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Mac Pro 2023 will not boot with PCIe SSD installed.

I just spent all night setting my new M2 Mac Pro. Everything seemed OK. This morning I was ready to do the final steps and get back to work. The final steps included adding some additional storage for my audio projects. Something I've been doing for over two decades now and didn't expect that to be a showstopper.

As soon as I installed my previously working OWC SSD OWC Accelsior 4M2 the Mac Pro would NOT boot. This drive works and I put it back in my 2019 Mac Pro and there are no issues. Even if I put the OWC SSD in a Sonnet PCIe to Thunderbolt chassis, the same thing happens. No boot. If I connect the chassis when the Mac is booted, it freezes.

I had also purchased a new OWC Accelsior 8M2 and planned for it to be my main working audio drive but the issue also happens with that SSD, so it's safe to say it's not a faulty SSD.

OWC is a VERY reliable brand and widely used in the pro audio and video community. I've been using them over 20 years now without issue.

I am not using these drives to boot the MacOS from. These are just storage for my actual audio projects, which is common in audio studios to have a dedicated drive for all the audio work. No software runs from these drives. I am using the internal Mac SSD to boot from as you normally would and without the PCIe SSDs, the computer seems to run just fine. I was so excited to get to work but I can't use this machine and get by on just the internal storage. Additional PCIe storage is essential in a pro studio.

I chatted with Apple Support today and they are looking into it, but I don't feel too confident about it. The "senior advisor" was not even aware there was a new 2023 Mac Pro (LOL) and hadn't watched the WWDC yet. I thought he was joking. He was not.

I called OWC as well and they are not aware of any issues yet but the Mac Pro just started arriving yesterday so it's still new territory. I'm trying to find out if it's an OWC issue, or Apple.

I do have an OWC Thunderbay 8 with 8 HDD (my project archives) and that did work OK.

Something about the new Mac Pro is NOT happy with PCIe SSDs connected either internally, or in a Thunderbolt chassis.

After staying up all night and wasting about 10 hours of setting up the new 2023 Mac Pro, I am sadly back to working on my 2019 Mac Pro. All my OWC SSDs work just fine again when inserted in the 2019 Mac Pro.

This could be bad news for Apple if it's on their end.

Mac Pro

Posted on Jun 15, 2023 10:22 AM

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Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Posted on Jun 16, 2023 7:44 AM

Some progress has been made. While for some reason, the new and unformatted OWC 8M2 drive was still causing this issue (it could be due to needing an additional power cable/supply), I tried a new and unformatted OWC 4M2 drive and it worked.

I am currently back to work using the M2 Mac Pro and a new OWC 4M2 PCIe SSD to store my active audio projects.

In talking with OWC, it seems that the new Mac Pro might not like external PCIe drives that are formatted to anything other than APFS Volume • APFS.

Hopefully Apple can release an update that makes the M2 Mac Pro work with a wider variety of external drives in terms of how they are formatted.

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119 replies

Jun 16, 2023 4:05 PM in response to David K. Gross

<<HEY ALL>> Try something here. Look at your SoftRaid formatting on the drives that don't work and check your block size. A friend of mine just sent me this. I'm going to do an experiment and report back asap.

Is the card formatted to use 64kb block size? The issue looks a lot like a problem with the I/O system that others experienced a year ago on the first M2 laptops and from what I’ve seen there’s anecdotal evidence it’s caused by formatting the drive with a suboptimal format.

Basically, the I/O on the M2 is so fast that it can cause issues if the card isn’t formatted for the massive I/O that’s happening. The hardware can deadlock or the massive I/O rate can expose bugs in the firmware that won’t happen on older machines.

Jun 16, 2023 4:58 PM in response to Jperkins27

Well..it didn't work on my end for the older 1tb/4M2. But, something to think about regarding Optimizing the OWC card via Soft Raid (according to a tech friend of mine):

With unified memory the new chips go from making thousands of 16kb reads per second to make tens of millions, and that could overload the firmware of the cards. So using larger block sizes will cut the number of read operations down considerably. Also, there’s also some anecdotes that switching to RAID 1+0 fixes a very similar looking kernel panic. It likely works because it cuts the I/O throughput in half for the striping operation.

This is starting to get over MY head.. but I'm planning on trying more experiments (and hopefully there might have just been an issue with the chipset in the newer OWC card...But setting the block size to 64 makes sense (since I'm doing mostly ProTools and Logic with my machine).

==========================

From the SoftRaid help file

Optimized for Workstation:

Rebuilding mirrors and validating volumes will proceed at full speed unless any SoftRAID volume is reading or writing files. If a SoftRAID volume is reading or writing files, the rebuild or validate will only proceed during 50% of the time (0.5 sec rebuild, 0.5 sec rebuild paused, 0.5 sec rebuild, etc). The default stripe unit size when creating a new stripe volume is set to the best value for general use.

Optimized for Server:

Rebuilding mirrors and validating volumes will proceed at full speed unless any SoftRAID volume is reading or writing files. If a SoftRAID volume is reading or writing files, the rebuild or validate will only proceed during 75% of the time (0.75 sec rebuild, 0.25 sec rebuild paused, 0.75 sec rebuild, etc). The default stripe unit size when creating a new stripe volume is set to the best value for the small i/o sizes commonly found on database, web and mail servers.

Optimized for Digital Video:

Rebuilding mirrors and validating volumes will proceed at full speed unless any SoftRAID volume is reading or writing files. If a SoftRAID volume is reading or writing files, the rebuild or validate will pause until 15 seconds after the last file read or write operation. The default stripe unit size when creating a new stripe volume is set to the largest size possible for the disks used by the volume. This will offer the highest throughput for large files and uncompressed video.

Optimized for Digital Audio:

Rebuilding mirrors and validating volumes will proceed at full speed unless any SoftRAID volume is reading or writing files. If a SoftRAID volume is reading or writing files, the rebuild or validate will pause until 15 seconds after the last file read or write operation. The default stripe unit size when creating a new stripe volume is set to the smallest size which SoftRAID supports. This ensures that disk i/o does not starve the buffers on some digital audio PCI cards.

Optimized for Digital Photography:

Rebuilding mirrors and validating volumes will proceed at full speed unless any SoftRAID volume is reading or writing files. If a SoftRAID volume is reading or writing files, the rebuild or validate will pause until 5 seconds after the last file read or write operation. The default stripe unit size when creating a new stripe volume is set to 128 KB. This will offer high throughput for large files and still provide good performance with PhotoShop which reads and writes files in smaller blocks.

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 16, 2023 7:47 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I don't really know but I think it's software. It's my understanding that these larger capacity OWC SSD are a few smaller SSDs that can be configured as RAID, or one big drive. I set mine up as one drive and don't use any RAID features.

The older 1TB might not be available anymore, but here is the current model that you can order:

[Link Edited by Moderator]

Jun 16, 2023 7:59 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Yeah. The OWC drives come with Soft Raid software than allowed a wide variety of options for different raid configs as well as buffer sizes. And yes. It’s insanely odd that the brand new drive would t work in the M2 no matter what, but was fine in the Intel box :/

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 16, 2023 8:04 PM in response to Jperkins27

I should mention that my goal is not to get my older drives that worked fine in the 2019 Mac Pro to work in the 2023, even though they should. That is a lost cause at this point.

My goal is just to understand what PCIe SSDs I can buy and safely use in the 2023 Mac Pro.

The new Mac Pros seem to be VERY picky about formatting and specs as there are numerous reports of issues like mine, and other external drive related issues that you just wouldn’t expect from a new professional machine from Apple.

Hopefully it’s something they can address ASAP with a firmware or software update.

I understand perhaps not being able to read drives formatted a certain way but the fact that these drives which again, worked flawlessly in the 2019 Mac Pro are grinding the new Mac Pro to a halt and preventing them from even booting is pretty crazy.

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 18, 2023 5:38 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Just checking in here. My new OWC 4M2 that was purchased last week, the one that didn't prevent my Mac Pro 2023 from booting up when inserted, and was able to be formatted to APFS seems to be working great.

I've done a fair amount of work this weekend without an issue. For now I'm just using my 1TB OWC Envoy Pro mini (formatted to APFS as fate would have it) as my backup drive until my other new 4M2 arrives Tuesday. We'll see if that allows me to insert it without killing the Mac Pro 2023. Ideally that will be my backup audio drive that gets mounted every 15 minutes for Carbon Copy Cloner to back up the main audio drive and then eject the backup drive. That system worked great on my 2019 Mac Pro.

My older spinning 3.5" drives (used for older project archives) that are in my OWC Thunderbay 8 connected via Thunderbolt are also working just fine. I think those are SATA drives formatted to HFS.

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 18, 2023 6:49 PM in response to David K. Gross

That is funny. For me, the 3.5" spinning HDD disks in my Thunderbay are for my finished mastering projects. I like to have them easily accessible in case I need to revisit something. One data cable and one power switch and I can get at all my archives quickly and easily.

I have a bare 3.5" HDD that mirrors each drive in the Thunderbay 8 and I keep those in a fireproof safe, and just connect them via an OWC bare drive dock every few weeks to keep them in sync with the "master" archive disk in the Thunderbay. Things don't really change much on those drives, aside from adding newly finished projects to them every month or so.

All the disks in the Thunderbay 8 are sync'd up to Backblaze for total worst case scenario, and my little pocket 1TB OWC Envoy Pro mini is what I keep in my pocket for my total worst case scenario back up for active working projects...so if the house blows up while I'm gone, all my active projects are up to date in my pocket and in Backblaze, and all the archives are in the Backblaze cloud too in case the fireproof safe doesn't survive.

I'm a worst case scenario-ist.

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 19, 2023 12:45 PM in response to Jperkins27

Also, in all the chaos I got confused and just realized that it's my brand new FOUR TB 42M that is working just fine in the 2023 Mac Pro. That was the drive that was intended to be the backup to my brand new 2TB 82M which did not work.

I will be very curious to see what happens tomorrow when the new 2TB 42M arrives, or if I hear anything back from Apple after the holiday weekend.

Jun 19, 2023 2:23 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

disk10 looks goofy. It has an APFS partition, but it has no GUID partition Map.

compare to any of the (external, physical) drives listed after it.

Is that the problem drive, or is this just a red herring?

[Expression: red herring is something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question.]

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 19, 2023 2:24 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Disk10 is the 4TB OWC 4M2 SSD that is for some reason working in my 2023 Mac Pro without issue.

It's a very similar drive to the other PCIe OWC drives that myself and others are reporting as not working.

Jun 19, 2023 2:30 PM in response to Jperkins27

Jperkins27 wrote:

Disk10 is the 4TB OWC 4M2 SSD that is for some reason working in my 2023 Mac Pro without issue.

It's a very similar drive to the other PCIe OWC drives that myself and others are reporting as not working.

then perhaps that is the way SoftRAID sets up the drive when you use SoftRAID to set up a bare drive.

Okay, now how about the reverse?

suppose SoftRAID wanted a completely bare drive and the GUID partition map is messing it up?

--- I am guessing here, so feel free to tell me to sit down and be quiet.

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 19, 2023 2:37 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Perhaps. That's beyond the scope of my knowledge at this point, but everything is working and SoftRAID and Disk Utility report no errors with that drive.

Maybe somebody from Apple and/or OWC is monitoring this thread and the info will be helpful.

A 10k computer should be able to host a PCIe SSD that its predecessor did. I didn't see Apple list any exceptions or exclusions about PCIe storage in the new Mac Pro.

Jun 19, 2023 2:47 PM in response to Jperkins27

FWIW...I have let my contact at OWC know about this thread since there seems to be some pretty smart people here trying to figure it out, and not just complaining. :). I'll be reaching out to them tomorrow as well.

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 19, 2023 2:54 PM in response to David K. Gross

Thanks! I have been in touch with OWC a bit and also with a few senior level Apple support and engineers late last week.

I'm hoping that after the holiday weekend tomorrow Apple will be back in touch about this.

I'm hoping this can be solved with a software/firmware update as I don't really want to set up another new Mac Pro as this one is working really well aside from these SSD issues which are not good, or a good sign.

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 20, 2023 10:18 AM in response to David K. Gross

Well, bad news. I added the new 2TB OWC 4M2 PCIe SSD to the 2023 Mac Pro and that caused the same issue. It won’t boot when it’s in the computer. I didn’t remove the other working drive, I just added the new once since that is my ideal configuration to have both drives in the Mac.

It does seem let me go SLIGHTLY farther and attempt to log in, but after entering the password, the progress meter barely starts and then it shuts down.

Mac Pro 2023 will not boot with PCIe SSD installed.