MP 7,1 Sonnet M.2 4x4 Pcie Card New Version?

[LeonPro]

My first thought are the memory sticks, but seeing a reformat each time...could your Sonnet PCIe card go south and be the offender since you said you are experiencing it on both OS?

What test are you running? I can see if it's occurring to mine based on the program (has to be a Mac though).

I just ran the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and it's constantly going at 5GB/s (2 x Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB @ RAID 0 as well) and did this to the other set of 2 x RAID 0 sticks on the same PCIe card with similar results.

 

[kennyman]

Does that mean that the fan-less Sonnet PCIe card is throttling the SSDs? Wondering whether I should get the Sonnet with the fan.

 

[LeonPro]

I am not experiencing any throttling with the card. If you have a Mac Pro 2019, you wouldn't need the fan as there is adequate cooling.

 

[VaZ]

So whats the deal with it being only able to boot off 1 SSD and not in RAID 0 where all the speed is ?
Thats a deal breaker for me. Anyone figure out a workaround !?

 

[Schismz]

So whats the deal with it being only able to boot off 1 SSD and not in RAID 0 where all the speed is ?
Thats a deal breaker for me. Anyone figure out a workaround !?

It's not the card, Apple broke that on macOS many revisions ago (booting from RAID0).

 

[VaZ]

What do you mean? I'm on Mojave booting on a 4 drive RAID0.
Somethings up with this card. Is there an alternative card that will boot with the 4 slots filled and RAIDed?

 

[tsialex]

What do you mean? I'm on Mojave booting on a 4 drive RAID0.
Somethings up with this card. Is there an alternative card that will boot with the 4 slots filled and RAIDed?

None. Btw, you hacked Mojave to work from a RAID array - Apple never implemented bootable APFS RAID array support and it's not possible with Catalina or BigSur.

Official bootable AppleRAID support ends with HFS+ and HighSierra.

 

[Schismz]

APFS has never supported bootable arrays (other than Apple's own "SSDs" which aren't really SSDs since the controller is the T2 chip which then does a RAID0 on both blades).

I believe 10.13.5 or .6 is the last official macOS release which can boot a RAID0 array without hacks and workarounds. You can maybe make it work with Mojave but need to keep cloning the boot disk and updates to the array, I believe @dosdude1 provided some sort of workaround/patch. Are you somehow running Mojave on HFS+ and doing direct updates to a bootable array? To my understanding and recollection, without hacks/patches you cannot boot Mojave from HFS+. I recall being frustrated at the time since I'd been using RAID0 boot for many years prior.

Where speed really shines is on large files, the issue with booting is more latency and booting from a RAID0 does not dramatically improve boot time or responsiveness of the OS. If you scroll back through this thread I've posted my own -- highly positive -- experiences with original Sonnet card and 4 NVME Samsung blades from last year, but I use it mostly for data/storage and scratch.

If you have a lot of RAM, cards, or devices attached, the longest delay in your Mac Pro's boot time will be scanning the PCIe space, not reading from the startup volume.