MP All Models Bootable PCI SSD Cards/Drives for Mac Pro (NVMe M.2, U.2, EDSFF E3.S, etc.)

[Eyezestful]

For anyone following this thread and interested in U.2/U.3 SSDs for the Mac Pro, I am posting an update. As mentioned before I tried the Samsung PM9A3 15.36TB and this drive does not work properly. The write speeds are fine and as expected but the read speeds are slow, they happen in bursts and are not consistent. Contacted Samsung and they provide no help as for them this is "OEM" drive so no support.

After this, I purchased the Micron 7450 15.36TB. This drive is even worse than the Samsung because MacOS does not recognise it at all and experiences a Kernel Panic shortly after startup every time the drive is inside the Mac. I contacted Micron and they say the drive is no natively supported on MacOS.

Below are the details of how I tested these drives:

MacOS Ventura 13.5
Sonnet Dual Fusion U.2 PCIe Card
Mac Pro 2023 M2 Ultra 192gb RAM

I bought the Mac Pro 2023 because I needed a very large Raid with U.2/U.3 drives but so far I have not found any that work. It has been a very frustrating journey.

Anyone have tested any U.2/U.3 drives that work with MacOS? In this thread, I can see that Micron 9300 used to work (with Intel Macs) but this has now been discontinued. Any other large capacity drives that work with MacOS on Apple Silicon?

I hope this post helps others looking into U.2/U.3 drives for Mac.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

For anyone following this thread and interested in U.2/U.3 SSDs for the Mac Pro, I am posting an update. As mentioned before I tried the Samsung PM9A3 15.36TB and this drive does not work properly. The write speeds are fine and as expected but the read speeds are slow, they happen in bursts and are not consistent. Contacted Samsung and they provide no help as for them this is "OEM" drive so no support.

After this, I purchased the Micron 7450 15.36TB. This drive is even worse than the Samsung because MacOS does not recognise it at all and experiences a Kernel Panic shortly after startup every time the drive is inside the Mac. I contacted Micron and they say the drive is no natively supported on MacOS.

Below are the details of how I tested these drives:

MacOS Ventura 13.5
Sonnet Dual Fusion U.2 PCIe Card
Mac Pro 2023 M2 Ultra 192gb RAM

I bought the Mac Pro 2023 because I needed a very large Raid with U.2/U.3 drives but so far I have not found any that work. It has been a very frustrating journey.

Anyone have tested any U.2/U.3 drives that work with MacOS? In this thread, I can see that Micron 9300 used to work (with Intel Macs) but this has now been discontinued. Any other large capacity drives that work with MacOS on Apple Silicon?

I hope this post helps others looking into U.2/U.3 drives for Mac.

My micron 9300 pro has been working for 3 years + now on my 2019 Intel max pro with the high point 7120 card. I have seen 9300 pros are still for sale and go for around 1500bux.

Micron 9300 Pro 15.36TB NVMe U.2 Enterprise Solid State Drive

Performance-critical cloud and enterprise workloads demand consistently Fast throughput and immediate access to data. The Micron 9300 Series of NVMe SSDs delivers industry-leading sequential write performance with the lowest write latency on the market, to accelerate your datacenter to meet the g...

www.amazon.com

Hopefully will get the micron 9400 pro for around $3100 next week and fingers crossed it will work. I’ll let everyone know.

Micron 9400 Pro 30720GB NVME U.3

9400 PRO 30720GB NVME U.3 (15mm MTFDKCC30T7TGH-1BC1ZABYYR

www.amazon.com

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

BTW I have been detailing that pursuit of the micron 9400 pro 30tb drive and controller cards and it’s relevant in this thread too….

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/32359780/

Hmm it might makes sense to merge these three @mods, since rhyme converged into The same area.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Another 30TB u.3 micron drive, the 6500ION.

Micron 6500 ION 30.72TB Review A Big Balanced NVMe SSD

In our Micron 6500 ION review, we see how this 30.72TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD balances large capacity with performance to hit a new price level

www.servethehome.com

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

A lot of cool developments all the sudden in large capacity SSDs. So there is a new form factor, EDSFF (E3.S) that should 'take over' soon. Really fast connectors. But here are a couple of 30 and 60TB offerings. Interesting stuff.

Kioxia CD8P PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs Launched

The new Kioxia CD8P PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs are designed to provide up to 12GB/s fast storage with over 30TB of capacity per drive for new servers

www.servethehome.com

Solidigm has a 61.44TB SSD Coming this Quarter

Solidigm has a massive new NVMe SSD. Dubbed the Solidigm D5-P5336, the new drive spans U.2, E3.S, and E1.L form factors reaching 61.44TB

www.servethehome.com

Does anyone know of an EDSFF PCIe card that works in the Mac Pro?

 

[joevt]

Does anyone know of an EDSFF PCIe card that works in the Mac Pro?

EDSFF is just a form factor. Or a family of form factors. They use NVMe for the protocol. Since macOS supports NVMe, shouldn't any EDSFF PCIe card work?

Maybe you're asking about how to mount EDSFF drives in a Mac Pro? If the drive isn't mounted on the PCIe card, then it needs to be mounted in some other way.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

EDSFF is just a form factor. Or a family of form factors. They use NVMe for the protocol. Since macOS supports NVMe, shouldn't any EDSFF PCIe card work?

Maybe you're asking about how to mount EDSFF drives in a Mac Pro? If the drive isn't mounted on the PCIe card, then it needs to be mounted in some other way.

But dont the different EDSFF drives have different physical connectors. A bit like NVMe M.2 and U.2 drives use NVMe but have physically different connectors.

Doesnt that mean it needs a PCI adapter card with support for the right connector? Or is it more of having the correct cable and instead of using my 7120 card to connect to a U.2 drive, it would have a cable that connects to EDSFF?

 

[joevt]

But dont the different EDSFF drives have different physical connectors. A bit like NVMe M.2 and U.2 drives use NVMe but have physically different connectors.

So your question was actually "Do PCIe EDSFF cards exist?" instead of "What PCIe EDSFF card will work in a Mac Pro?".
Google found these:
https://www.serialcables.com/product/pcie-gen4-x4-slot-to-e-3-edsff-adapter/
https://www.serialcables.com/product/pcie-gen5-x8-slot-to-e3-edsff-vertical-adapter-e1-s/

Doesnt that mean it needs a PCI adapter card with support for the right connector? Or is it more of having the correct cable and instead of using my 7120 card to connect to a U.2 drive, it would have a cable that connects to EDSFF?

Yes, a cable adapter should work as long as the power requirements are met. So the question there is "Do PCIe/mPCIe/M.2/U.2/whatever to EDSFF cables exist?".
Google found these:
https://www.serialcables.com/product-category/edsff-genz-cables/
https://www.serialcables.com/product-category/gen4-other-adapters/
https://www.serialcables.com/product-category/gen5-edsff-cables/
https://www.serialcables.com/product-category/gen5-edsff-adapters/

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

So your question was actually "Do PCIe EDSFF cards exist?" instead of "What PCIe EDSFF card will work in a Mac Pro?".
Google found these:
https://www.serialcables.com/product/pcie-gen4-x4-slot-to-e-3-edsff-adapter/
https://www.serialcables.com/product/pcie-gen5-x8-slot-to-e3-edsff-vertical-adapter-e1-s/


Yes, a cable adapter should work as long as the power requirements are met. So the question there is "Do PCIe/mPCIe/M.2/U.2/whatever to EDSFF cables exist?".
Google found these:
https://www.serialcables.com/product-category/edsff-genz-cables/
https://www.serialcables.com/product-category/gen4-other-adapters/
https://www.serialcables.com/product-category/gen5-edsff-cables/
https://www.serialcables.com/product-category/gen5-edsff-adapters/

Thank you!

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Well good news bad news.

Good news is I got my 30TB Micron 9400 Pro today.

Bad news is it does not work.

Much like @Eyezestful mentioned above, the 9400 Pro does not even come up in the system profiler. Nor does it come up in disk utility. Further, and weirdly, when it's plugged in, booting into any drive is very slow during the boot process for some reason.

I'm super disappointed and will pack this up and send it back to Amazon.

The worst part of this is for all Mac Pros. Basically, as best we can tell the ONLY U.2 drive that works is my 9300 Pro (at 15TB). Worse still, there are absolutely ZERO SSD options to have a larger than 15TB boot drive that actually boots up on ANY Mac. This is really kind of pitiful.

Mac Pros are treated like garbage and Apple's taking away the ability to boot off RAID renders them 2nd class citizens where they can never have a large boot drive.

Not even sure what to do. I suppose I can try some other U.2 or maybe even EDSFF drives on the market?

Would love any thoughts about this from the collective.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

So while I am depressed on what to do next, searching for any other 30 or 60TB drives to replace my full 15TB Micron 9300 Pro, I happened upon this:

OWC 32.0TB U2 Shuttle 3.5-inch NVMe U.2 SSD at MacSales.com

U2SHUTTLE32 32.0TB OWC U2 Shuttle 3.5-inch NVMe U.2 SSD. The world's first NVMe U.2 shuttle drive for 3.5-inch bays that combines four NVMe M.2 SSDs into a swappable high capacity RAID ready storage solution.

eshop.macsales.com

So it basically takes M.2 NVMe stick and stuffs them into a U.2 case to act as a U.2 drive. It relies on soft raid to RAID 0 the sticks together, so it will have the lame problem of not being bootable if you want the full capacity as the boot drive.

However, it got me to thinking that I suspect all U.2 drives are really just glorified versions of this OWC drive, just with built in RAID0 on the internal memory inside the U.2 case. There should be some other solutions.

But as best I can tell, there are none. My only other outlet is to check out Solidigm drives I linked to above, but best I can tell, they are not yet available for sale. No joy.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

The other thing that is weird is these drives sound like glorified NVMe/PCIe sticks. So what the heck is going on. Why would the Mac Pro be unable to read what should be commodity drives?

What is the difference in protocol? Is it something Apple has failed to update the operating system with.

Or is it something new to PCIe4 that cannot 'hook up' on this old PCIe3 motherboard? Would it maybe work on the new 14,8 M2Ultra Mac since it has PCIe4? Although @Eyezestful seemed to have these troubles on the 2023 M2Ultra Mac as well.

 

[Rimmsi]

Have you tried booting Windows from the 9400Pro?

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Have you tried booting Windows from the 9400Pro?

No I haven’t. It’s a good suggestion to see if it at least shows up there.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

No I haven’t. It’s a good suggestion to see if it at least shows up there.

Comes right up under windows. So it’s just apple sucking and not supporting stuff that works with no drivers needed under windows 10.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

So I got some screen shots of it working under windows. I formatted it ExFAT and did some speed test. Mediocre speed but not surprising my 7120 High Point is PCIe3 speed bound.

I figured maybe formatting might have 'jostled' something to have it mount on macOS, but no joy.

So I'm going to pack this up and return it. And back to square one.

But the bottom line is this, the only U.2 drive known to work on macOS is the Micron 9300 Pro, and nothing else. So sad.

 

[joevt]

So while I am depressed on what to do next, searching for any other 30 or 60TB drives to replace my full 15TB Micron 9300 Pro, I happened upon this:

OWC 32.0TB U2 Shuttle 3.5-inch NVMe U.2 SSD at MacSales.com

U2SHUTTLE32 32.0TB OWC U2 Shuttle 3.5-inch NVMe U.2 SSD. The world's first NVMe U.2 shuttle drive for 3.5-inch bays that combines four NVMe M.2 SSDs into a swappable high capacity RAID ready storage solution.

eshop.macsales.com

So it basically takes M.2 NVMe stick and stuffs them into a U.2 case to act as a U.2 drive. It relies on soft raid to RAID 0 the sticks together, so it will have the lame problem of not being bootable if you want the full capacity as the boot drive.

The OWC U2 Shuttle uses a ASM2812X which only has 12 lanes so each NVMe inside only has PCIe 3.0 x2 which is ≈1500 MB/s. It has a an x4 upstream so it should be able to do ≈3500 MB/s total.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16424/ces-2021-owc-introduces-35-u2-ssd-carrier

However, it got me to thinking that I suspect all U.2 drives are really just glorified versions of this OWC drive, just with built in RAID0 on the internal memory inside the U.2 case. There should be some other solutions.

PCIe hardware RAID 0? Like a NVMe controller to talk with multiple other NVMe controllers? Unlikely. Although doesn't the HighPoint RAID cards do that? I think they turn the PEX PCIe switch to a SCSI controller or something like that. Have to look at the PCIe config (vendor/device IDs and class code) to see how it identifies.

They could just connect more chips to a single NVMe controller but I have no idea.

But as best I can tell, there are none. My only other outlet is to check out Solidigm drives I linked to above, but best I can tell, they are not yet available for sale. No joy.

The other thing that is weird is these drives sound like glorified NVMe/PCIe sticks. So what the heck is going on. Why would the Mac Pro be unable to read what should be commodity drives?

What is the difference in protocol? Is it something Apple has failed to update the operating system with.

I don't see how the size of the drive affects whether it can work in macOS or not. Again, have to see the PCIe config (or ioreg) to see what's going on.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

I don't see how the size of the drive affects whether it can work in macOS or not. Again, have to see the PCIe config (or ioreg) to see what's going on.

I do not think it is the size of the drive, but something about the protocol it uses. I'm not sure how to get you the PCIe config or ioreg. Is it some Windows utility? Happy to provide it if it's useful.

 

[joevt]

I do not think it is the size of the drive, but something about the protocol it uses. I'm not sure how to get you the PCIe config or ioreg. Is it some Windows utility? Happy to provide it if it's useful.

You could try this in macOS or Linux:
https://gist.github.com/joevt/e3cd4ff08aae06279134969c98ca3ab7

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

You could try this in macOS or Linux:
https://gist.github.com/joevt/e3cd4ff08aae06279134969c98ca3ab7

Updated: Ok I forgot to chmod and now it runs but the output is a bit... sparse:

bash-3.2# /Users/user/Desktop/pcitree.sh


#=========================================================================================


bash-3.2#

BTW, I only have the base Apple 256GB SSD and the 30TB drive plugged in.

That said, I probably messed up the install of your tools.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

So this is interesting.

Nvme Ecosystem | HighPoint-tech.com

www.highpoint-tech.com

Highpoint supplied a link with compatible drives. I’ve also made a support ticket with tech support to see why the 9400 pro does not work. Will be interesting.

What is interesting is that my 7120 seems to ONLY be compatible with the 9300 Pro from Micron, but other controllers are compatible with more drives:

So perhaps it's as easy as upgrading my controller card and the newer drive will work?

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Ok, well considering the above, I ordered the High Point 1580 card (which seems to be the newer version of the 7580 card) in the hopes it will see the 9400 Pro. Fingers crossed if this will work.

I don't believe I'm like pioneering this and am apparently the first person on the planet to try to get this to work on the Mac. It just does not feel like this should be so 'exotic'. Sad.

Anyway, if this does not work, there is a bit of hope in the above compatibility list. Namely, SolidGM:

It looks like their drives seem to be pretty compatible. Unfortunately their new 30 and 60TB are not yet shipping, but means I may need to wait a little bit.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

This is cool.

Going to go out on a limb and guess this is not Mac compatible, but cool card.

Apex Storage X21 NVMe AIC

www.apexstoragedesign.com

 

[Eyezestful]

Ok, well considering the above, I ordered the High Point 1580 card (which seems to be the newer version of the 7580 card) in the hopes it will see the 9400 Pro. Fingers crossed if this will work.

I don't believe I'm like pioneering this and am apparently the first person on the planet to try to get this to work on the Mac. It just does not feel like this should be so 'exotic'. Sad.

Anyway, if this does not work, there is a bit of hope in the above compatibility list. Namely, SolidGM:

View attachment 2244214

It looks like their drives seem to be pretty compatible. Unfortunately their new 30 and 60TB are not yet shipping, but means I may need to wait a little bit.

Thanks for all the testing you are doing for the benefit of the community. This is really helpful! I followed up with Micron Support and they said they are aware of the incompatibility issues and are reviewing options with Apple. I hope this is true and they are really doing something about it!

It is shocking that Apple is happy to sell a super expensive machine but then does not care about Pro Users and their needs! I still have my old Mac Pro 2019 and I tried both the Samsung PM9A3 and the Micron 7450 on widows using bootcamp and both were recognised without problems and displayed appropriate read/write speeds!

@ZombiePhysicist please report back when you get the HighPoint 1580 card. I hope this will recognise your Micron 9400 Pro! I am tempted to try the Solidigm D7-P5510 but performance seems quite a bit lower than Samsung and Micron drives!

 

[Rimmsi]

@ZombiePhysicist : Can you try the Sonnet Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe Card with 9400Pro?