PCIE M.2 drive not mounting after Sonoma install

For anyone who wants to put in their own ticket with Apple about this issue — strength in numbers — Sonnet tech support wrote this to me:

If you would like, you can also try and submit your own Apple bug report, and reference the bug report we sent (FB13560165). More individuals reporting this may give more impetus to Apple to look into this more closely or more quickly.

We have also verified that, as a partial solution in the interim, installing the M.2 card/drives into an external Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis like our Breakaway Box, does resolve the issue of drives dropping off, albeit, bandwidth is limited to ~2800MB/s in the external chassis.

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.

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.

The only reliable fix for this (for me) has always been that I have to physically take my Sonnet M.2 4x4 card out of the 2019 MacPro 7,1 and re-seat the card. Its drives come back and are seen every single time I do that. On this last update to MacOS 14.5 the drives sent invisible again and no repeated boot, zapping PRAM, SMC, Safe Boot or anything would help the drives to be seen again. But physically removing the card and simply re-seating it in the same slot, then rebooting, fixed it. And every time I have had trouble...that has 100% fixed it. I honestly don't know why this could be happening and it is frustrating. I am NOT running my 4 drives on the Sonnet card as a RAID. I do not think it has anything to do with RAID. It is a physical issue in seeing or loading the hardware card in the PCI slot. My drives are all 4 Samsung 970 Eco Plus drives and have worked flawlessly for me in that setup till Ventura....then a handful of hiccups in Ventura. Now almost constant issues in Sonoma.

Exact same issue here after a recent forced upgrade to Sonoma on my 2019 Mac Pro.

I have 4x 4TB Samsung 990 Pro SSDs in a Sonnet M.2 8x4 card which no longer mount. I also have 8x 2TB drives in an OWC Accelsior 8m2 which are still working perfectly.

The Sonnet website mentions an incompatibility with Sonoma, but claims it only affects the 2023 Mac Pro, which is clearly not the case...

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/m2-8x4-pcie-card/overview.html

"* Only in a 2023 Mac Pro (M2 Ultra), the initial release of macOS 14 (Sonoma) does not properly access the data in the M.2 8x4 PCIe Card. Users with macOS 13 installed should not update to macOS 14 at this time. We expect Apple to fix this anomaly in an update. (The data will not be lost, just inaccessible.) The card will continue to work fine under macOS 14 in an Intel Mac Pro, or with any Mac using a Thunderbolt expansion system."

Options that I've discovered to not keep waiting on Apple:

• move my two Sonnet PCIe cards to external Thunderbolt PCIe chassis
  • Sonnet eGPU Breakaway Box 750 (option recommended by Sonnet; pair for RAID 1)
  • Sonnet Echo I (option recommended by Sonnet; pair for RAID 1)
  • Sonnet Echo II DV (seems like a nice, if pricey, option if you don't strictly need separate chassis for your RAID 1)
• move my NVMe storage to external Thunderbolt NVMe chassis
  • Sonnet Echo Dual NVMe Thunderbolt Dock (plus buying higher capacity NVMe; pair for RAID 1)
  • OWC Envoy Pro SX (plus buying higher capacity NVMe; pair for RAID 1)
  • OWC Express 4M2 (repurpose my existing NVMe storage; pair for RAID 1)
• Vacate macOS and move to Linux or Windows (expensive option for cost and time, but at least it's end-game)

You lose 16x PCIe storage bandwidth with the move to 4x Thunderbolt bandwidth, but it's likely not a showstopper for me.

A potentially positive update, as both my Sonnet card and my OWC card have stayed mounted on the desktop for the past three days, including through 6 restarts. Here's what I did:

I updated to the latest version of SoftRaid ( v 8.0). The Sonnet m4 raid showed up in that, though showed as "Unmounted" and would not "Mount" at all. I initialized all four nvmes on the Sonnet card using SoftRaid.

Then went back to Apple Disc Utility and the four formatted drives all showed up, so I used Disk Utility to build a new 4 disc array, and since then the Sonnet card has worked.

I'll update any changes, fingers crossed this may work for others.

Tony

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??

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

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.

I've been told Sonnet knows and has reproduced the bug, they have started a bug report with Apple. How long that takes to result in a rolled-out fix is anyone's guess. Better to stick with Ventura for now.

Here's my experience so far. After upgrading my 2019 Mac Pro (with the Sonnett m.2 4x4 PCIe card installed) to Ventura, one of the two 2 RAIDs on this card would randomly not mount, not even seen by Disk Utility as a usable drive. Nothing worked. SMC reset. PRAM. Nothing. Until I changed the card slot order inside the Mac, and for now, it seems to be working. All I did was swap this card with one that holds to SSDs, and everything is fine. For now.

I'll keep y'all in suspense!

A recent update from Sonnet, confirming this is a bug caused by Apple and applies to multiple vendors:

Our engineers have been working hard on this and have now been able to reproduce the issue. Just recently we were able to duplicate this issue with competitor's hardware. From the data we have gathered from yourself and other customers, it does seem that an update released by Apple in the 2023 time frame for multiple OS' caused the issue with drives dropping off. We are trying to narrow down exactly which ones. We are in the process of filing a bug report to Apple so that they can get the issue fixed in a future OS release.

Seriously Apple, this is just embarassing.

If you're paying attention: FIX YOUR MAIN OS AND TEST THE BASICS BEFORE PUSHING OUT UPDATES.

Same issue here - but could not be solved by moving the card to an 8 lane slot from my 16 lane slot. Also I've replicated the issue with both my sonnet card, and an OWC one I purchased in the hope that this would fix the probmem.

I have a full troubleshooting report I put together.

https://stuartfoxmusic.com/m2-pcie-sonnet-testing.pdf

Downgrading OS solves the issue on a test partition, but undoes a few bug fixes which I enjoyed with sonoma.

I've raised this with apple, they hinted at a fix to sonnet with 14.4, but no.

I did the data collection and full troubleshooting with apple support and they forwarded it to engineering.

Engineering came back and said they themselves needed to escalated it - and that's it - radio silence.

It's been 7 months, and it could be at least 7 more. Infuriating.

Personally - I've been late with deadlines and lost opportunities because of this and apple have been less than sympathetic, just telling me I've had a good run with this machine and it's time to spend more money!!!!!!!!!

I'll keep in touch here with any developments. Good to know I'm not the only one.