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

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!

Works brilliantly on a MacPro 3.1, running either Mountain Lion or El Capitan. I've paired it with a SanDisk Extreme Pro 480Gb, and am getting real-world 480Mb/Sec WRITE and 530Mb/Sec READ, which is 3.3 times quicker than a 1Tb Velociraptor 10,000rpm HD Drive. Using it with Premiere Pro CC 2015, it means the cache renders are just spectacularly quicker. Best thing of all, for MacPro users anyway -- NO DRIVERS REQD. You can plug it into one of the internal PCIe 4x slots (don't know if it works even faster on the other PCIe 16x not holding the GPU), and with two PCIe 4x slots free (after adding USB 3 card to the third one), it basically means if you buy TWO of these Accelsior S adaptors (plus the SSD to go with each), you can have 6 internal hard drives on a MacPro, and we can all stay up-to-date with the latest tech on an 8 year old machine.

This is the one thing (along with a good SSD drive) an older MacPro (late 2008 3,1) will benefit from most in bringing back some of its original mojo and speed. My boot ups went from 4-6mins before the Mac was ready for use to 60seconds from power button press to completely ready for use. All applications launch in seconds and working with my old MacPro is a real joy again. Amazing and well worth the purchase. True plug and play too. Plug it into one of the x16 pci slots loaded with a good SSD for the best performance.

Being the optimist I am I was expecting problemsin using this as a boot drive, after receiving the card and mounting a Samsung 500GB 2.5-Inch 850 EVO Solid State Drive I mounted it into the spare 16X PCI-e slot on my Mac Pro 3.1, the drive was instantly recognised and I used Carbon Copy Clone to migrate the 239GB's on the boot drive this completed in just under an hour. Booting from the SSD is considerably faster than before by around thirty seconds. The only problem I encountered (not the card) was some software such as Arturia's (Limited to the number of times you can register their products) was not recognised as being registered on the new drive though the registered version on the original drive can be accessed and used no problem. I would recommend this card, it may not be all singing and dancing compared to the Sonnet Tempo Pro Plus at almost 5 X the cost, but it works and works well especially for the price conscious consumer.

This is a relatively recent discovery for me. I have had SSD drives running in my mid 2010 Mac Pro for a couple of years (5 SSD drives in fact). I recently happened upon a guy on youtube pointing out that the SATA in my Mac is in fact SATA2 and therefor rather throttling the potential performance of my SSD drives. So that led me to these wonderful SATA3 cards. I ordered 2 of these. One for my boot drive and one for a media drive. These took up the remaining 2 slots in my Mac - the other 2 are used by the graphics card and a USB3 card. They are supplied in stout boxes well packaged and with excellent instructions. Installation is very straight forward. Plug the SSD Drive on to the card and fix with the 4 provided screws. Insert into an available slot and power up - that's it. I was initially rather perturbed, on booting with these cards installed, that it took a long time from the chime to the Apple logo appearing (around 40 to 50 seconds!). What solved this in the end was re-pointing to the start drive in the preferences, even though it was already selected. I would say that boot time is pretty much unaffected by these cards for me. But then I do have a large number of peripherals hanging off my Mac - 23 USB devices in total. But I have noticed the general running of things is now much slicker. The tests with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test bear this out. As others have pointed out, the Mac sees drives on these cards as external and therefor colours them orange on the desktop. There was something not quite right for me about seeing my boot drive displayed like this so I changed the icon to something more standard by copying and pasting within 'get info'! Those looking for a cheaper option to these OWC cards should be aware that the cheaper cards may not actually run SATA3 drives in SATA3 mode because they don't have the proper SATA3 drive circuitry that these OWC cards have. Seems you get what you pay for yet again! I'm really pleased with my purchase of these OWC cards. They have given my rather maxed out Mac Pro a bit more Max!

It works perfectly !

I don't normally leave reviews but as this product only really seemed to have reviews stating it was good for Macs, I thought I would help anyone who was in the same boat as me and wanted to know if this works well for Windows PC's too. In my scenario, I have a Supermicro server which has 8x hot swap bays that were all filled with large storage disks in hardware RAID and I wanted a neat solution to add a SSD OS drive but due to the nature of the chassis being geared for hot swap caddies (and all of these were used) it would have involved a number of extenders and splitters plus a disk dangling loose in the chassis which I was not a big fan of. That was until I came across this product which doesn't need any cabling (ie. no SATA data cable going to a header on your motherboard and no SATA power cable going back to your PSU) - everything it needs is handled via the PCI-E lane yet your motherboard still picks the drive up as a normal SATA disk and thus no drivers, OS reinstalls or additional configuration is needed. The other benefit of course is that, if like me, your onboard SATA is only 3G/s, this card will boost you speeds as per the screen shots I added. All in all, a slightly expensive way of adding another disk to a chassis that's already full but if your a neat freak and or if you want to get more speed from your SSD on a legacy motherboard, this is a very good solution!

Wow what a difference - why on earth didint I do this earlier - so quick to load apps and startup screen - seconds rather than minutes of previous. Makes my (fantastic still) early 2008 Mac Pro feel right up to date with the solidity the Mac pro gives you. I bought a 1TB Samsung SSD drive to use with this and its been great from day one - used CCC carbon Copy Cloner to dupe my old hard drive and everything great no issues. If you have a Mac pro with an old hard drive trust me make this upgrade.

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。

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.

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