Mac Pro 2023 will not boot with PCIe SSD installed.

Running the "Uninstall All SoftRAID Components" option did not work.

I'm on 13.4.1 (22F2083), was previously on 13.4 (unsure of the build number).

I purchased 16 new (uninitialized) drives, installed them, and was able to boot. I didn't destroy the RAID or wipe any of the previous drives, so if you need additional info in testing, just let me know.

Mac Pro 2023 PCIe SSD issues

I discovered another Problem with a Sonnet Fusion Dual U.2 SSD PCIe Card filled with two Kingston DC 1500M nvme U.2 SSDs with 7.68 TB.

No matter if I used them in Raid 0 or JBOD there is always a forced restart with a panic report if I tried to shut down the Mac Pro.

I tried everything - safe reboot, complete new and clean Systeminstallation, removing all other cards and periphery - nothing helped.

Then I ordered a single PCIe to u.2 nvme SSD Card and tried it with one DC 1500M - same problem.

The strange Thing is that the problem did not occur if I install the DC 1500M with the pci Card in my good old Mac Pro 6.1 - everything went smooth.

Is there anybody with same issues or a workaround? Is it a System or a Hardware problem?

Or is it better to open a new thread with this?

best Klaus Wagner

Mac Pro 2023 M2 Ultra 128 GB, Ventura 13.4.1 (22F2083)

I got an Email from Sonnet - they told me that the problem are the Kingston U.2 nvme SSDs, there are incompatible with the Mac.

I will try some others.

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 :/

I'd love to start this as a sub-thread specifically see if it's a particular type of chip causing the issue.. Those of use with OWC/SoftRaid can easily see this info.

JPerkins: your 4TB 'Mystery Room' is using 4-1TB OWC Aura Ultra IV chips. So that's working in your M2 (new)

DGross: I have a 4TB "Content" drive using 4- 1TB OWC Aura Ultra PRO chips. This works in both my Intel and M2 box

DGross: I also have an older 1M2 unit with a single 1TB OWC Aura P12 Pro chip that works in both. It's only got a 4kb sector size, and I don't seem to be able to change that. But, when I try to, I get an 'unsupported enclosure' error.. Gonna have to ping OWC about that.. it's working..but :)

I have seen several reports of this. We are working on finding "workarounds".

One thing that will certainly work is backing up, and deleting your volume. Zero the disks.

Then run RAID Assistant in DIsk Utility to create a RAID 0 volume. If you make it HFS, you can "convert" this volume to SoftRAID when a permanent resolution to this issue has been found.

When there is a known temporary fix, I will post it here. At present, this issue seems to affect Mac Studio M2, Mac Pro M2 and possibly the most recent versions of MacOS.

Hopefully news will be posted in the next few days.

I'll be curious to know if the new 4TB 4m2 solves this. I'd rather not spend the extra $, but if having 2 matching 4TB 4M2's makes my rig stable, I'll do it. (FWIW..I DO have a 1TB 1M2 as well that's working just fine along with my existing 4TB 4M2). heck..the only commonality I'm seeing through all of this is an issue with the 2TB 4M2 version.

<< Grant;

SoftRAID publishes its volumes as whole numbers, rather than slices. So a SoftRAID volume disk10, is just the equivalent of disk10s2 with an APFS Apple volume. Not a problem. >>

.. so that is the EXPECTED look of a SoftRAID-controlled device, no separate GUID Partition map partition is created (because none is needed).

I was going to go back and get the diskutil list output, but the Hosts must have decided it contained bad stuff and removed it. from memory, it showed something like (possibly inaccurate) re-creation:

disk10/dev/disk10 (external, physical):

   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER

   0:      APFS Volume                        4.0 TB     disk10

..that is distinctive in having no GUID partition Map partition, and no EFI partition, and no APFS container-disk, but goes straight to an APFS Volume.

Intersting comparison.. MY 4TB 4M2 is using the Aura Pro IV chips, NOT the Ultra IV's that you have. This worked fine in my Intel box and this one.. No issues

(the Ultra IV that I do have is a 2TB external Envoy EX that came yesterday. My Aura P12 Pro is a 1TB 1M2 internal, also from the 2019 Intel box.. No issues.

When you can’t boot up, it takes you to recovery. Erase your drives. Reboot and the system will start as they are not initialized.

Once in Mac OS, erase and reset them all. Then use Raid Assistant to setup the raid. Avoid SoftRaid and you are good to go.

ctwinger's feedback is consistent with my theory about the SoftRAID kext. My issue is that Disk Utility doesn't (elegantly) handle RAID 10. I may abandon this ambition and just use Time Machine or a cloud backup solution for resiliency and forego local redundancy.

For those of you who only need RAID-0 or RAID-1, and still have access to your 2019 Mac Pro, you should be able to put the drives in the 2019 MP and wipe them. I was unsuccessful at getting into recovery mode with the drives present in the 2023 MP.

Once they're wiped in the 2019 MP, you should be able to put them back into the 2023 MP and then build the new RAID set using Disk Utility and it should be fine.

I have the new Mac Pro 2023 M2 Ultra and have updated it to OS X 13.5 and installed the OWC Accelsior 8M2

it works fine and gets 22 GigaBytes/sec read and write using the ATTO disk speed utility. I needed set the transfer size to 64 GB to see this speed. Blackmagic disk utility will only show about 11 GigaBytes/sec but uses a maximum 5 GigaByte block size. There seems to be some overhead in setting up the read/write cycles in the test and you have to use very large block sizes to see the real transfer speed. I am very happy with the whole setup. BTW if the ATTO disk speed test could use block sizes larger than 64 GigaBytes, I think I might see the full 26 GigaByte speed advertised by OWC.