MP 7,1 Mac Pro 2019 NVME RAID drives failing to mount

[H. Flower]

I moved my Sonnet from Slot 5 to Slot 4, have rebooted a few times the past day, am not having any issues. Will keep you updated.

 

[12vLego]

I just installed a Highpoint SSD7104 PCIe 3.0 x16 4-P. M.2 NVMe card, combined with four Samsung 4TB 990 pro's in my 7.1 MP (to ditch my 8TB Accelsior 4M2 scratch disk which keeps giving problems, such as unmounting DURING video editing!!!).

Having Softraided the Highpoint in Raid0, it appears to work fine, and I have just copied the contents of the Accelsior. Now returning to fcpx and keeping fingers crossed (I will keep you posted if I experience pcie mounting failures with the new Highpoint unit)...

 

[profdraper]

Mine came back and seems to be sticking since 14.4 although one new sw install made it come back (UAD drivers & plugs). Still, an NVRAM & NVME reset made it good again. No problems for quite some number of re-boots now.

 

[H2SO4]

My problems came back too. They always seem to be accompanied with Spotlight warnings such as;
warning: inode (id 15176494): Resource Fork xattr is missing for compressed file
I've heard that these can be ignored sometimes but just looking for commonality. Is anybody seeing the same errors or warnings on any partition of their boot drive in Disk Utility?

 

[doobydoooby]

Anecdotally, I've also moved the Sonnet sled from slot 5 to 4, which was a bit of a pain since I'm using the power port underneath slot 4 on a tight cable. Since moving it, I haven't had any intermittent mount fails on startup. Hmmmmm. I will keep you updated!

 

[H2SO4]

Anecdotally, I've also moved the Sonnet sled from slot 5 to 4, which was a bit of a pain since I'm using the power port underneath slot 4 on a tight cable. Since moving it, I haven't had any intermittent mount fails on startup. Hmmmmm. I will keep you updated!

I've gone back to the original Apple SSD for now. One of the other side effects OI had was data corruption. Doesn't happen now.

 

[aventham]

I tried moving my 1M2 cards to slots 5 and 6, and my USB expansion card to slot 7. It's had a slightly curious effect on the bandwidth allocation information reported at the bottom of the expansion slot utility, but hasn't helped with the mounting problem (i.e. it still recurs at a similar frequency).

The only mitigation that hasn't already proven unreliable for me is unmounting the PCIE drives before restarting and shutting down. So I've made myself a custom shutdown "menu", for convenience and to help me to remember!

I haven't tried booting from anything other than the factory-fitted drive, and for the time being am happy not to, so this seems like a decent enough workaround for me, fingers crossed.
But I don't suppose this is much help to anyone who boots from their PCIE drives, as presumably it wouldn't be any good unmounting a drive that you're hoping to boot from - unless an "option key boot" would still detect and add it to the boot options automatically perhaps? Even if so it would be bit of a faff...

 

[cobra521]

Ah, well...

My 7,1 updated to Sonoma 14.4.1

Now, one of my Sonnet cards has disappeared and does not return after multiple reboots.

Thanks a lot, Apple.

Tom

I don't think it is connected, but "coincidentally" my iPhone seems to have stopped receiving texts.

 

[aventham]

Ah, well...

My 7,1 updated to Sonoma 14.4.1

Now, one of my Sonnet cards has disappeared and does not return after multiple reboots.

Thanks a lot, Apple.

Tom

I don't think it is connected, but "coincidentally" my iPhone seems to have stopped receiving texts.

Have you tried resetting the SMC / NVRAM?

 

[cobra521]

aventham,

Thank you. I think...

I reset the NVRAM. No change.

I reset the SMC and all the drives are now mounted!

Only time will tell whether they will continue to show up.

For now: thank you!

Tom

PS: The iPhone did an update this morning to 17.4.1 and after that, I turned it off, then back on. It now seems to be receiving messages again.

 

[rhoulian]

I've had no issues for a few weeks since I did a NVRAM reset.
yesterday the problem came back on startup, reseting the NVRAM again solved the problem, and all seems alright. I hope it will be for some more weeks
In the meantime I received an answer from OWC regarding this issue :

As a best practice, we generally suggest any of our PCIe drives in your Mac Pro, we recommend that 2 bottom PCIe slots. Also depending on the OS/year of your Mac Pro, moving the Alllocation Pool to 100% in slot A.
If you have any further questions or concerns please feel free to reply to this email, and I will be happy to assist you. Thank you have a fantastic day.

Sincerely,

Jeff H.
Customer Experience

OWC

 

[aventham]

I've had no issues for a few weeks since I did a NVRAM reset.
yesterday the problem came back on startup, reseting the NVRAM again solved the problem, and all seems alright. I hope it will be for some more weeks
In the meantime I received an answer from OWC regarding this issue :

As a best practice, we generally suggest any of our PCIe drives in your Mac Pro, we recommend that 2 bottom PCIe slots. Also depending on the OS/year of your Mac Pro, moving the Alllocation Pool to 100% in slot A.
If you have any further questions or concerns please feel free to reply to this email, and I will be happy to assist you. Thank you have a fantastic day.

Sincerely,

Jeff H.
Customer Experience

OWC

Thanks rhoulian - good to know that from OWC.
Have you recently installed the 14.4.1 update? I had to reset the NVRAM after that.

 

[rhoulian]

Have you recently installed the 14.4.1 update?

Nope ! Actually I am quite satisfied with the situation so it's not worth it... unless it solves the problem for everybody, but it doesn't seem that's the case. I will definitely wait for an official fix from OWC or Apple and continue with NVRAM resets meanwhile.

 

[mattspace]

I've had no issues for a few weeks since I did a NVRAM reset.
yesterday the problem came back on startup, reseting the NVRAM again solved the problem, and all seems alright. I hope it will be for some more weeks
In the meantime I received an answer from OWC regarding this issue :

As a best practice, we generally suggest any of our PCIe drives in your Mac Pro, we recommend that 2 bottom PCIe slots. Also depending on the OS/year of your Mac Pro, moving the Alllocation Pool to 100% in slot A.
If you have any further questions or concerns please feel free to reply to this email, and I will be happy to assist you. Thank you have a fantastic day.

Sincerely,

Jeff H.
Customer Experience

OWC

That would have to be advice for the 2023 machine, otherwise they're suggesting "best practice" is to install their storage in the slots Apple uses for the default graphics installation.

 

[danano]

I have a MacPro7,1 (2019) with four Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB cards mounted on a Sonnet M.2 4x4 Silent PCIe Card. The cards are running in an Apple software RAID array. I also have the standard Pegasus hardware array. My User folders are relocated to the Pegasus array. As many others have observed, sometimes one or more of the SSDs on the PCIe card do not mount. I have a couple of observations to offer.

When the PCIe system does not load, I shut down my computer. After a minute or two I start it up. When started like this, so far the PCIe SSDs always load and mount as expected. However, if the PCIe system is not working and I do a Restart, the PCIe stuff continues to not work. Looks to me like when started from completely shut down, the PCIe cards work properly.

My second observation is that the system tools Apple supplies to observe how disk memory is allocated show a major problem. Have a look at System Settings / General / Storage Settings. The bar at the top shows memory allocation on the Startup Disk. A note across the top says, in my case, my system takes 288.71 GB of the 1 TB SSD. Under the bar is a key showing color assignments indicating particular uses of disk space, Strangely, the whole bar is red. Clicking the button above the bar shows space allocation on All Volumes. This displays one problem. My PCIe-mounted RAID array, "Charlie", is shown three times. Hovering my pointer above the bar shows another problem. The Settings dialog claims my Documents folder takes 10.55 TB of the 1 TB available on the Startup SSD.

It seems system software does not work properly with memory on PCIe cards, or on the RAID array Apple sells. This suggests the problems we observe are due to faulty system software. This easily observed glaring error tends to verify the lack of quality control in Apple's system software development.

Can anyone reproduce these results?

 

[aventham]

I have a MacPro7,1 (2019) with four Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB cards mounted on a Sonnet M.2 4x4 Silent PCIe Card. The cards are running in an Apple software RAID array. I also have the standard Pegasus hardware array. My User folders are relocated to the Pegasus array. As many others have observed, sometimes one or more of the SSDs on the PCIe card do not mount. I have a couple of observations to offer.

When the PCIe system does not load, I shut down my computer. After a minute or two I start it up. When started like this, so far the PCIe SSDs always load and mount as expected. However, if the PCIe system is not working and I do a Restart, the PCIe stuff continues to not work. Looks to me like when started from completely shut down, the PCIe cards work properly.

My second observation is that the system tools Apple supplies to observe how disk memory is allocated show a major problem. Have a look at System Settings / General / Storage Settings. The bar at the top shows memory allocation on the Startup Disk. A note across the top says, in my case, my system takes 288.71 GB of the 1 TB SSD. Under the bar is a key showing color assignments indicating particular uses of disk space, Strangely, the whole bar is red. Clicking the button above the bar shows space allocation on All Volumes. This displays one problem. My PCIe-mounted RAID array, "Charlie", is shown three times. Hovering my pointer above the bar shows another problem. The Settings dialog claims my Documents folder takes 10.55 TB of the 1 TB available on the Startup SSD.
View attachment 2364601

It seems system software does not work properly with memory on PCIe cards, or on the RAID array Apple sells. This suggests the problems we observe are due to faulty system software. This easily pbserved glaring error tends to verify the lack of quality control in Apple's system software development.

Can anyone reproduce these results?

Which version of MacOS is this?

 

[doobydoooby]

I have a MacPro7,1 (2019) with four Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB cards mounted on a Sonnet M.2 4x4 Silent PCIe Card. The cards are running in an Apple software RAID array. I also have the standard Pegasus hardware array. My User folders are relocated to the Pegasus array. As many others have observed, sometimes one or more of the SSDs on the PCIe card do not mount. I have a couple of observations to offer.

When the PCIe system does not load, I shut down my computer. After a minute or two I start it up. When started like this, so far the PCIe SSDs always load and mount as expected. However, if the PCIe system is not working and I do a Restart, the PCIe stuff continues to not work. Looks to me like when started from completely shut down, the PCIe cards work properly.

My second observation is that the system tools Apple supplies to observe how disk memory is allocated show a major problem. Have a look at System Settings / General / Storage Settings. The bar at the top shows memory allocation on the Startup Disk. A note across the top says, in my case, my system takes 288.71 GB of the 1 TB SSD. Under the bar is a key showing color assignments indicating particular uses of disk space, Strangely, the whole bar is red. Clicking the button above the bar shows space allocation on All Volumes. This displays one problem. My PCIe-mounted RAID array, "Charlie", is shown three times. Hovering my pointer above the bar shows another problem. The Settings dialog claims my Documents folder takes 10.55 TB of the 1 TB available on the Startup SSD.
View attachment 2364601

It seems system software does not work properly with memory on PCIe cards, or on the RAID array Apple sells. This suggests the problems we observe are due to faulty system software. This easily pbserved glaring error tends to verify the lack of quality control in Apple's system software development.

Can anyone reproduce these results?

Mine doesn't appear like that, it shows a fan of different colours for different file types. The red one corresponds to 'documents' as yours shows above, but only for the literal drive. Yours appears to be aliasing other drives since your 1TB drive has 10TB of documents....

 

[danano]

Which version of MacOS is this?

macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 (23E224)

 

[aventham]

I'm on 14.4.1 with two 970 Evo Plus drives in 1M2 cards.
One drive failed to mount immediately after the upgrade (from 14.4), but reappeared after a reset of the NVRAM.
I'm still unmounting them before shutdown and haven't had any further problems so far.
The capacity of all my drives is being correctly reported in the settings and disk utility applications, but on a couple of occasions (before I started doing this unmounting routine) I've ended up with a duplicate listing for one or other of my PCIE drives in the "Folders" (third party file explorer) application. One listing would behave normally, but the other one behaved more like a shortcut - if I clicked on it, the first one would get selected. I just removed the duplicate/shortcut listing and assumed it was a bug with the application, but perhaps there was more to it than that.

 

[bcomer]

This sh*t is getting so out of hand - rebooted seven times and still no mounting.

This will be my last Mac - tired of Apple telling me what I cannot install in my computer.
Spending over $10,000.00 for this machine and foundation issues like this not getting fixed.

 

[profdraper]

This sh*t is getting so out of hand - rebooted seven times and still no mounting.

This will be my last Mac - tired of Apple telling me what I cannot install in my computer.
Spending over $10,000.00 for this machine and foundation issues like this not getting fixed.

Couldn’t agree more; Apple is certainly a very different bunch of a-hats than they were even 10 years ago. Greedy know-it-alls.

 

[Norbert Mikołajczyk]

I hate Apple internal politics about not informing if they are aware of the problems or not, we don't know if they are working on it. They always play it like everything is fine, what are you talking about, our products are perfect kind corporate ********.
It is on the main page of apple insider: https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...artially-broken-and-its-probably-apples-fault

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

I hate Apple internal politics about not informing if they are aware of the problems or not, we don't if they are working on it. They always play it like everything is fine, what are you talking about, our products are perfect kind corporate ********.
It is on the main page of apple insider: https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...artially-broken-and-its-probably-apples-fault

Well at least someone is finally reporting it. Part of the problem is the tech press is so broken. Support for u.2 drives in macOS has been broken for years now, and no one is reporting on it.

 

[Radium]

Sorry to hear no one is getting anywhere. 2023 Mac Pro's are working perfectly . Regardless of how many times I boot them all drives show up regardless of orientation inside the machines. What we need to do is keep contacting Apple everyday and tell them this is not acceptable it is related to the t2 chip and a security measures, explicitly from Apple's own mouth with multiple engineer conversations after spending close to $ 80 grand on hardware for the music studio. When you call explicitly ask for an explanation of what's going on and you'll probably get the same ridiculous lawyer answers and I quote Apple takes the privacy and security of their owners over all other concerns. Leaving me to believe that the t2 chip that handles security and handing over the operating system not allowing the drive to load under the new operating systems due to security concerns. Once again on the 2023 Mac Pros once the computer comes on each Drive slowly appears on the desktop I've never seen that with the 2019 ever under any operating it just appears when the machine boots up with everything else. The 2023 no longer has a T2 chip its now part of The Enclave built into the Apple SOC handles things totally different I wish I had more to offer. The problem is I don't believe they're going to invest any time in fixing a 2019 Intel Mac with an update to the t2 chip which would allow the Handover of the operating system and extensions to the drive once the system is booted this is why sometimes it works and sometimes it fails it's all about timing from what Sonnet technology engineer where describing to me when I was trying to help them with all my hardware at my disposal still couldn't figure it out. So don't go away quietly I don't know how many people actually own the 7.1 Intel Mac keep calling and become an annoyance I do it every week I'm not throwing away a $15,000 Mac Pro expected solved regardless of their time and cost take care

 

[aventham]

Well at least someone is finally reporting it. Part of the problem is the tech press is so broken. Support for u.2 drives in macOS has been broken for years now, and no one is reporting on it.

No mention of PCIE drives not mounting, and they even suggest that the problem can be "narrowed down" to Exfat, which it can't; but hey, at least it's some journalistic "noise" in the vague ballpark!