M.2 NVMe SSDs in the 2023 Mac Pro. Use a Sonnet M.2 4x4 PCIe card

That card is built for SPEED. That card has a controller, so it can configure provide full x16 PCIe 4 speeds to any drive or combination of drives. When multiple drives are configured as a Striped RAID, the speed is truly impressive.

But for a music production Mac, you should not need that much speed, and could save most the estimated retail US$800 by using slower alternatives.

The fastest generally-available single NVMe SSD module seems to be an advertised 7,000 M Bytes/sec. again, all about speed.

Do you even need SSD drives for music production?

I understand your point, Grant, but what's interesting is that nobody at Apple who talks to anyone in the public knows the basic specs of these machines, which is much less than good. They made no allowances for anyone who isn't a casual user on any tier of what's available. And since the thing has "pro" in the name, I don't think it's unreasonable for pro people to want to know what the specs of a machine are. I can't think of a single good reason why the number of PCIe lanes isn't published.

In my realm it's not good to have more variables than are strictly necessary - the machine doing something "clever" in the background can result in some visual or audible artifact when I least want it. I can appreciate if this is simply not an issue for you - I don't know your use case - but let's be clear about analogies - they aren't the thing to be argued about. What I say still stands - the airline saying "there will be a short delay" (no matter how short) is not the same as "we did what we said we'd do". It is absolutely possible to use the Mac Pro within its specs and get absolutely full performance, with headroom, but one would not get that by filling it with 8x and 16x cards - one would get the moderated PCIe switch situation, which is fine for some and less than fine for others. I'd rather have seen a board with fewer slots or a CPU with more lanes.

The configuration utility adds up the number of lanes you have assigned to A and to B and tells you the percentage. Stay under 100 percent on each side and you should never face any slowdowns.

One can also modestly over-configure, but I expect you will not want to do that.

Install PCIe cards in your Mac Pro (2023) - Apple Support

scroll down for information on "Expansion Slot Utility" and an exact tally of how many lanes are supplied:

PCIe bandwidth

The M2 Ultra chip provides 32 lanes of PCIe gen 4 to the system, with 8 lanes dedicated to the internal SSD. The M2 Ultra chip connects to the PCIe slots through a PCIe switch and provides 24 lanes of gen 4 bandwidth. Pool A provides a maximum of 16 lanes of gen 4 bandwidth and Pool B provides a maximum of 8 lanes of gen 4 bandwidth.

These built-in components are connected to the system through the PCIe switch and assigned to Pool B:

• SATA controller
• 10Gb Ethernet controllers 
• Wireless (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) controller
• USB-A port
• PCIe Slot 7 (Apple I/O card)

This means that a system will always show a percentage allocated to Pool B, even if no PCIe cards are installed.

Each built-in Thunderbolt port in Mac Pro is managed by its own controller integrated in the M2 Ultra chip and doesn't share bandwidth with the PCIe slots.

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<< There have been multiple posts about this issue but Apple seems to be ignoring it. >>

This is the Apple User-to-User Support Community. Apple is not monitoring these forums, except to ensure civility and provide answers to posts that go completely un-answered.

There are no standard mechanisms for escalating problems to Apple Support from here, and Apple Engineering and Marketing Movers and Shakers do NOT monitor these forums looking for trends and outstanding issues. If other users can not help you think of a fix, No further help is likely to be forthcoming using this medium. 

If the suggestions already posted here are not adequate to solve your problem, and you have tried:

• creating a new Account/Userid and logging in with that new Account to eliminate Account issues

• Restarting in Safe Mode to eliminate third-party add-on issues --

Then you may have a very complex issue or have discovered a bug. We can't fix (or even track) bugs from the forums. Engineering effort to fix bugs is applied only in response to Bug Reports. 

Get Support

Be polite and professional. 

But do not let them tell you "it's fine", unless it really IS fine.

Work with them until:

•  the problem is solved -OR-

•  they file a Bug Report -OR-

•  they forward you to specialist who solves the problem or files a Bug report.

To file a Bug Report, contact support, work with the first responder to go through their checklist of obvious issues (¿is it plugged in properly?). 

if no solution, be polite and professional, and ASK FOR A SPECIALIST.

The specialist will probably have to contact you again later.

Specialists are more knowledgeable in their areas of expertise, but far less patient. You can freely reference things posted on the forums, but they never take out word for things, they have their own more rigorous methods for data collection and analysis. 

One of the most important items you can provide is EXACTLY how to replicate the issue you encountered.

Official Apple Support

DO NOT "wait for Apple to provide a fix". Unless and until a large number of users present their issues through standard problem-reporting channels, Apple does not know there is a problem, and is NOT working on a fix. Being selfish is the best policy, getting yours fixed helps everyone.

If you want to send your suggestions or opinions directly to Apple use the feedback links:

Product Feedback - Apple

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purplepaul1 wrote:

Not compatible with sonoma yet...PCIe 4.0

sonnet states on its web site that card is Sonoma compatible.

¿what are you talking about?

No, it specifically says it is compatible.

For Rotating Magnetic drives, speed above 150 M Bytes/sec are exceptional, and the limiting factor is the Drive. (Drive RPM limits how fast data bits can spin under the read-write head.)

USB 3.2 itself is limited to 20 G bits, 20,000 M bits/sec or around 2,000 M Bytes/sec, so the enclosure is not likely to be the limiting factor. Some of those older SSD drives with speeds under 500 G Bytes/sec speeds might just be older, slower SSD drives, speed-limited by the SSD itself. (Some might actually be SATA SSD enclosures holding limited-speed SATA SSD drives.)

A newer SSD device in that same USB 3.2 enclosure might be both larger and faster. (Provided they are not actually SATA enclosures.)

A genuine ThunderBolt enclosure could provide drive speeds of up to 2500 M Bytes/sec.

Yes, NVMe drives and the bus they sit on is far faster. The OWC 1M2 card for US$25 can support one NVMe device, and in your new M2 Mac, with PCIe 4 slots, that x4 can attain speeds of as high as 7,000 M Bytes/sec with an appropriately fast device..

But you repeatedly express the need for space, not speed.

Rosindabow, it’s difficult to get clear answers when people don’t think you need what you are asking for. You will get unbelievable speed from a 4x4 in a 16x PCIe slot - absolutely plenty for your needs. (Source: I’m a composer.) What other devices do you connect to your system?

i have to give you an answer based upon some speculation as this is not documented by Apple at this time.

My suggestion is that you do some consolidation. At this moment it’s unclear how many PCIe lanes the Pro can accommodate, and putting all of those drives online may cause you some issues. What’s becoming apparent with new systems is that it’s no longer of such great benefit to have libraries spread across drives or to have a lot of smaller drives to spread the load. For my part I’m consolidating several smaller drives that had been externals onto 4TB Thunderbolt drives - because whereas before they were USB-3, and not extraordinarily fast, now a Thunderbolt 3 drive like the Glyph Atom Pro will perform at 2800 MB/sec.

The only issue I can foresee is something I don’t have an answer for: if you install a card like the Sonnet 4x4 in one of the two 16x PCIe slots, it will give each nvme drive 4 PCIe lanes, which means you could get the full speed of your nvme drives, I.e. if they are PCIe 4, around 7000 MB/sec sequential reads in practice. But the issue is that it’s unclear how many lanes are available in the Mac Pro. If you allocate all of those to the card, your interfaces (which I think use a lane each) may or may not have issues. Apple support have been unable to answer this one for me. And it’s unclear how many other cards you would be able to use. I have read of other composers on vi-control (a forum for these and other issues) using the Mac Studio Ultra and external TB4 drives with terrific performance and no issues - with the caveat that you still have a limitation on how many drives you could connect and get full performance from them. One of the users there posted a video showing his Studio Ultra playing back upwards of 910 tracks of Kontakt instruments in Cubase, with what appeared to be no issue streaming voices from his two external drives.

It appears also to be possible (according to a Sonnet tech) that if you connected a 4x4 nvme card to an 8x slot that you would get half the performance, which is still more than 3000 MB/sec and so likely fast enough for sample streaming. So that would mean you could use two of them, possibly. Remember, though, that folks here have been reporting issues using nvme’s on cards when the nvme’s were not formatted on the new systems. And also keep in mind if you were considering the Sonnet 8x4 that it uses a PCIe switch, and it’s unclear how that would react with the needs of sample streaming.

I hope this helps.

I recently installed the Sonnet M.2 8x4 Silent Gen4 PCIe card into my Mac Pro M2. The card is inserted into the x16 PCI slot and contains eight 4TB SABRENT Rocket 4 Plus-G M.2 drives, along with the provided auxiliary power cable. I configured these eight drives into a RAID 0 setup with a 32K block size, resulting in a combined total capacity of 32TB. Apart from the provided Thunderbolt accessories PCIe card, no other components are installed. Curiously, the allocation pool shows A at 100% and B at 88%.

However, I'm facing an issue. Whenever I reboot or shut down and then restart, the Sonnet card's RAID array vanishes as if it's not installed at all. I've had to reboot multiple times before the PCIe card and array are recognized again.

I've tried using both Apple RAID and OWC's SoftRAID, but the issue persists. If I put the computer into a complete sleep state, upon waking it, the Mac Pro indicates that the drive array was improperly ejected. I also own the previous Sonnet M.2 4X4 Silent Gen3 PCIe card, and when I reinstall this older card in the Mac Pro 2023, I encounter no issues. It works flawlessly, just as it did in my previous Mac Pro 2019.

<<. At this moment it’s unclear how many PCIe lanes the Pro can accommodate, >>

The Mac Pro can get very close to full performance, full duplex, for every PCIe device you can install. It is common to modestly over-configure the PCIe slots, knowing that EVERY device running full duplex at exactly the same instant is extremely unlikely, and if that does occur, it will only be a momentary slowdown. So the configurator allows to to modestly over-configure.