Mac Pro 3,1 SATA optical drives - sometimes not visible

Thanks Malcolm , that may very well be the issue . I've unchecked that box , and will now wait and see if it solves the problem .

Hi Grant , thanks , but I didn't find it a problem at the mother board end - however , the two cables I used happened to be straight at one end and right angled at the other , and I found it more convenient to put a right angle connector onto the back of one of the optical drives , so as it happens I do have a right angle connector on one of the motherboard sockets .

I've looked a bit further into this and , as well as resetting NVRAM and SMC a few times , I have also disabled System Integrity Protection , then re enabled it after a couple of reboots .

What I have noticed is that the two drives show up pretty regularly both under the eject button in the menu bar , and in Roxio Toast , but generally after the machine has been running for a while they cease to function and , if I try to use them , then a message is displayed that I have inserted a blank disc , when in fact nothing has been inserted . The only way to get the drives working again is by restarting the machine .

I looked on the Pioneer website to see if there were any OSX drivers , but apart from a utility which puts the drives into 'quiet mode' everything is windows only . My drives both show firmware v 1.2 , and there are various firmware upgrades as far as v 1.5 , but only for Windows machines , which I wouldn't have in my house .

Malcolm , I just came back to thank you again and to confirm that , after sitting overnight , the two optical drives are still 'awake' .

I think there were a combination of issues , with the NVRAM and SMC resets , disabling and reenabling the csrutil in terminal , between them ensuring that the drives both showed up every time the machine is booted , then this setting ensuring that they don't go to sleep after a period of time .

Hopefully this will be useful to others who might be experiencing similar issues .

I'm not aware whether Apple sell their own branded Blu-Ray optical drives , which might have the low power polling feature you mentioned , but since the internal optical drives which came from the factory in earlier Macs I've had were always Pioneer , that's what I chose . I know there are a range of firmware updates available for my two drives , but since you need a Windows machine to do them ( something I've never owned ) , that won't be happening .

Hi Malcolm . I initially went online looking to see if there were Mac OS drivers that I might need , and ended up on the Pioneer website . On the page below , there are lots of firmware downloads - there are only a couple applicable to the BDR-209 series , but in any case all are Windows type .exe files ; the only download applicable to Mac is the drive utility ( which I downloaded and installed , but it only enables the drive to be put into 'quiet mode' ) . While there do appear to be some small advantages in the later firmware versions , both my drives ( one BDR-209D and a BDR 209M ) are functioning perfectly well as they are , and while I rarely write Blu-Ray discs ( I used to film weddings etc and offered Blu-Ray HD discs as an option ) , I made one on each drive and checked that they played in my Blu-Ray player . Most people latterly were happy with either a DVD disc or a file on a USB drive . These days I mainly film conferences , which is a lot less work !

https://pioneer.jp/device_e/product-e/ibs/device_e/dev00001r_e.html#DriveUtility

I seem to remember now that I did look into the availability of Mac approved Blu Ray drives a few years back before I bought the first one , and , although I couldn't find any at the time , I stuck with Pioneer because they were the vendors of the original drives in my Macs . Now that you mention it , I think I did come across the failure of Apple to reach agreement on Blu-Ray .

This is all a bit moot now as most computers , of whichever flavour , are moving away from optical drives .

Anyway , thanks again for your helpful comments .