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Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

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

Top-ranking reply

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 26, 2023 8:16 PM in response to lukiffer

This is not an encryption issue, it is the same issue as this thread. Expect a fix in macOS 13.5, most likely. Its possible it may take longer, it wil be fixed when Apple can create the fix,test, and release it. We hope it is 13.5, but however.

Jun 28, 2023 10:17 AM in response to SoftRAIDSupport

I have a similar set up as the original post and the exact same problems except using a 2023 Mac Studio M2 Ultra with a Sonnetech PCI chassis hosting the cards. WHenever the 4m2 was plugged in to the chassis the computer would kernal panic and shut down on boot.

I reformatted the 4m2 using the apple raid format and it works fine for now with no kernel panics. After I got it working, I tried, for experimentation, to use softraid to convert the drive to softraid format and suffered an immediate kernal panic and shut down. Luckily, I was another to use another computer with softraid to convert the drive back to Apple Raid with no loss of data. Thus, until a fix is found, I will probably leave the drive as is.

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jun 29, 2023 6:28 AM in response to David K. Gross

Thanks for sharing this link from OWC. It's a well written description of what's going on. Thankfully my 4TB 4M2 SSDs are working flawlessly out of the box for whatever reason so I'm just going to stick with those. I can't invest any more time into this right now.

I asked Apple if they'd be willing to compensate me in any way for being likely one of the first people to report this APPLE issue, and being cool about it, giving them the benefit of the doubt and not returning this $10,000 computer that couldn't perform the simple task of hosting a PCIe SSD, like my 2019 Mac Pro and many other computers can do.

I spent A LOT of time on the phone with them, providing photos, videos, and a lot of detail.

I asked if they'd be willing to put this Mac Pro under Apple Care at no cost for all the time lost, and to give peace of mind. They said no.

They offered me a lousy $300 credit (not applicable to Apple Care) to the Apple.com Store to buy a very narrow range of mostly useless products.

Pathetic.

Jun 29, 2023 6:49 AM in response to Jperkins27

Yeah.. my older 4M2 and 1M2 from my 2019 box are working as well.. But I need my third one for an internal Record drive :). I did snag one of the new external 2TB Envoy EX's as a temp fix, and it's pretty zippy and can hold me over for a little while. But yeah.

OWC_Adam

Level 1

8 points

Jun 29, 2023 11:36 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Hey OP, I'm the product manager for internal storage at OWC. We are monitoring this thread and did discover an OS-level issue that causes M2 Mac Studios and M2 Mac Pros to restart whenever four or more SoftRAID NVMe blades are attached. We published an official update yesterday that outlines the problem and a fix (full post: tinyurl.com/2xotar5b).

TL;DR:

- There is a bug in macOS 13.4 unique to the 2023 M2 Mac Studio and Mac Pro that causes the computers to restart whenever four or more SoftRAID NVMe blades are attached

- We have published a temporary fix that works immediately

- We are confident that Apple engineers will have a new version of macOS which fixes this problem in the very near future

I'm happy to answer any follow-up questions, but rest assured our team here is hunkered down and doing everything we can to help our customers and minimize impact to their workflows.

Jul 4, 2023 10:47 AM in response to David K. Gross

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)

Jul 24, 2023 1:42 PM in response to David K. Gross

Ventura OS 13.5 (22G74) released a few hours ago.. Updated my M2Ultra tower and Initialized my new 4M2 with Softraid 7.5. So far, all is working.. Please do post back if anyone can confirm their rig is working (or not!) with this new OS update. thanks all.

Jperkins27 Author

Level 1

5 points

Jul 24, 2023 2:02 PM in response to David K. Gross

I got around the problem by using the new 4TB OWC drives that somehow didn't have this issue. I just installed 13.5 and everything still seems OK.

I really only wanted/needed a 2TB drive and 4TB backup but now I have two 4TB drives but it is what it is.

I do agree with the previous post that it's sad that Apple and OWC/Softraid just let this happen and it took this long for a supposed fix.

Apple send me a free pair of AirPod Pros that I didn't really need for all the HOURS of wasted time this posting on the forums, talking on the phone with them, sending videos, etc.

I would have preferred complimentary Apple Care or something more practical but it also is what it is.

It seems crazy that something as simple as a PCIe SSD could take down an entire computer like this did.

Aug 11, 2023 11:27 PM in response to Jperkins27

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.

Oct 17, 2023 12:17 PM in response to Ray Maxwell

I am sure Apple has internal test tools that show the 26GB/s.

I use AJA System test, as it is pretty good at standardizing results.

Do not use the App store version, it is old.

https://www.aja.com/products/io-4k-plus#support

Click Software and download AJA. Do not install any options, like Adobe, they are not needed. You do not need the Kona app either, just delete it.

Run AJA, set resolution to any 8K video, set the Codec to 16bitRGBA, and file size to 64GB

In settings, enable Dual DMA engine.

You can optionally set it to run continuously.

See what results you get. You should see consistent 20GB/s to 24GB/s

This is a true test of writing video files to disk.

Oct 19, 2023 9:43 AM in response to SoftRAIDSupport

With JBOD via soft raid, does optimizaton help? (meaning does the 'digital audio setting' still benifot us with just running JBOD on 4m2's ? ') Or should just use it with the normal initiazlie settings? thanks