PCIE M.2 drive not mounting after Sonoma install

As a test I 'downgraded' from Sonoma to Ventura, using Migration Assistant to restore all apps and files exactly the same as before, with exactly same hardware configuration, and now all M.2 NVME drives installed on both Sonnet 4x4 PCIe cards mount perfectly on my Mac Pro 2019, everytime.

Apple, what on earth have you done with Sonoma to cause external drive mounting to become a random lottery??

4/13/24: Emailed with Sonnet this past week. As others have said here, Sonnet confirmed they’ve been able to reproduce the issue with their own product and a competitor’s PCIe card. They reported the bug to Apple.

I called Apple to report I was one of many having this issue. The more reports and calls the better, whether on their developer site, customer relations, or tech help.

Hi All SOLUTION (maybe for some)

I have a OWC mercury elite pro dual set up as a raid (not a soft raid) and was having drive reading issues, after extensive work with apple (thanks Antonio) we found the culprit

/Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext

I deleted the SoftRAID.kext extension restarted and my drive works

3cre8ive;

Deleting the SoftRAID driver in /Library/Extensions could not fix a problem where drives are not appearing to MacOS.

For one, as of 13.3, the loadable SoftRAID driver has moved to /System/Extensions. Any legacy driver in /Library/Extensions would be inert as of 13.3, it cannot load. (If you launch SoftRAID 7.6.1 or later, SoftRAID Application will delete this extension)

This cannot be the cause of the drives not showing up. You can easily prove this, as the disks for most of the users here are in Apple format, so the SoftRAID driver is not even loading. MacOS exclusively determines whether a disk shows up to MacOS, not a driver like SoftRAID.

If People with this problem look in System Report, under PCI, you will see the cards, but not the drives. That is a "hardware issue", whether triggered by a recent MacOS update or not, the drives are not being presented to MacOS at all.

To repeat, if you do not have any SoftRAID disks connected to your mac, (disks with SoftRAID partition maps), then the SoftRAID kext does not load. (Its like having a printer driver, with no corresponding printer, it does not do anything, it cannot cause any conflicts with other printers, for example.)

Not sure what was happening with your Mercury Duo. Deleting a non-loading extension was not the actual solution. (hopefully Apple had you clear the extensions cache, else just deleting it does nothing, as a copy of drivers is in the extensions cache, and will still be offered to MacOS at startup.)

As a possibility, perhaps you previously deleted the actual offending extension, but until you flushed the extensions cache, it was still loading.

One such extension I can think of would be a SMART USB driver.

My Sonnet M2 PCIe 4x4 unmounts intermittent my M2 SSD!

(MacPro 2019, 28 Core CPU, 192 GB RAM, 4 TB SSD, AMD Radeon Pro Vega II Duo.)

I have 2 RAID0, each with different M2 SSD. Sometimes the first one is "kicked" about 30 sec after login, sometimes the second one.

Apple, your 2019 MacPro is a real expensive investment. I do ask you to fix that problem very soon!!!

Update:

Due to necessity I had to sacrifice and move my 2 cards to the 8x slots, not ideal for best performance but I am still achieving 12,000mbps reads / 6000mbps writes vs 18,500/7500. Still faster than T3 external chassis speeds and way faster than any devices I move files from.

The cards are now showing up as they were before upgrading to Sonoma from Monterey. The speed is a small sacrifice to gain normal access to my raid setup.

Reason: I needed to add my W5700X MPX module back in to gain more Thunderbolt 3 ports, so in addition to my AMD RX6800XT I have no more 16x slots, thus sacrificing my cards to the 8X slots.

Hope this helps.

Anyone who wants to assist in data collection for this issue of missing drives, we can help submit data on this to a bug report we filed.

Send an email to support at Softraid dot com.

I will tell you what we need to collect, it will be a few large files, "before" (with drives missing) and "After", when you get the drives to show again.

We are interested in what drives are triggering this, in addition, as it does not appear to be all brands. We have not seen any reports for example of Samsung drives not appearing. If anyone has Samsungs with this issue, I would like to hear from you.

thanks

Just upgraded my 2019 MacPro from Monterey to Sonoma yesterday and, as you all, I lost my PCIe NvME SSD drive in the process; it's not showing in disk utility and most certainly not mounting.

I was not even able to downgrade to my previous Monterey system which I had saved as a Time Machine archive.

I can't figure out WHY it is such a pain to downgrade from one version of MacOS to another !

Anyway, another day, another thought !

I got deeper into my NvME drive specification and decided to try and download an uptodate driver.

My NvME drive is a HighPoint SSD7101 3.0 x16 4-Port M.2 NVMe RAID PCIe card.

I got the driver on this page ( https://www.highpoint-tech.com/ssd7000-products-downloads/ )

I installed it and after a reboot, I got my NvME drive back on track, just fine !

Hope that helps you sort out your problem out there.

+1. Same issue with Sonnet drives on my 2019 Mac Pro.

Exact same issue here. Sonnet M.2 Pcie card in 2019 Mac Pro randomly doesn't mount on system restart since updating to Sonoma. I can't find any consistent pattern to it.

2019 Mac Pro, same issue. had machine checked by Apple, all good. All since Sonoma update. I've even bought a new card thinking it was that, but the same issue. Sometimes only mounts 2 of my 4 SSDs. Anybody with any fixes?

I have a 2019 Mac Pro and am also seeing this issue with a number of my internally mounted M.2 SSDs.

It has gotten to the point where I need to boot the computer then shutdown and unplug it then restart.

Exact same problem! Everything was fine on Ventura with 2019 Mac Pro. Now after a (forced) Sonoma 'upgrade', often random NVME M.2 drives installed on my 2 Sonnet 4x4 M.2 PCIe cards will not mount after booting. Nothing else has changed. It's like the lottery whether after booting, a drive is just missing and not showing in Disk Utility. If the drive shows up later, the RAID array works fine. It's not a disk or driver issue, it's Sonoma 100%. Please fix this Apple!