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CanPhantom

macrumors member
Oct 21, 2014
48
26
I'm currently going back and forth with OWC tech via email but have not gotten any solutions only more questions. I truly hope there's a solution!

Given the variety of hardware involved, OWC probably won't be able to do much (and really, it's not their problem to solve). This is either a board issue, or a software issue. This is an Apple problem.
 
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macguru9999

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2006
817
387
Hey guys,

I am havining an inconsistant issue with both my NVME drive adapters intermittingly failing to mount on my 2019 Mac Pro on Monterey 12.6. I'm constantly having to restart the machine to get the drives to mount. No drive issues or fails via Disk Utility and just gives 'Invalid Disk' error when I try and mount manually. I've also just sent back the Sonnet Flex J3i back for a replacement as the Raid setup was failing on each restart via the USB connnected SSD so not sure if this is a related issue. Also worth mentioning that I've recently replaced the MPX module with 2x RX 6900 XTs.

1x Sonnet’s M.2 4x4 PCIe card
- 4x Samsung 980 Pro 2TB (8TB HFS+ Raid0)

1x OWC Accelsior 4M2 PCIe card
- 4x Sabrent 1TB (3TB HFS+ Raid0 & 1TB Windows)

It's worth mentioning that the 1TB Windows SSD always mounts and the issue is just with the 3TB & 8TB RAID drives.

My system report is attached in case there's anything in there that could help.

Thanks in advance for any advice that you may have!
I have often wondered about those cards. I think you should just stick to single nvme blade adapters. One solution for a raid that I recently bought is a QNAP TBS-464. You can fit 4x nvme blades in there (so up to 32TB) at 2.5GB/s ethernet and raid them with a mind boggling number of options. I just have 3 blades in raid 0 in mine because the data is not held solely on the drive, its a file bucket for my network.... AND you do not need any raid software on the mac
 

macguru9999

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2006
817
387
Kia Ora Everyone. I had a similar issue with my Iocrest m.2 card running dual Samsung 2T 980s (not RAID). They had been running perfectly for a year then I updated to Sonoma and they became very temperamental. Sometimes they would not mount at start-up. Or one would mount and not the other. I would erase / reformat / reload backed up data. They would would work for a few days then the same problem. Then I bought two PCIE cards and mounted them in their own slots. Same problem. After digging around I found that the directories were corrupting. I tried rebuilding the directories but had limited success. The solution for me was to reboot in RECOVERY MODE and run DISK UTILITY First Aid on them. That was about a month ago and I haven't had a problem since. I'm a bit surprised such a simple fix worked but there it is...
Also, I dont think Sonoma 14.2/14.2.1 works properly. I noticed boot delay/mounting issues straight away and I am not the only one.
 
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profdraper

macrumors 6502
Jan 14, 2017
391
290
Brisbane, Australia
Also, I dont think Sonoma 14.2/14.2.1 works properly. I noticed boot delay/mounting issues straight away and I am not the only one.
Exaclty what I've found. Sometimes it (slowly) mounts my Sonnet 4xm2, sometimes not at all. No such probelms with (say) Monterey. Sonoma has been a PITA, notonly for this but also for a host of other third party app,plugs & drivers - incl. the latest verison of SoftRaid & took way too much time to figure out & get going; short story was that it would not recoginise new driver & delete old driver; this process worked as it should in Monterey.
 

lbeale

macrumors newbie
Nov 24, 2020
16
1
In case my data point is useful: I am running two Highpoint 7101-A1 cards in Raid 0, and they always mount. You have to deal with Highpoint's driver during OS updates, but I guess there's a trade-off. I was having a ton of issues on my system otherwise, and recently had the logic board replaced under warranty which seemed to solve my daily crashes...
 

macguru9999

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2006
817
387
Exaclty what I've found. Sometimes it (slowly) mounts my Sonnet 4xm2, sometimes not at all. No such probelms with (say) Monterey. Sonoma has been a PITA, notonly for this but also for a host of other third party app,plugs & drivers - incl. the latest verison of SoftRaid & took way too much time to figure out & get going; short story was that it would not recoginise new driver & delete old driver; this process worked as it should in Monterey.
I have reverted to Monterey on the 7,1. I have an M1 pro on sonoma and ill just keep updating that for the time being.
 
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Royal Raider

macrumors newbie
Mar 7, 2011
8
1
Auckland, New Zealand
Kia Ora Everyone. I had a similar issue with my Iocrest m.2 card running dual Samsung 2T 980s (not RAID). They had been running perfectly for a year then I updated to Sonoma and they became very temperamental. Sometimes they would not mount at start-up. Or one would mount and not the other. I would erase / reformat / reload backed up data. They would would work for a few days then the same problem. Then I bought two PCIE cards and mounted them in their own slots. Same problem. After digging around I found that the directories were corrupting. I tried rebuilding the directories but had limited success. The solution for me was to reboot in RECOVERY MODE and run DISK UTILITY First Aid on them. That was about a month ago and I haven't had a problem since. I'm a bit surprised such a simple fix worked but there it is...
Thought I would add a couple of details I missed from my original post... in addition to the m.2 issue encountered when installing Sonoma my MP no longer recognised the 4x 64GB OWC DIMMS installed. No matter how many different configs / restarts I tried they just wouldn't appear. I reinstalled Ventura and still no luck on both issues. Making this even stranger was the fact that the 2x 32GB OWC DIMMS were fine (as were the original Apple DIMMS). I sent the 64GB DIMMS back to OWC for replacement and sure enough the DIMMS worked on their test machine. I've got to say — OWC were great through this whole process. Good luck to all trying to find their solution — it is very frustrating to deal with these issues while trying to get paid work out the door...
 

ZombiePhysicist

Suspended
May 22, 2014
2,884
2,794
Thought I would add a couple of details I missed from my original post... in addition to the m.2 issue encountered when installing Sonoma my MP no longer recognised the 4x 64GB OWC DIMMS installed. No matter how many different configs / restarts I tried they just wouldn't appear. I reinstalled Ventura and still no luck on both issues. Making this even stranger was the fact that the 2x 32GB OWC DIMMS were fine (as were the original Apple DIMMS). I sent the 64GB DIMMS back to OWC for replacement and sure enough the DIMMS worked on their test machine. I've got to say — OWC were great through this whole process. Good luck to all trying to find their solution — it is very frustrating to deal with these issues while trying to get paid work out the door...

I have 96gb of ram and futzing around on the motherboard i snagged something and then only 48 would show up with the machine throwing an error. My guess is scratched something with my fingernail or something like that that around the top left of the motherboard (basically on the other side of the motherboard from where the ram slots are) and it required a motherboard swap.

You're probably not dealing with that issue, but not a bad spot to note to be careful when moving cables and things around the motherboard and learn from my stupid mistake.
 
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macguru9999

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2006
817
387
I have reverted to Monterey on the 7,1. I have an M1 pro on sonoma and ill just keep updating that for the time being.
There is also something going on with samba shares in sonoma, sometimes I have to reconnect to transfer files to my NAS. I have tried with 2 different NASs and compared Monterey and sonoma. Seems to be a sonoma problem with reconnect after sleep
 
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Daily PRAM Resets

macrumors newbie
Jan 11, 2024
9
10
Happy to find this thread, I'm seeing exactly the same issues with 2019 Mac Pro using SoftRAID with 2x Sonnet M.2 PCIe 4x4 cards, one with 4x Samsung 1TB 980 Pros (4TB APFS array), the other with 4x Samsung 2TB 970 Evo Plus (8TB HFS+ array).

My 2019 Mac Pro annoyingly decided to install Sonoma by itself last night without any confirmation (WTF?!) and ever since, drives are randomly missing from either of the Sonnet cards on reboot. So it's like a lottery... sometimes one array mounts, sometimes the other. Disk Utility cannot see the missing drives either.

Have tried SMC resets, etc. I've seen this before on Big Sur, but on the latest Ventura things were running great and both SoftRAID arrays were mounting perfectly fine on each reboot.

So I can say 100% this is an issue with Apple's ****** software as this is happening with every reboot now ever since I was forced to use Sonoma. I would rather Mr Apple forced me to listen to U2.

Is there a fix on the horizon? Apple? Sonnet?? OWC??? Anyone????
 

mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,342
2,975
Australia
Happy to find this thread, I'm seeing exactly the same issues with 2019 Mac Pro using SoftRAID with 2x Sonnet M.2 PCIe 4x4 cards, one with 4x Samsung 1TB 980 Pros (4TB APFS array), the other with 4x Samsung 2TB 970 Evo Plus (8TB HFS+ array).

My 2019 Mac Pro annoyingly decided to install Sonoma by itself last night without any confirmation (WTF?!) and ever since, drives are randomly missing from either of the Sonnet cards on reboot. So it's like a lottery... sometimes one array mounts, sometimes the other. Disk Utility cannot see the missing drives either.

Have tried SMC resets, etc. I've seen this before on Big Sur, but on the latest Ventura things were running great and both SoftRAID arrays were mounting perfectly fine on each reboot.

So I can say 100% this is an issue with Apple's ****** software as this is happening with every reboot now ever since I was forced to use Sonoma. I would rather Mr Apple forced me to listen to U2.

Is there a fix on the horizon? Apple? Sonnet?? OWC??? Anyone????

Have you called Apple, lodged a support ticket to have it pushed through to Engineering etc?
 

cobra521

macrumors 6502
Dec 14, 2016
393
136
FL
Well, lots of e-mails with Sonnet who have been responsive but unable to diagnose the problem. I'm debating sending in one of the cards to Sonnet but am hesitating until I see whether there's any indication that Apple will look at the problem.

After looking through this thread I'm convinced there are too many 3rd party items involved for all of them to be defective - I now believe the ball is in Apple's court, maybe some kind of bootup timing problem?

I have this sinking feeling that the above idea and $11 will get me a cup of coffee at Starbuck's :rolleyes:


Tom. 🤞
 

macguru9999

macrumors 6502a
Aug 9, 2006
817
387
Well, lots of e-mails with Sonnet who have been responsive but unable to diagnose the problem. I'm debating sending in one of the cards to Sonnet but am hesitating until I see whether there's any indication that Apple will look at the problem.

After looking through this thread I'm convinced there are too many 3rd party items involved for all of them to be defective - I now believe the ball is in Apple's court, maybe some kind of bootup timing problem?

I have this sinking feeling that the above idea and $11 will get me a cup of coffee at Starbuck's :rolleyes:


Tom. 🤞
Agreed, from what I have seen its a sonoma 14.2/14.2.1 problem. Luckily I dont mind using Monterey. But there is also a samba shares NAS problem on wake from sleep, and that may go back to Ventura, I had a few issues with my airport but blamed it as old tech and bought something newer. Similar issues at times when in sonoma, but not monterey.
 

Daily PRAM Resets

macrumors newbie
Jan 11, 2024
9
10
Agreed, from what I have seen its a sonoma 14.2/14.2.1 problem.

Can confirm 100% it is a Sonoma problem.

I just spent 4 hours wiping my Mac Pro's SSD, installing a fresh Ventura, restored using a Time Machine backup from 48 hours ago, and everything is exactly the same with hardware and software, except I'm now on Ventura 13.6.3 instead of Sonoma. And both my Sonnet 4x4 PCIe cards and their 8 NVME drives are working perfectly, all mounted as you'd expect, not a single issue.

Apple really needs to sort out how MacOS handles external drives. They could just copy/paste Ventura code across.

I also installed this handy app tp remove Sonoma reminders, that OS is flakey: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...ge.2204123/page-6?post=30546511#post-30546511
 

CanPhantom

macrumors member
Oct 21, 2014
48
26
Can confirm 100% it is a Sonoma problem.

If you'll go back to the beginning of this thread you'll notice that some of us have been having this problem since OS 12. Definitely not a Sonoma-specific problem, it's been happening for some time. It got significantly better in the later stages of Ventura - personally, I had completely stopped seeing it in the very last Ventura updates before Sonoma came out. I was really hoping they'd finally fixed it - then it got drastically worse again in the first Sonoma releases.

They could just copy/paste Ventura code across.

Software developer here. I doubt they specifically changed the code that mounts PCIe drives. More likely they changed something else (maybe something that's not even related) which messed this up, which is why this is so difficult to nail down a cause for.
 

cobra521

macrumors 6502
Dec 14, 2016
393
136
FL
Has everyone filed a bug report with Apple? This may not be solved for a fading star (7,1) even if we do but it sure as heck won't get Apple's attention if we don't...

I sent mine in. Nothing back, of course.

Tom
 

profdraper

macrumors 6502
Jan 14, 2017
391
290
Brisbane, Australia
Has everyone filed a bug report with Apple? This may not be solved for a fading star (7,1) even if we do but it sure as heck won't get Apple's attention if we don't...

I sent mine in. Nothing back, of course.

Tom
FWIW, I saw this same fault posted multiple times on the Apple Support website, no answer from Apple. When I tried to log in and add comments the site kicked me out multiple times.

BTW I have previously tried the time-wasting supposed 'fixes' including info about encryption (not applicable), booting into recovery etc etc. None of them work.

What 'tends' to work is both resetting the SMC and then zapping the PRAM.
 

Daily PRAM Resets

macrumors newbie
Jan 11, 2024
9
10
FWIW, I saw this same fault posted multiple times on the Apple Support website, no answer from Apple. When I tried to log in and add comments the site kicked me out multiple times.

BTW I have previously tried the time-wasting supposed 'fixes' including info about encryption (not applicable), booting into recovery etc etc. None of them work.

What 'tends' to work is both resetting the SMC and then zapping the PRAM.
I have an active support case at the moment, I am insisting they push this to engineering as a bug.

There must be many affected by this. Here's another relevent Apple Discussions link "PCIE M.2 drive not mounting after Sonoma install":
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255339675?login=true&sortBy=best&answerId=260054533022
 

mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,342
2,975
Australia
I'd be curious if it's effecting folks using TB enclosures, or if it's specific to Mac Pros. It would be a very Apple thing to do - only test software against machines without slots.
 
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