MacPro optical bay issues

[cosmichobo]

G'day,

The original Superdrive in my MacPro5,1 was getting pretty clunky sounding so I purchased a Pioneer BluRay Superdrive BDR-209DBK to replace it.

Initially I just stuck it in the lower optical bay, expecting everything to be rosy, but the Mac wouldn't recognise it. (Was running Mavericks at the time.) IE Not shown in System Report, Disk Utilities would simply hang whilst trying to load its main window, as would VLC.

I swapped the 2 drives around, and suddenly the OS could see them both.

I then upgraded to Sierra, and - lost the Panasonic again, though the original drive still displayed in the lower bay.

I tried disconnecting the original Superdrive - and suddenly the Mac could see the Panasonic... until I tried to launch VLC - which crashed - and again the drive disappeared.

If I open Disk Utility - the app hangs again. System Profile sees nothing at all in the Optical list.

What's going on?!

Thanks

cosmic
[doublepost=1559367982][/doublepost]A shut down, instead of a restart, fixed it for a short time - then gone again...

 

[cosmichobo]

After reading another thread here, I've un-ticked the "sleep hard drives" option in Energy prefs, as apparently once the BDR-209DBK is put to sleep, the MacPro has trouble waking it back up...

Ripping a movie at the minute... 3/4 finished... which is better progress than I've had so far.

 

[bin90a]

I’ve had similar issues with a new Pio Bluray drive that I installed when updating my 5,1. Fortunately I don’t seem to need to use the drive much, but it’s still a nuisance.

 

[cosmichobo]

Seems to solve the problem, but I think I'll have to go back to "sleep when possible" long term - just untick the box and shut down, start up when I need to use the optical...