Mac Pro 4.1 and 5.1 Bootable NVMe SSD Upgrade (Mojave Fresh Install)

Nice information. I have the original E5520 CPUs in my Macpro 4,1. Do I need to upgrade the CPU to X5xxx CPUs before I can upgrade to a NUME SSD?

Good morning I have updated to Mojave’s and I am using the SSD as my boot drive but still appearing as an external, any advise will be greatly appreciated

Hey @Create Success TV, thanks for these informative videos! Have you considered placing the NVMe drive into a 16 lane slot to take more advantage of the NVMe performance capability? The 4 lane slots max out at just under 2 GB/s and 16 lane slots max out at just under 8 GB/s, so the 16 lane slot should give you better write / read times without having to spend $500 on a RAID adapter with bifurcation. It won’t be anywhere near as fast as with RAID 0, but the price to performance ratio will be very good.

Inspired by your video's, I upgraded my 2009 dual-CPU MacPro with a Radeon 580, an NVMe 1TB SSD and 2 new CPU's (X5675, delidded them myself). What a change, amazing! Thanks for the clear step by step tutorials, great work!
However, while looking into the possibility of adding a 2nd SSD, I noticed you put yours in the top slot = slowest slot. Does that mean that there's no advantage in using the 16x slot 3 (which I now use for my SSD)? I also get the 1500 mb speed in slot 3 that you get in slot 1... That would be good news -- I was afraid the only way would be a 2xNVMe to PCIe card of around $300-400, which I really would find overkill.

Great video! Just a couple of things to mention with my own experiences.
I have an rx580 and Boot rom version 144.0.0.0.0....
However, when I was doing a clean install of Mojave on my system drive, I had to do it via recovery mode while my bootable usb (mojave) was connected. When I went into disk utility, I chose the option of APFS format and returned to the main recovery menu to reinstall MacOS. This is where I encountered the problem. I was not able to complete the install and my screen went completely blank. After trial and error, I changed the format to APFS to Extended journaled. This worked!
My question is, when trying to format the NVME in disk utility, should it not be formatted to extended journaled? Doesn't Mojave automatically format it to APFS itself?
(Apologies for the essay lol)

Have u ever tried the 2tb version? I have a 5,1 MP 12 core. I want to upgrade to SSD and I am happy I found this video but before I make the investment I want to know if I can use it with a 2tb version of the 970 evo pro and one of the high raid adapters perhaps? I just ordered the evo plus for my laptop but I have been researching how to upgrade my MP n this is great! I work with audio so I def want to cut back on having to buy an entirely new computer when I feel this is strong enough just needs a push. I already have a usb 3.0 pcie card and had a secondary drive but I should still have a slot open. What is your advice?

Hi there, what a great option, only I can't find mojave installer any more. All links are dead including the official one in the app store. Any idea where I can get it? Thanks

Hi like your tutorial do you know if the bootable NVMe SSD upgrade is compatible with Boot Camp?

I have Boor Rom Version 138,0,0,0,0 even though I am on Mojave 10.14.6 what do I do?

Thanks for all the help, I managed to upgrade my "Mac Pro 2009" with High Sierra and to 5,1 firmware, however when I'm trying to use the boot camp to be able to download Windows System it does not let me open "Boot Camp Assistant cannot be used. This MAc does not support Camp." Sir can you point me to a solution, please. Thanks

hi ,sir i can't download mojave on app store because my mac pro is old. Have you a link for i can download please .The good version for work with good boot room for nvme samsung 970 please. Big thanks for your help

hello Create Success TV, can you tell me if with 970 evo i can use this one to boot disk with my all app ? thanks for your reply

Went and made the jump to using a NVMe 970 EVO Plus and everything went fine but maybe a regular EVO is good enough as I'm not sure if this computer can utilize all the speed of the Plus. I did have to watch very carefully while you typed in the terminal lines as I kept adding spaces. The rebuild was fun and challenging mainly to understand the Mac features to get everything to work. I've built a few PC computers but the last Mac I worked on was a G4 and that was some time ago. Thanks for your insightful videos and advice. Learned so much that it's a shame to stop, almost want to fix our work computer up ... if they would pay for the parts! LOL My final computer: single 3.06 GHz 6 core Zeon , 64 GB RAM, Samsun 970 EVO Plus M.2 home SSD, Radeon RX 580 8 GB video card, one SSD for storing picture catalog information from Luminar and Lightroom, two 2 TB reg HD, another 2 TB drive as my Time Machine HD. I would be interested to know if this computer can accept dual cpu's? It's a MacPro 5,1 Serial # on processor tray is J500-----BYOA (dropped the middle numbers/letters). Also I'm hearing that I might have to set in Terminal, that upon boot, the computer looks for my M.2 first (is it looking everywhere else, timing out and then looking for a special drive?)

Hardtess driva lol!

hi! i buy all the components same like you. i want to know if you can help me to configured after effects and premiere to use RX580 metal GPU support on mac, i use after effects and i dont know where can i configured de video card to increase the speed.

Great series! What's the song playing in the background towards the beginning?

If you go into security and privacy, accessibility, can you add or remove apps? I’m getting permission issues

Hi. I just got on the nvme bandwagon. Started with my skylake board has the built in slot and the speed was massive. the black magic speed test the needles went up almost as high as they go with a samsung pro 970. So I buy another for the same price but its a tb and not 500gb WD blue. I slap it in the mac pro 4,1 with some ezdiy-fab adapter and its results were about the same as you had in the black magic test. Anyway did you mention trying to sleep it? This one crashes if sleeping it. Edit: I see a guy below had the same issue and he was also using nvidia. That may be the issue but I will have to try it with my rx580 first and get back here later to report. Another Edit: I saw a list of tested nvme modules and the issue was the western digital blue has problems with mac pros. I swapped the two and its perfect now.

Very informative, bought my first Mac Pro last week, thanks for the tutorial!!

Guys ! PLS. Tell me. Does NVMe SSD memory work on Mac Pro 4.1 (5.1) with El Capitan operating system?

Hi do you know if I can boot from nvme with ubuntu instead of mojave (on 2009 mac pro?)

Hey guys are your Mac Pros sleeping properly? I can't put my Mac Pro into sleep mode, it only turns of the screen. I think it's caused by that Mac Pro shows NVME as external drive and not as internal HDD. When I did this upgrade on Macbook Pro I was able to make it sleep only with certain NVME SSDs/adapters, could be this the same? Any ideas?

Excellent video i am having an issue though.
When i mount my 970 EVO on the PCIe slot it it shown as an external disk on the system.
I am formating it on disk utilities and nothing happens
Still shown as an external disk.
Any ideas how to fix this ??

Could I clone my hard drive with superduper or something and then remove it to boot from the Nvme? I do not wish to make a fresh install. At the moment i have SATA-SSD. Thanks

How is the boot time with NVME compared to normal SSD?

Does restart options work in this mode?

what moment in the video you show how to install and boot on the nvme ? .. ?

Great! Do you know if a new Samsung 980 PRO 1 TB PCIe 4.0 fits in the Mac 5.1? or is it too fast?

Hi Review Tech TV.
thanks for some great helpful

I stilled Mojave on my 5.1 and the OS was unstable and laggy went back to my 870EVO

Any idea why I would get only 675mBytes/sec? Using OWC and EVO 970 Mac 5,1

great job...keep up the good work

Are you sure it's not possible without Mojave with just high Sierra and not metallic GPU ? I think I read you can even as a boot mode and without patch.

I have been at this for days, I have been trying to install High Sierra onto a Samsung 980 PRO SSD 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe, with no luck, are you saying this can't be done? That I would need to bump up to Mojave?

tell me which adapter to buy to make RIDE 0 out of four 970EVO for Mac Pro 2009, flashed to 5.1. Mac os Mojave. I will always load OS from another Disk

Hello. I watched another video about this where the guy said that if you put this card in an x16 slot, the SSD will run twice as fast at 6 gigabits per second. I’m planning on doing this for my Mac pro, but I’m also gonna be running 4 SSD’s in a raid configuration using the 4 har drive sleds. If I install the card first, do I then boot up the machine with the Mojave usb inserted, hold down option and select the Mojave usb install and just choose the pcie ssd? That is, after I’ve booted to recovery mode to format the pcie ssd? Thanks!

I’ve been reading that booting from standard sata ssd would be faster than from an nvme drive because of the pci scanning delays. Is that true? But I guess it still makes running the OS from the nvme faster in day today operation. An alternative could be to boot from sata and put all of the apps and document folders on the nvme. What’s your take on this?

why would you do it before you made the video? if youre making a video about doing it.

Hello, I made this upgrade but my nvme ssd is recognize by macOS as an external drive. What should I do? Thanks

In some articles I found that mac pro 2009 and 2010 only support PCIe-AHCI SSD, This is true? I'm running on High Sierra..with the plan to upgrade Catalina

Thumbs up for the middle finger :D

Hello,
Thanks for the video ! I also happen to be the (proud) owner of a Mac Pro Server from 2010. I installed Mojave thanks to a replacement video card that supports metal. I also upgraded the disk to put an NVMe SSD (Samsung 980 Pro) just like you did but still I do not quite get the bandwidth you have. I get a 2.5 GT/s and a 700 Mo/s average on read / write on that disk. These numbers are not great and represents a solid half of what you get but seems consistent with the motherboard. Since I used slot 3 on the mac pro and the technician manual for the mac pro associate this bandwidth on the schematics. For instance, with the videocard on slot 1, I get the expected 16 GT/s as expected from the technician manual.
Which leads me to my question : how is it possible to get a better performance (just like you did) for the bandwidth - a performance which is even better than the one Apple indicates in its manual ? I have watched your videos a few times (this one in particular but also the others in the playlist) and I do not see any steps I could have missed (for instance I upgraded the firmware - installed Mojave - booted from SSD etc.). Could it be related to the drive itself ? The adaptation card is supposedly supported by Mojave.
Thanks again for your videos and the time and efforts you put in them : they are very helpful and I only regret that I was unfortunate to lose a lot of time before knowing their existence.
Have a nice evening

I have a 2009 Mac Pro with Mojave. It presents the following problem. While I want to download, for example, an update of some program, for example Firefox, some file or something else, the process stops. What could be wrong? my connection is optical and the relevant check has been done by OTE and everything was fine since the pages on the internet open very quickly. Do I need to change anything in the hardware? Do you suggest I get a new network card? I've tried everything but I don't know what else I need to do. Thanks

Hello, I have a Samsung 990 pro and mac 4.1 but the disk utility dont show the disk, Do I need a particular drivers for the disk?

Great video , thanks for your time in making this !