Nov 06, 2013 GA EX58-UD5 + GTX580 upgrade need help. Discussion in 'Mavericks Desktop Support' started by michust, Oct 26, 2013.
In an attempt to speed up my aging Chameleon CustoMac Pro 2010 I picked up a Crucial M500 SSD, only to learn that my GA-X58A-UD3R's onboard Marvell 9128 Sata III controller doesn't perform that well on OS X (Was getting about 140MB/s from the SSD). Looking for a better-supported alternative I bought an Apricorn Velocity Solo X2 PCIe SATA III card with the faster 'second version' Marvell 9128 controller. The SSD now flies around 480MB/s when connected through the card... But I can't boot off of it because as far as I can tell Chameleon can't see the SSD behind the Apricorn card, nor can the BIOS.
I've scoured the BIOS settings and see no option that might get the board to register the SSD. There is a 'Bootable add-on card' option in the boot menu but that doesn't help me because I need to boot through Chameleon on my USB stick and Chameleon doesn't have a similar option. Haven't tried installing Windows on the SSD yet to see if this option would work otherwise.
Does anyone know how to do this? Isn't the BIOS supposed to be able to see the SSD behind the SATA controller? Is there custom firmware required to make this work (I'm running version FH, the latest) or is there some trick in Chameleon I don't know about? Or did I just waste $80 on a card that would have been better spent on a new mobo and cpu?