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

[mattspace]

Aferburner is even more limted than that: only ProRes codec & somthing not all that common in cameras. A good Nvidia would have nailed it, but oh …. Useless except for a specialised & questionable workflow. Yet another dubious brain fart & misrepresentation from Apple.

Yeah absolutely, I should have emphasised - so it relies on you transcoding first into prores.

They certainly marketed it as a reconfigurable piece of hardware, as if it would be able to be reconfigured in realtime on a task by task basis.

 

[Regulus67]

They certainly marketed it as a reconfigurable piece of hardware, as if it would be able to be reconfigured in realtime on a task by task basis.

I have been searching for a way to reconfigure the afterburner card, or if anyone already have found other ways to use it. As it has a FPGA chip. But so far I have not discovered anything.

AMD has a similar card

AMD's latest FPGA promises lower latency stock trading bots

Letting more advanced ML loose on the stock market? What could possibly go wrong?

www.theregister.com

AMD Proposes An FPGA Subsystem User-Space Interface For Linux - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

 

[jwestpro]

Honestly, I only have mine in the machine because removing it is too much of a palaver. The Afterburner (AFAIK) has one function - decoding video for playback. If you're not editing video, it's largely a paperweight. It doesn't help with display functions or *encoding* etc, merely means you can have more streams of higher quality realtime video in your editor.

If you have it in a PCI x16 slot, it will use 16 lanes, and can process (IIRC) 8 streams of video. If you put it in an 8x slot, all that happens is the number of streams is halved. IF I keep mine in my machine, I'll probably end up moving it to an 8x slot, so my NVME card can go to the x16 and be fully populated at its full capacity.

The W5700 can drive all your displays on its own. The real question it what you want in your second MPX bay, with all that unswitched PCI bandwidth.

Kind of what I figured and as soon as I read the next reply, I remembered the ProRes aspect. I only have the 5500 because they were willing to just include it when I asked to buy/upgrade to the 5700x which only has 1 hdmi vs 2 on the 5500. I see the 2023 mac pro comes with 2 hdmi.

I think with the 5700 and 5500 that still leaves 2 more 16x lanes. The owc 4m2 and 1m2 nvme adapters I have in the 2019 don't make use of a 16x anyway.

 

[Hasbro1]

A waste of time, the only answer those condescending nitwits have is ‘reinstall your operating system’.

I have to say this is exactly my experience with not just the Genius bar but almost every high ranking contributor that comments on the, (Un???), Official Apple forum.

He went Apple Store to get great customer service and white glove service from the Apple Store in Natick , followed by dealing with executive relations who promise they would roll out white glove service.
"the lie detector, determined, that was a lie".

Pure garbage. When this machine dies, so does my reliance on Mac. There is not a program on earth that can't run on just about any operating system. I've been so stuck in logic and Final Cut Pro, and they're not even the industry standard anymore and I pay for Adobe every month. Hopefully a few years from now I'll upgrade it one more time with a juicy processor, but I'm sure unless I keep my operating system down here they'll find a way not to support it. So my lesson from all this is turned off all automatic software updates forever from Apple. I think I got better customer service the week that #CircuitCity went out of business.

 

[profdraper]

He went Apple Store to get great customer service and white glove service from the Apple Store in Natick , followed by dealing with executive relations who promise they would roll out white glove service.
"the lie detector, determined, that was a lie".

Pure garbage. When this machine dies, so does my reliance on Mac. There is not a program on earth that can't run on just about any operating system. I've been so stuck in logic and Final Cut Pro, and they're not even the industry standard anymore and I pay for Adobe every month. Hopefully a few years from now I'll upgrade it one more time with a juicy processor, but I'm sure unless I keep my operating system down here they'll find a way not to support it. So my lesson from all this is turned off all automatic software updates forever from Apple. I think I got better customer service the week that #CircuitCity went out of business.

View attachment 2475500

Try Davinci Resolve, you won't go back. Try the free one, if you like & need more, go Davinci Resolve Studio. So much better than Apple-centric FCP & infinitely better than Adobe's subscription service. Pay once for Resolve Studio. Re. Logic, I'd say give Cubase Pro a try.

 

[profdraper]

Anyone know if Sequoia 15.3 has fixed this yet? I'm guessing not ...

EDIT: and after a half day of time-wasting with Apple bs once again, the answer is .... drummmm rollllll... YES.

Unplugged Thunderbay, installed, re-booted, connected Thunderbay, it mounted, restarted & zapped PRAM.

Now does what it should/ 2024, the future. Mindbogging, from the trillions company that doe sit all in revers: shareholders first, staff second, customers last.

 

[smckenzie]

Try Davinci Resolve, you won't go back. Try the free one, if you like & need more, go Davinci Resolve Studio. So much better than Apple-centric FCP & infinitely better than Adobe's subscription service. Pay once for Resolve Studio. Re. Logic, I'd say give Cubase Pro a try.

I just got Cubase. Right now they are offering a cross grade from logic to cubase for 40% off. I got the pro version for $270 instead of $580. Just provide them with proof of ownership of logic. Offer ends early feb I think. It’s a NAMM promotion.

 

[Hasbro1]

I just got Cubase. Right now they are offering a cross grade from logic to cubase for 40% off. I got the pro version for $270 instead of $580. Just provide them with proof of ownership of logic. Offer ends early feb I think. It’s a NAMM promotion.

Try Davinci Resolve, you won't go back. Try the free one, if you like & need more, go Davinci Resolve Studio. So much better than Apple-centric FCP & infinitely better than Adobe's subscription service. Pay once for Resolve Studio. Re. Logic, I'd say give Cubase Pro a try.

I will check it out. I have Studio One as well. Ive never tried cubase.

 

[profdraper]

I will check it out. I have Studio One as well. Ive never tried cubase.

S1 is a nice piece of kit as well (from ex-Steinberg core dev plus new PhD wiz /audio engine). Relatively new code, ground up, nice. GUI is a little open source for me, but YMMV.

Charlie Steinberg is one of the original and literally invented the DAW we see to day with Cubase v1. Still a greta piece of kit. Big diff with logic is all the VIs included, but still hate the thing & what Apple did to it since Gerhard Lengling sold out.

Cubase will cost you more if you want all their VIs, but I've just been using 3rd party for all that, Native Instruments for example. A lot more range in 3rd party as well; Logic seems to have doof-doof pop mentality. Big brother Nuendo is astonishing and takes on all of post, walks all over Pro Tools etc.

 

[smckenzie]

I was on Logic when it was Emagic back in the day. On the Atari before that. Logic just seems a bit lame, looks like a toy. Maybe I’m fickle. I finally got a bunch of the Native Instruments stuff so I should be set. Cubase seems to run well on my 7,1 from the little I’ve played with it.

 

[aventham]

Anyone know if Sequoia 15.3 has fixed this yet? I'm guessing not ...

EDIT: and after a half day of time-wasting with Apple bs once again, the answer is .... drummmm rollllll... YES.

Unplugged Thunderbay, installed, re-booted, connected Thunderbay, it mounted, restarted & zapped PRAM.

Now does what it should/ 2024, the future. Mindbogging, from the trillions company that doe sit all in revers: shareholders first, staff second, customers last.

Excellent! Now we just need someone braver than me to confirm whether it reliably mounts PCIE drives 🤞

 

[LukeMacPro]

Anyone know if Sequoia 15.3 has fixed this yet? I'm guessing not ...

EDIT: and after a half day of time-wasting with Apple bs once again, the answer is .... drummmm rollllll... YES.

Unplugged Thunderbay, installed, re-booted, connected Thunderbay, it mounted, restarted & zapped PRAM.

Now does what it should/ 2024, the future. Mindbogging, from the trillions company that doe sit all in revers: shareholders first, staff second, customers last.

Well done dude. Was about to ask if anyone's tried 15.3 yet as really couldn't be arsed with another day wasted rolling back! Are you sure, sure? No mounting fails? Do you have an internal Raid setup like a lot of us? Sonnet M.2 / OWC Accelsior?

 

[wfmwfm]

Crucial NVMe Drive Issues with Mac Pro 7,1

Hi everyone,

I'm an OCLP 5,1'r on my 1st 7,1 odyssey. And I'm unsure how to proceed.
Sorry for the length.

I’ve been going through multiple pages on these issues, and it seems most people are able to get their drives to mount with repeated restarts, zapping PRAM, re-seating cards, and the latest Sequoia, but I’ve come across a potential compatibility issue with my Crucial NVMe drives and my 16-core Mac Pro. I’m looking for some advice.

Background:

I recently upgraded from a 5,1 Mac Pro to a used Mac Pro 7,1 (16-core, 192GB RAM, 2TB system drive) purchased from iPowerResale, who are selling "off-lease Meta.com" machines. It’s now running Ventura 13.7.4, and I’ve been using it for orchestral composing.

Audio Setup:
- Avid HD|Native card in slot #2 with an OMNI, which is working fine.

- Added a Sonnet Fusion Flex J3i with a Seagate 16TB drive and a WD 1TB SSD for now.

NVMe Drives:
- 4TB WD Blue and newer Crucial P3 4TB (REV D) on an OWC 4M2 card.
- Older Crucial P3 4TB (REV A, fresh from packaging) on an OWC 1M2 card.

I’m not running RAID, just individual drives. I’ve been reinstalling my audio software from scratch, and everything was running fairly smoothly (barring some 'hard crash' kernel panics which I attributed to the continuing software installs) until yesterday when I was experiencing repeating kernel panics repeatedly. I upgraded Ventura from 13.7.2 to 13.7.4 in hopes of a fix. Then I noticed the REV A Crucial drive had stopped mounting?

Current Problem:

• The REV A Crucial P3 4TB on the OWC 1M2 card (in Slot #7) is not mounting but is seen in Disk Utility — it’s greyed out and won’t mount with "the Disk Utility button". The drive contains 3.3TB of orchestral libraries, and I need to access the folder index.
• I had planned to back it up to the 16TB Seagate soon, but now I’m unable to do so.

Troubleshooting Steps Taken:

• Unplugged and reset the Mac Pro
• Reset PRAM (caught only 2 ‘chimes’)
• Multiple reboots (cold, restarts, etc.)
• Booted in verbose mode
• Booted in Safe Mode (Shift key held down)
• Ran Apple’s First Aid, which reported:
  • Bad checksums and missing resource forks.
  • Corrupted, requires repair.
  • Unable to verify the container completely
  • Error code: -69716.
  • Unfortunately, I read that First Aid destroys recover-ability?

What I’ve Learned:

• Expansion Slot Utility in Ventura is located in the Library, not in System Report.
• Crucial NVMe drives appear to have compatibility issues with the 16-core Mac Pro 7,1
  (as confirmed by Crucial's own website, linked earlier in this thread).
• Other users have reported kernel panics with Crucial drives installed (same for me).
• There may be a security or permission issue causing the mount failure.

Positives:

• Kernel panics have stopped since the REV A Crucial drive stopped mounting.
• No critical work has been lost — only time spent installing and configuring software.

Negatives:

• $450 spent on two unusable Crucial 4TB drives
• Unable to verify which orchestral sample libraries are now inaccessible?
• I'm hesitant about fully trusting the 7,1 Mac Pro after my experience (I still love my 5,1).
• I hoped leaving the 5,1 for the 7,1 would be a seamless upgrade, but it's been a rocky transition.

Questions:

• Should I initiate an RMA for the REV A Crucial drive?
• Could the REV A Crucial drive potentially work in an external case?
• Is there a firmware upgrade available for the REV A model?
• Given that PCIe slots 4, 5, and 6 are open, should I try moving the drive from Slot #7?
  
  AppleCare?
• The machine has AppleCare through March 18th, 2025. Should I open a ticket ASAP?

I’d greatly appreciate any insights or suggestions. I know many of you folks have battled these issues.

Thanks in advance for any insights and advice.

I truly appreciate it.

Kindest regards wfm

 

[smckenzie]

I have a 16c 7,1 to but with a Sonnetech M2 4 NVME card. On Sequoia 15.3 it was fine but the last two point updates have the un-mounting issue re-appearing, so it might not just be your card and an OS issue again.

 

[wfmwfm]

I have a 16c 7,1 to but with a Sonnetech M2 4 NVME card. On Sequoia 15.3 it was fine but the last two point updates have the un-mounting issue re-appearing, so it might not just be your card and an OS issue again.

Sorry to hear you're also dealing with it on the latest Sequoia updates and with a Sonnet. I love Sonnet since forever. But that it's still happening on Sequoia is really a bummer.

I did upgrade my OS from 13.7.2 to 13.7.4 on Tuesday night (hoping to end the Kernel Panics). Then on Wednesday morning, my "missing sample library drive" odyssey began, although no 'black screen of death' all day. Maybe Apple's update "blacklisted" my funky Crucial NVMe to stop the kernel panics?

OWC is blowing out a bunch of their 1 SATA SSD PCIe sleds for $20 a piece.
So I'm looking at 4TB SATA SSDs online and there are a lot of bad reviews there too.

Comments about WD buying Sandisk quality control issues, bad 990 Samsung reviews from 2025...I'm not really sure where to turn for my 'read only' orchestral libraries?

Perhaps an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure?

 

[mattspace]

Sorry to hear you're also dealing with it on the latest Sequoia updates and with a Sonnet. I love Sonnet since forever. But that it's still happening on Sequoia is really a bummer.

I did upgrade my OS from 13.7.2 to 13.7.4 on Tuesday night (hoping to end the Kernel Panics). Then on Wednesday morning, my "missing sample library drive" odyssey began, although no 'black screen of death' all day. Maybe Apple's update "blacklisted" my funky Crucial NVMe to stop the kernel panics?

OWC is blowing out a bunch of their 1 SATA SSD PCIe sleds for $20 a piece.
So I'm looking at 4TB SATA SSDs online and there are a lot of bad reviews there too.

Comments about WD buying Sandisk quality control issues, bad 990 Samsung reviews from 2025...I'm not really sure where to turn for my 'read only' orchestral libraries?

Perhaps an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure?

Whether it's just a result of greater numbers in use, Sonnet's NVME cards seem to have been effected more intensely by the Sonoma unmounting issue than others - at least we have folks here with Highpoint cards who were not effected.

If you're looking for a NVME SSD, I've had reliable performance with Samsung 990 Pros. Yeah, they're more expensive to start, but the cost of one round of troubleshooting an unreliable drive... is it really a savings to get a cheaper option?

Edit: also, you can renew your Applecare, it goes on to a rolling 12 month auto-renewing plan.

 

[dbr9]

I have a similar setup (2019 Mac Pro, 16c 7.1, Sonnet M.2 4x4 silent NVME, Sequoia 15.3.x). My new issue after updating the OS is either the NVME raid 0 mounts or the raid 0 on the J3i mounts but never both. Has anyone else experienced this? Is there an (not ideal) external solution that will get me the same (or close) speeds.

Appreciate any help, thanks.

 

[smckenzie]

I did fix this but not intentionally -At the time I had two monitors plugged in, one on each MPX module. I went down to a single monitor and changed the port from the furthest right one to the furthest left. No unmounts after that. Weird but it worked. So I don't know if it what having two monitors that did it or it was just moving the main displays port.

 

[dbr9]

That's interesting. I have 3 monitors, so I tried 2 and then 1. I can get more of my drives to mount this way (most success with only one). I plugged the other 2 monitors in after boot up. Not Ideal but I can work. Thanks.

 

[mattspace]

That's interesting. I have 3 monitors, so I tried 2 and then 1. I can get more of my drives to mount this way (most success with only one). I plugged the other 2 monitors in after boot up. Not Ideal but I can work. Thanks.

That's nuts, what type of display, and connection are you using?

 

[dbr9]

That's nuts, what type of display, and connection are you using?

2 Dell P2415Q & 1 Dell SE2722HX. The two 24' monitors are connected via HDMI and the 27 is HDMI to TB (monitor to computer)

 

[mattspace]

2 Dell P2415Q & 1 Dell SE2722HX. The two 24' monitors are connected via HDMI and the 27 is HDMI to TB (monitor to computer)

What GPU are you using, and what does your pci config app say about lane usage?

 

[dbr9]

What GPU are you using, and what does your pci config app say about lane usage?

AMD 580x 8GB

 

[mattspace]

Ahh ok,

AMD 580x 8GB

I wonder if the 580 (you're using the MPX version, yes?), by not furnishing any TB3 ports of its own, causes issues in PCI bandwidth allocation / drive mounting bugs.

If you could test a normal GPU that doesn't interact with the TB bus, or with a W5700 or similar, it would be interesting to see if your triple display issues go away.

 

[dbr9]

I'll probably have to try that but I'm reminded that it did all work when I bought the computer. I can't remember the OS it came with but all my HDs and other 3rd party pci cards would mount without any issues.