MP 1,1-5,1 OWC Accelsior 1M2 card behaving badly.

[BoomerTheBlunt]

I purchased an OWC Accelsior 1M2 PCIe card for my Mac Pro 5,1. Initially, there were a lot of problems getting the machine to recognize the card. I got it working (somewhat) but ended up having it replaced trying to fix the issues I'm having. It didn't do the trick. Maybe someone here could shed some light on this?

The card is installed in slot 2. I have a SanDisk Ultra 3D NVMe 1TB SSD attached. I have Mojave 10.14.6 installed on the SSD. I have a HD with several partitions of different OS's, the first partition being High Sierra. I have a MSI RX460 GPU installed. There is another card installed in slot 4 which is an USB eXtensible Host Controller. I don't remember the vendor, but it hasn't been giving me any problems and was in the system prior to the OWC card. I have performed multiple PRam and SMC resets and it does not seem to help.

Here are the issues:

1) I am able to boot from the SSD only when I am restarting. If I shut down the machine for any length of time, when I start up, it always boots from the High Sierra partition on the HD. When this happens, I have to log in and open system preferences. Even though it says that the startup disk is the SSD, I still have to log in and restart. If I just restart at the login screen, it will boot back up into High Sierra again. Once I log in and restart, it will boot up from the SSD. I can restart as many times as I want and it will always restart from the SSD.

2) I am not able to put the computer to sleep. I have had to change my energy saver settings to never for sleep. When the computer would go to sleep, it causes a kernel panic and I must hard restart with the power button as everything locks up.

3) This isn't a problem so to speak, but this isn't an area I'm real knowledgeable in, so I wanted to check. When I look at the stats of the NVMe Controller, the Link Speed is showing only at 2.5 GT/s and a link width of x4. My USB controller shows a link speed of 5.0 GT/s and a x2 width. Is the speed for each lane or is that the combined speed of the card? Does this mean that my USB card is the same speed as the NVMe card even though it is running on only 2 lanes as opposed to 4? Is the USB card faster? Does the Accelsior just have a slow chipset?

Any insight as to what's going on here is very welcome! I just have no idea what to do to fix this.

Thanks in advance!

 

[tsialex]

I purchased an OWC Accelsior 1M2 PCIe card for my Mac Pro 5,1. Initially, there were a lot of problems getting the machine to recognize the card. I got it working (somewhat) but ended up having it replaced trying to fix the issues I'm having. It didn't do the trick. Maybe someone here could shed some light on this?

The card is installed in slot 2. I have a SanDisk Ultra 3D NVMe 1TB SSD attached. I have Mojave 10.14.6 installed on the SSD. I have a HD with several partitions of different OS's, the first partition being High Sierra. I have a MSI RX460 GPU installed. There is another card installed in slot 4 which is an USB eXtensible Host Controller. I don't remember the vendor, but it hasn't been giving me any problems and was in the system prior to the OWC card. I have performed multiple PRam and SMC resets and it does not seem to help.

Here are the issues:

1) I am able to boot from the SSD only when I am restarting. If I shut down the machine for any length of time, when I start up, it always boots from the High Sierra partition on the HD. When this happens, I have to log in and open system preferences. Even though it says that the startup disk is the SSD, I still have to log in and restart. If I just restart at the login screen, it will boot back up into High Sierra again. Once I log in and restart, it will boot up from the SSD. I can restart as many times as I want and it will always restart from the SSD.

2) I am not able to put the computer to sleep. I have had to change my energy saver settings to never for sleep. When the computer would go to sleep, it causes a kernel panic and I must hard restart with the power button as everything locks up.

3) This isn't a problem so to speak, but this isn't an area I'm real knowledgeable in, so I wanted to check. When I look at the stats of the NVMe Controller, the Link Speed is showing only at 2.5 GT/s and a link width of x4. My USB controller shows a link speed of 5.0 GT/s and a x2 width. Is the speed for each lane or is that the combined speed of the card? Does this mean that my USB card is the same speed as the NVMe card even though it is running on only 2 lanes as opposed to 4? Is the USB card faster? Does the Accelsior just have a slow chipset?

Any insight as to what's going on here is very welcome! I just have no idea what to do to fix this.

Thanks in advance!

You probably have different problems here, the serious one is that you can't fully bless the NVMe disk. Maybe your NVRAM is full or you have an stuck sector, this need investigation since you can have a brick incoming.

The link width of the NVMe it's weird, should be 5GT/s x4. Did you injected the NVMe module and is using a MP51.00xx.B00 BootROM version? Did it in the past and now have the current Mojave BootROM?

Btw, your OWC Accelsior 1M2 PCIe card don't have any chipset, it's just a format conversion card, from PCIe x4 to M.2 connector. It's a dumb card.

 

[tsialex]

I've sent you a PM with instructions on how to correctly dump your BootROM, let's see what is really going on here.

 

[BoomerTheBlunt]

I've sent you a PM with instructions on how to correctly dump your BootROM, let's see what is really going on here.

Thank you! I've replied and sent the requested info. I hope I did it right. lol. And hope that you are able to make something out of it! Thanks again!

 

[jaygaret]

I know this post is old, but maybe this will help others. I struggled with a similar problem. Resetting the PRAM solved the problem by rebooting the system on the SATA drive every time. I would then reboot once more selecting the system from the Startup Disc. As long as you didn't do anything that remembered your settings on a system installed on SATA (for ex. installing new app), you could reboot a system installed on NVMe configured with OWC Accelsior 1M2 PCIe without any problem. Regards!