Sonnet M.2 4x4 Silent PCIe Card (Four M.2 NVMe SSD Slot)

I purchased this to increase the high speed storage capability in a 2019 Mac Pro (especially considering how NVME prices have continued coming down). This card is plug-n-play straightforward with adding NVME's (Sonnet has a compatibility document on their site) including the thing with the thermal pads (mine was missing the pad for double sided NVME's but I'm using only single sided ones so it wasn't an issue). The NVME's do show up as external drives so if you want to setup one of them as a boot drive (which has to be non-RAID), you do need to boot into recovery mode and go into the startup security utility to allow booting from external or removable devices. I have mine booting up from this (I left the factory setup on the T2 flash drive for emergency purposes).

Very nice well made card. Also liked the thermal pads as they cover both sides of your NVME SSD. Once it was all slapped together my Mac had no issues detecting the card/drives and setting up RAID was a breeze. I used 4 Samsung EVO+ 2TB drives stripped in a single RAID 0 partition. R/W are well over 6GB a sec and might get faster if and when I upgrade my CPU. Very happy!!!

I'm just downright giddy...I installed this on a 2009 Mac Pro 5,1 running the latest Big Sur and my 14 year old computer went from 475MB/s read and write speeds on an older SSD drive to 2,550 MB/s on the Write and 2,750 average on the Read speeds. That is insane for a 14 year old computer. And that's single drive speed, I can probably double that if I went with a RAID array. The PCIe 2.0 bus can't do much more than that so I'm just thrilled. Had issues with WD Black SN850x drives not showing up, but that's a WD issue on Macs in general. Check out the Sonnet supported drive list and you'll avoid any headaches, and their tech support is outstanding. I'm currently using Lexar NM790 drives and they work like a charm. Huge, awesome upgrade. Large video file transfers that took 4 hours between my old SATA III or Firewire 800 drives now take 4 minutes between the M.2 drives, just a mind blowing speed upgrade.

The Sonnet M.2 PCIe card works great in an Apple M2 Ultra Mac Pro tower. This is the second one that I have bought. I used 4 Samsung 4TB 990 Pro SSD's in raid 0 and got amazing speed with Black Magic speed test. See pics.

from what I can tell, this card is not compatible with the 2023 M2 Ultra Mac Pro. I would love to have found a 16x PCIE NVME card, but this is not the one. initially it was easy to setup. Ran immediately, cards recognized with zero problem and soft raid formatted the cards easily into a raid, but repeatedly the NVME cards would fail.... Hard, Completely non functional in two slots. Exchanged this adapter card (a couple of times so I doubt it was just a manufacturing defect, more like a design flaw), replaced the NVME cards also and installed them on the now new Sonnet adapter, ran for a few weeks with no problem, and very fast, but it failed again and again. Wash rinse repeat. I've destroyed no less than six Samsung 990's trying to make this work, but it has to be the adapter card. I've been using OWC's adapter cards in my 8 x slots and they had not given me a lick of grief, so I purchased two more and have been using my 990's without headache for a while. Too bad the OWC cards only run at 8x and do not take full advantage of the 16X slot. Honestly it's fast enough, but on a $10k machine you'd expect to get the max out of it, No? Again I loved how fast this card is, but if it's going to freak out and make 2 cards unreadable every month, it's dangerous at best. M2 Ultra Mac Pro user will want to look elsewhere IMO.

good

plug and play and works great in mac pro 2019 catalina with 4 ssd; mix and matched and less expensive than samsung; very good read write speed, faster than ape installed drives; perfect for extrastorage , run audio / 4k video or as a fast speed scratch disk for apps like photoshop, etc. No fan and is absolutely quiet.

Really solid card with heavy heat sink. Great performance but it died without warning. I replaced it with a new card and no data loss. I am surprised how short lived it was