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MP 7,1 2019 Mac Pro - Installing my own NVMe as boot

johnnymcc

johnnymcc

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 30, 2019
131
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In my Mac Pro 7,1, I am going to install a WD NVMe that supports 7,000 MB/s as boot drive via an NVMe PCIe card. I plan to clone my current Monterey boot drive onto it. I know there is something about keeping the existing Apple NVMe's installed due to the T2 chip, but wondered about other people's experience with this. Can I completely remove the Apple NVMe's?
 
Gr1f said:
Why would you remove the Apple SSD? Storage is storage.....
Click to expand...
well, I actually will just keep them installed, so with that in mind... I'm hoping to simply use it for that purpose ...
 
tsialex said:
Nope, MacPro BootROM is stored there. Anything T2 related is stored on the NAND modules.
Click to expand...
BUT, I can keep them in there and reformat them for storage, right? and use a different NVMe as boot?
 
johnnymcc said:
BUT, I can keep them in there and reformat them for storage, right? and use a different NVMe as boot?
Click to expand...
You need at least a small macOS install there, firmware updates are done from it and you also need it for Startup Security Utility and etc.
 
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johnnymcc said:
In my Mac Pro 7,1, I am going to install a WD NVMe that supports 7,000 MB/s as boot drive via an NVMe PCIe card. I plan to clone my current Monterey boot drive onto it. I know there is something about keeping the existing Apple NVMe's installed due to the T2 chip, but wondered about other people's experience with this. Can I completely remove the Apple NVMe's?
Click to expand...

I responded to a similar post. This is from memory over a year ago. I did this when I first got the 7,1 with the intention of using the 4TB Apple SSD as my media drive and a 1TB Samsung NVMe as the boot drive.

It annoyed me that you can't reformat the Apple SSD and have to leave the original MacOS files in there. Otherwise the T2 security chip will not function properly and repeatedly ask for your security password or something like that even if you did enter the correct password. It was an endless cycle. So I had to reset the computer with Apple Configurator.

I find it wasted space to have two MacOS files so I gave up on the idea and just accepted that Apple SSD will be my boot drive. To each their own.
 
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