Mac Pro 5.1 and BIG corporate capacity discs, which will work?

Question

Mac Pro 5.1 and BIG corporate capacity discs, which will work?

Hi all,

here in the forum have been reports, that some big corporate capacity hard drives bigger than 8 tb will give problems. e.g. that they are shown by the bios / osx / finder only by a cold start of the mac. And when the mac does a reboot / warm start, they will not be recognized and not shown. Only a complete shutdown and new cold start will show them again.

Now i must replace my 8b boot disc T8000NE0001-1WN112 because it has increasing number of reallocated sectors, and i am afraid that it will fail completely in the near future.

I would like to use the opportunity to insert a really greate disk, 10 tb, 12 tb, 14 tb, 16 tb.

But which brands will work without the reboot problem? Which discs are known to be o in the mac pro 5.1 / osx 10.13.6?

Thank you!

greetings fro germany

Chris

edit:

ooops, wrong section. should have been desktop computers / mac pro

Mac Pro

Posted on Jul 13, 2019 6:30 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Christian Stueben Author

Level 2

200 points

Jul 31, 2019 9:16 AM in response to Christian Stueben

The case is closed...

Now i have a WD Ultrastar DC HC530 14 TB for replacement, and it works perfect. No disappearing after reboot.

greetings from germany

Chris

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Jul 16, 2019 7:31 AM in response to Christian Stueben

I read this elsewhere...

I tried a combination of 10tb Western Digital Reds in my 5,1 and all worked well. Both regular Red 5900rpm and Red Pro 7200rpm. Stuffed all 4 slots and had a Mojave drive booting from the dvd slot Sata.

So, at least 40TB of WD Reds work fine.

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Answer 3

Long Lane

Level 1

105 points

Jul 17, 2019 4:59 PM in response to Christian Stueben

I like your work!

Your best option is as was said above: use a SSD as your boot disk. Your Mac pro has four SATA drive slots. Use one of them for your data on a large drive, create links to those folders in your home directory.

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Answer 4

Jul 13, 2019 3:24 PM in response to Christian Stueben

In my opinion, many really large disks are seen by their manufacturers as "Server" disks, intended to run 24/7. So the manufacturers have not put any money into the electronic brake that traditionally slows drives down when they are dismounted.

I believe that Because they have not finished spinning down, they are not ready to spin up again unless you have endured the slightly longer delay of a Shutdown/Restart.

I do not see this a a defect. I suggest you NOT use it as a measure of overall drive quality. It is possible the reverse is true -- the drives that do not spin down quickly may last longer.

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Answer 5

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Jul 14, 2019 7:19 AM in response to Christian Stueben

When booting to osx, it only shows on cold boot reliable. When doing a warm reboot from osx to osx it will not be shown in the finder.

When doing a warm reboot from win 10 to osx, it will be shown in the osx finder. But only the first time. A second warm reboot from osx to osx ... you have three guesses ... not shown.

When it doesn't show in Finder, does it show in Disk Utility?

When it doesn't show in Finder, does it show if you wait a long time... for say fsck to finish running? Is fsck running?

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Answer 6

Jul 14, 2019 10:12 AM in response to Christian Stueben

The other interesting observation is that OLDER versions of MacOS DO Mount these drives after a Restart.

But older versions of MacOS do not Mount any secondary drives until the login screen, while more recent versions mount secondary drives much sooner in the Boot-up process.

This may also explain different behavior in Windows.

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Answer 7

Jul 14, 2019 1:08 PM in response to Christian Stueben

It is not good for overall performance to use a Big Rotating Drive as the Boot drive for MacOS.

Because of the way macOS reads parts of dozens of files, constantly as it runs, you should use instead:

a smaller drive with very low latency and fast random access.

An SSD drive is ideal for this.

Users who have installed an SSD Boot drive (not less than about 350 GB) in place of a Rotating drive report, "It's like getting a whole new computer!"

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Answer 8

Jul 16, 2019 12:34 AM in response to PeterBreis0807

Hello Peter,

no, ntfs is not the problem. Reformatting them to hfs, hfs+, or something else is not the problem too.

The real problem is, that most of the high capacity corporate discs will be shown in discutility and to the finder ONLY after the first cold boot. When doing a warm reboot from osx to osx, they disappear and will not be shown again. They are gone, until you do a complete cold boot again. Shutdown to power off, wait some seconds, then boot again. Then they are shown again.

Installed windows on the same macintosh under bootcamp has a complete different behavior. There you can do a warm boot from windows to windows, and the corporate capacity discs will be shown EVERY time. 100% reliable.

That is the problem. Windows will show them every time, osx only on the first cold boot.

And Grant has written, this problem only exist in the recent versions of osx. Some older versions (i don´t know which version) of osx show the corporate capacity disk every time too. Strange behaviour.

There must be something in the way corp discs react on "shutdown/reboot command", and how osx and Windows handle this. Windows does it, osx fails.

greetings from germany

Chris

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Answer 9

Jul 16, 2019 3:01 AM in response to Christian Stueben

Entschuldigung Christian

I found where you stated your macOS. I suggest you take this to the High Sierra forum.

If you have not already done so, try the drive in its own powered enclosure and also see if you can get some feedback from the drive manufacturer.

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Answer 10

Jul 14, 2019 10:43 AM in response to BDAqua

>> Ah, NTFS! So what do you use to handle them?

On the osx side? Nothing at all. This drive is used only on the windows side. Where it works reliable.

On the osx side i only see it is there (when it shows up), and i can observe the strange and funny behaviour, but don´t mind about.

But ... i need a second such big drive as osx boot device for replacing my old 8tb boot disk (which still works reliable on the osx side, but shows increasing number of reallocated blocks, smartreporter still reports it in status "green" but i fear it is a matter of time this will change).

greetings from germany

Chris

edit:

for file exchange between osx and windows i have another small 1 tb drive formatted with exfat, which can be read and written from both operating systems.

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Answer 11

Jul 14, 2019 10:15 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

>> Users who have installed an SSD Boot drive (not less than about 350 GB) in place of a Rotating drive report, "It's like getting a whole new computer!"

Users ... report "it is like getting a complete empty bank account".

Yeah, i know, ssd is like comparing rockets to slugs or turtles, but they are still expensive, very expensive.

Hmm, maybe next year, when the eight million terabyte drive will come, ssd may decrease in price significantly ;-).

greetings from germany

Chris

(no, i dont confess that i am thinking about the ssd option)

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Answer 12

Jul 15, 2019 5:49 AM in response to Christian Stueben

In the US, I can buy a good 500GB SSD drive (that would go in a bay) from OWC for under US$75:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/S3D7E3G500/

B & H Photo in NY shows several good brands SanDisk, Crucial, Transcend, PNY in the about 500GB range for about that price. You would need a special sled (US$17) or to hack a way to keep it steady in the bay.

You don't need to put everything on one drive when you have four bays.

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Answer 13

Jul 15, 2019 10:44 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

75$ for 500gb is a good price.

But my fotos allone are a 2.5 tb, plus gigapanoramas, plus virtual tours *1), plus, plus, plus ...

500 gb will not be enough. Minimum amount would be ten of them as array. Or one of them plus corporate capacity spinning cutie. Deep sigh.

greetings from germany

Chris

*1) http://360.haifischbar.de/panoramen/beispiele/sslz.html

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Answer 14

Jul 15, 2019 11:19 AM in response to Christian Stueben

You don't need or want every thing on SSD. That is too expensive and also unnecessary.

Put System, Applications, Paging/Swap and at least one Admin user (for administration only) on the Boot drive.

Then put just your fotos and plus plus plus on one (or more!) of your BIG drives. You have four bays, use them all.

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Answer 15

Jul 15, 2019 12:49 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

>> You have four bays, use them all.

No, i dont have four bays. I had them (past). Today i have (present) four already filled bays. Plus an esata card that has a fifth disk on board. That is why the deep sigh.

So inserting a ssd means replacing one already filled big drive. And the need to replace at least one of the smaller drives with a MUCH bigger one to make more space. And the need to spend additional money, more mone, and mooore money ;-(

It is a long time grown setup.

That´s why to replace one big disk (with increasing number of replaced sectors) with a much bigger spinning disc.

If there were only one drive in my mac pro, all would be easy, and cheap to replace. But to change system setup of an already well filled and stuffed mac pro is not easy, not cheap. Maybe i will do it when i win the lotto jackpot. Or buy the brand new cheese grinder. But lotto jackpot first ;-)

Yes the sata card has external connectors, so external drives can be connected. But these connectors i have reserved for backup drives.

greetings from germany

Chris

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Mac Pro 5.1 and BIG corporate capacity discs, which will work?

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