Fusion Dual 2.5-inch SSD RAID Card

Since upgrading my wife's 2010 Mac Pro to the 2020 version after a decade of solid use, the wallet has been stretched thin. Good thing we were able to get this card so that we could strip an external drive of its SSD and put it into the tower as an internal unit. At one point we'll upgrade that drive as well, and the card allows us to either run both simultaneously, or get two new ones of the same size for a RAID config. If installing into a Mac Pro 2020, just be sure to read the directions on what lever to push to open up the PCI slots – if you don't, you could damage either the little plastic guard or the PCI card itself.

This is an extremely adaptable, full-length PCIe dual SSD RAID riser. While having many wonderful features, it is ultimately not usable out-of-box because it overheats under load. Unless you are comfortable installing heat sinks onto the main controller, I wouldn't use this device strenuously.Pros: MacPro5,1 support (actually works very well, about 680MB/sec, sustained with bursts to 730 in RAID0). Very quickly accesses data in either configuration, but also can become a mirrored set for redundancy (at cost of capacity and performance). Fits very snugly (i.e. well) into the Mac Pro chassis — another reviewer mentioned "cutting out a few mm of plastic," and obviously was not aware of the mechanism the MacPro uses to secure full-length cards (i.e. if you find yourself hacking into your Mac, you're doing something wrong). Very reasonably priced.Cons: As clearly stated in the description (and in no way affecting my rating), this device is NOT bootable. Further, it makes the computer take an additional minute to turn off, and also makes sleep a bit more sluggish (I never sleep the machine, but noticed in testing).MAJOR CON: You MUST add a heat sink to the on-board controller, or the PCIe card WILL overheat, causing a long system hang until ultimately the data controller disappears (and the drive) and all your data. It's really sad to see such wonderful technology abused at such high temperatures, when an additional $1 per board would make it last 10x as long (with more thermal dissipation).MAJOR PRO: Once you add a 6mm x 6mm heat sink to the main on-board controller, this thing will throw data around all day (like it's its job — oh wait, it is! should have been installed from factory).I am using dual Critical 4TB MX500 in striped RAID 0 [protection: none].

My intent of this review is to allow potential buyers of this product to make an informed decision in the purchase of this product and not make the same mistake I made when purchasing this product which turned into a product nightmare.I purchased this product with the intent of of using it to migrate my SSD's from my MacPro 5.1 computer to this new machine and have an alternate option of running the machine from it. Nothing in the marketing, or description of the product, indicated that there would be any issue with this intention. After installing the product the two drives were available for reading & writing so I updated MacOS on one of the drives to Catalina and found it would boot. However when attempting to install Catalina onto the 2nd drive my compute essentially went 'out to lunch' and refused to allow installation or booting. So I first contacted Sonnet for support, which currently is only via email, and the card was diagnosed as defective, and needed to be returned. They provided me with a complex RMA procedure instead of suggesting I return it to Amazon. Eventually extended response delay in attempts to get a user guaranteed cross shipment so that I would not be without access to my drives for weeks during transitioning, So thanks to the outstanding customer service from Amazon I was able to finally arrange that with them an received the card within several days & then returned the 'defective' one. However the new card exhibited the same symptoms as the previous one and attempts to reach Sonnet support was met with ignored emails and hostility. So I escalated it to Apple Support and together we decided that it was either the card or the motherboard. In fact Apple was even suggesting replacing the motherboard or swapping out the entire machine in an attempt to fix the issue as it was quite difficult to isolate and up to then Sonnet Support was of little or no help. Together with Apple Support we came up with a series of test scripts to run and report back to Apple Engineering which took me around 6 hours to complete and document. Afterwards I copied Sonnet on the results summary. Sonnets response was to send me an attachment of the tech specs for the card with no apology, indicating the card does not support booting. Please understand that initially Sonnet support indicated the card was defective when I first reported the issue to them. In total I must have spent close to 50 hours troubleshooting this issue between emails, doing testing, waiting to on the phone for Apple Support, taking my machine apart to install and configure the card in various ways, shipping back the 'defective' card and discussing the issue with them. In essence Sonnet put me through living hell while the answer was buried in the middle of the tech specs all the time. In my opinion FULL compatibility does include being able to boot from the SSD drive as I was able to in my MacPro 5.1 abet without using their card but as a slide in drive. As such I personally regard this as false advertising. My plan now is to research a replacement for this card on Amazon and send the Sonnet Fusion card back through Amazon back to where it came from and hopefully never be in a position to have to consider the purchase of another Sonnet product. Thank goodness for Amazon and Apple as without their outstanding support this would have been a much worse and expensive nightmare.All that being said the card does do a credible job of being able to read and write to 2.5" SSD's in a MacPro 7.1 machine so long as you do not require boot capability and are willing to put up with Sonnets abysmal support for their products, at least based on my experience with it.Personally I find it absolutely outrageous that their own support staff was initially unaware that this card did not support booting, labeling it as defective, and then after realizing it, did not have the decency or courtesy to apologize for their mistake and what they put me through.UPDATE: Replaced the Sonnet Fusion Card with tested Sedna PCI Express (PCIe) Dual 2.5 Inch SATA III (6G) SSD Adapter (Extended Single Side SSD Version) that have confirmed is completely compatible with the MacPro 2019 Desktop including boot compatibility. If you are thinking of purchasing the Sonnet card, I invite you to read my review of the Sedna card.

Works perfectly fine, 2019 Mac Pro and 2 Crucial MX500 2TB SSDs, I set it to raid 0 on the Sonnet unit and it's giving me very fast 800mb/s+ speeds, and no disconnects or other issues.They do recommend Big Sur 11.3+, so far working great and easy to install in the 2019 Mac Pro.

Perfect. Works just as expected.

I had to remove and cut a piece of plastic casing of the fan, because the card is 2mm too long to fit......

I've got 2x SAMSUNG 870 EVO 1TB running in a RAID-0 setup and the speed is almost on par with with my NVMe. The problem is that it will occasionally just drop the drives like they aren't even there. Tech support was nice and replaced the card which solved the problem for a while, but after a couple months it started losing the drives again. I tested the SSD's individually for fault and they were fine. The RAID card is just unreliable.

Works as expected!