a way to take advantage of connecting my new SSD to the 6-year-old motherboard of mine bypassing the old and slow SATA chipset plugging the SSD right into my Gen-2 PCIe slot. Found the card economically priced a good gamble if my motherboard with it's Gen-2 PCIe would see it and recognize my SSD as a bootable drive. I think it took longer to configured the bios then installing the SSD onto the debit card and installing the card. If you are lookings to get breakneck speeds out of your SATA SSD, you'll see slight improvement, you're still limited by the SATA interface on the SSD.

First to say I've purchased several times form OWC and never been disappointed. My last 3 orders are through their store-front and Amazon and all 3 orders got shipped within 4-5 hours of my order! Card went in fine and works immediately, Checking System Device information in the hardware section for this card confirmed all is well! I have a Mac Pro 5.1 2010+ desktop. I've used both a combo of SATA internal HDs, SSHDs and 1-2 SSDs as well. My current Sandisk 1 TB SSd has been in one of the drive drawers using an adapted and interfaced thoought the respective SATA connected for that drawer. I wanted this PCI3 2.5 adapter card primarily for adding another drive to drives that already occupty all 4 STAT drive drawers plus one in the optical bay on top. I always spec out drives (Blackmagic Speed Test App) when doing any upgrades, or moving things around or after a new erasing and/or partitioning or for general trouble-shooting. Well.big surprise in a big speed gain using this card over one of the SATA II drawers. Granted this card is rated SATA III so there may be a beny there in regards to the results. My speeds using this adapter card were 310 mbps write and 550 mbps read! My 1TB Sandisk SSD tested was tested both in HTF+ and then APFS partitions and either one did not impact speeds at all (were the same). So in summary, if I ever add or swap in a new SSD in my machine, I WILL be adding another one of these cards for sure!

UPDATE 14/05/2019 So i can confirm that these do in fact work in a PC. I recently put one of these into a PC with a Gigabyte Z390 UD motherboard, wanting to give it another chance despite when trying it in my dads PC and it didnt work. And with the Z390 UD it works flawlessly. So if you have this type of motherboard? I can say it at least works there both as a data storage device, and a boot device! ORIGINAL REVIEW BELOW: =================== I ordered 2 of these. One for me and my Mac Pro (from 2009) and one for my dad and his PC. On my Mac Pro this product works excellently, coupled with a Samsung EVO drive! Boots up in less than 15seconds (MacOS 10.13 + quite a few auto-running applications). However on PC? This thing does not work well. PC detected the card and that there was a drive plugged in however it was never accessible and there were alot of crashes. If attempting to use it as a main boot drive? Everything crashed, stating the boot volume was inaccessible. If trying to use just as a storage device? Crashes, freezing and in some cases totally inaccessible. The drive that was plugged into this was also fine and so not at fault. The requirements for use in a PC are very vague as well. Simply saying 'A PC with a PCIe x2 slot' does not help anyone. Their website wasnt much better either, touting the support for multiple Macs, but again when it came to PC it was a vague 1-2 lines. Nothing of use. In conclusion; Want to use this with a Mac Pro? Go for it! It should work perfectly fine, at least in 2009 Mac Pros so long as you put it in one of the 4x slots. Putting it in a 16x one seems a little wasteful especially when the graphics card is supposed to go there! Not sure which are the 16x and which are the 4x? If you look closely at the Logic Board of a Mac Pro (at least the 2009 ones) the PCIe slots are clearly marked 16x or 4x at the left-side end of the PCIe socket. Want to use this with a PC? Take caution! I dont deny that maybe my dads PC itself was a factor. The BIOS/Firmware on the motherboard does state that it supports PCIe booting, but it just didnt work, even as a storage device. So we had to return my dads one. I'll be keeping mine in my Mac though!

Con OWC non ci si sbaglia mai (a patto di sapere cosa si vuole :P )!!! Prodotto eccellente, che costa un po' ma che offre performance degne di tale nome. - Una cosa importante per chi vuole prendere questa scheda per il suo Mac Pro, il plus valore sta nel fatto che fa girare anche Windows in boot, cosa che altri adattatori di questo tipo non fanno!!! Se volete ravvivare (DI BRUTTO) le potenzialità del vostro vecchio Mac, quà andate sul sicuro!!! (L' ssd con attacco sata standard va comprato a parte, questa è solo la scheda che adatta il disco a stato solido) p.s. da le prestazioni migliori su Mac Pro 3,1 - 4,1 e 5,1, mentre per i Mac Pro 1,1 e 2,1 non viene sfruttata a pieno quindi non vale la spesa.

Ich habe die OWC Accelsior S als Erweiterung meines Apple Xserve 3,1 gekauft, um eine Transcend 256GB SSD als schnelles Startvolume verwenden zu können und noch dazu keinen der drei Festplatten Einschübe dafür ‘opfern’ zu müssen. Die OWC Accelsior S kommt sehr gut verpackt und ist meiner Meinung nach hervorragend verarbeitet. Der optische und haptische Eindruck ist sehr gut. Die Installation der SSD in der Accelsior Karte ist super einfach: SSD einstecken und die vier Schrauben von unten (nicht zu) fest schrauben. Danach wird die Accelsior Karte in einen freien PCIe Slot gesteckt. Der Xserve hat die SSD in der Accelsior Karte sofort nach dem Start von der System DVD Version 10.6.8 als bootbares Volume erkannt und ich konnte problemlos macOS darauf installieren. Seit dem läuft die Karte schnell und zuverlässig.

MacPro2010で使用するため購入した。 従前はｘ１接続であるが安価なSEDNA - PCI Express (PCIe) SATA III (6G) SSD Adapterを使っていたので、PCI-Ex1がボトルネックなり最高390MB/s程度が限界であったが、本製品を使用することにより、同じSSDが550MB/Sに向上したのでありがたい製品である。載せ替えの際も、従前のアダプターがSSDを外して当製品に取り付けるだけで、そのまま認識できたので、非常に簡単であった。

I just fit the SSD, put it in a PCI-E port, starting the Mac and got full read and write. The SSD is a Samsung 870 EVO, also works with Kingston and Intenso SSD. Great quality, and a cheap way to a get a faster Mac Pro