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MP 14,8 2023 Mac Pro - adding internal PCIe storage?..ADDED!
- Thread starter wgr73
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Hey is this drive bootable as a single large drive?
Meaning, I know it comes up to 64GB in size, but it uses up to 8 8GB sticks. And you can raid them together to get that speed and capacity. But my understanding is that if you pool it to be say a 64GB single drive, it is not bootable. So if you want the large 64GB (or multi stick raid that gets such speed), it MUST be a secondary drive as it cannot be primary and boot.
One alternative is to use one of the 8sticks in the card as a boot drive, then RAID the other 7, but then the main boot drive, obviously, will see far slower speeds since there is no RAID on it.
If the above is true, for those that one just one large drive that is also bootable, we basically are limited to a U.2/U.3 drive/card combo and some of the new drives there are single pool drives now 32TB for around $4k. Way slower of course, only around 7000MB, but if you need the single large bootable drive, seems that is the way to go there.
That's a good question, I wasn't going to configure that way so i'm not sure.
Tbh as ugly as the studio is , the pro is still a very beautiful piece of kit , inside and out
For that alone I’d justify buying it
For that alone I’d justify buying it
Any update on this? How did you configure your drive(s) and what are you booting off of? Curious how it went!
I recently installed the Sonnet M.2 8x4 Silent Gen4 PCIe card into my Mac Pro M2. The card is inserted into the x16 PCI slot and contains eight 4TB SABRENT Rocket 4 Plus-G M.2 drives, along with the provided auxiliary power cable. I configured these eight drives into a RAID 0 setup with a 32K block size, resulting in a combined total capacity of 32TB. Apart from the provided Thunderbolt accessories PCIe card, no other components are installed. Curiously, the allocation pool shows A at 100% and B at 88%.
However, I'm facing an issue. Whenever I reboot or shut down and then restart, the Sonnet card's RAID array vanishes as if it's not installed at all. I've had to reboot multiple times before the PCIe card and array are recognized again.
I've tried using both Apple RAID and OWC's SoftRAID, but the issue persists. If I put the computer into a complete sleep state, upon waking it, the Mac Pro indicates that the drive array was improperly ejected. I also own the previous Sonnet M.2 4X4 Silent Gen3 PCIe card, and when I reinstall this older card in the Mac Pro 2023, I encounter no issues. It works flawlessly, just as it did in my previous Mac Pro 2019.
I am considering returning the card. I've already contacted Sonnet's tech support, but their assistance was less than helpful. They posed basic troubleshooting questions and suggested the standard RMA process.
And that is just using 1 of the 16X slots in the new Mac pro studio? WOW not very good is it, the other slots are already redundant. Its a joke calling it a Pro machine, when clearly its not.