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Norbert Mikołajczyk

macrumors 6502
May 26, 2016
321
140
No mention of PCIE drives not mounting, and they even suggest that the problem can be "narrowed down" to Exfat, which it can't; but hey, at least it's some journalistic "noise" in the vague ballpark!
Yeah, overall it shows how bad MacOS became in recent years.
No roadmap, no real development communication with consumers, no driver updates, walled garden everything...
 

aventham

macrumors member
Mar 6, 2024
49
11
Sorry to hear no one is getting anywhere.
It's far from a solution, as it's presumably no good for those who want to boot from their PCIE drives, but as I don't need to do that, unmounting my PCIE drives before shutdown is a viable and so far reliable workaround for me on my 2019. Early days still though!
 

mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,164
2,866
Australia
So to take stock for a bit - apart from @flowrider is there anyone who is running Ventura, and booting / sleepwaking from NVME SSDs without problems?

I don't really fancy dropping a grand and a half to be the guinea pig :/
 

ZombiePhysicist

macrumors 68030
May 22, 2014
2,788
2,689
So to take stock for a bit - apart from @flowrider is there anyone who is running Ventura, and booting / sleepwaking from NVME SSDs without problems?

I don't really fancy dropping a grand and a half to be the guinea pig :/

I had no problems with my Highpoint 1580 card with a Micron 9300Pro 15TB drive with either Ventura or Sonoma. The OS sees it as external but it just always boots right up, thankfully. Maybe because it's the boot drive, that makes a difference?
 
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mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,164
2,866
Australia
OK well I found out today that Highpoint has discontinued the 1104f, leaving only the passively cooled 1104, or the triple-the-price pci4, or double the price pci3 8 bay cards as options.

Then I found AmazonUS had them in stock, so i kinda panic bought one, and a pair of 4tb Samsung 990 Pros (which AmazonAU sells from America for abut 2/3 the price of the local market ones).

So, guinea pig time, i guess. Here's hoping I don't end up as the tasty snack on a stick version.
 
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aventham

macrumors member
Mar 6, 2024
49
11
It's far from a solution, as it's presumably no good for those who want to boot from their PCIE drives, but as I don't need to do that, unmounting my PCIE drives before shutdown is a viable and so far reliable workaround for me on my 2019. Early days still though!
Reliable until I unplugged my USB drives after shutting down and then plugged them back into different ports before restarting - apparently that's still enough to cause the PCIE drives to fail to mount, and need a further shutdown and reboot to come back! [Expletives deleted]
 

aventham

macrumors member
Mar 6, 2024
49
11
aventham,

Thank you. I think...

I reset the NVRAM. No change.

I reset the SMC and all the drives are now mounted!

Only time will tell whether they will continue to show up.

For now: thank you!

Tom

PS: The iPhone did an update this morning to 17.4.1 and after that, I turned it off, then back on. It now seems to be receiving messages again.
I just had to reset the SMC to get my PCIE drives back, after resetting the NVRAM didn't work; all seemingly from just unintentionally plugging my USB drives back into different ports. My theory is that whatever is stored in the SMC (and NVRAM?) is vulnerable to being "invalidated" by what ought to be innocuously minor configuration changes between one boot and the next.
I'm tempted to upgrade to the Highpoint Rocket 1104 (the passive version) - so it'd be very useful to hear what experience anyone has had already with that specific card on the Mac Pro 2019, and with which SSDs.
 
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profdraper

macrumors 6502
Jan 14, 2017
336
259
Brisbane, Australia
I just had to reset the SMC to get my PCIE drives back, after resetting the NVRAM didn't work; all seemingly from just unintentionally plugging my USB drives back into different ports. My theory is that whatever is stored in the SMC (and NVRAM?) is vulnerable to being "invalidated" by what ought to be innocuously minor configuration changes between one boot and the next.
I'm tempted to upgrade to the Highpoint Rocket 1104 (the passive version) - so it'd be very useful to hear what experience anyone has had already with that specific card on the Mac Pro 2019, and with which SSDs.
Yeah, its weird. Seems to be different results for different users with the same mac, NVME card and system version (but then it always seems to have been like this for Apple, eg, I intall a lab of say 20 iMac & cloned systems & three might be realy weird, no reason).

My personal experience with this to date:
7,1 mac pro, Sonoma 14.4.1, Sonnet 4xm2 PCIe with Samsung 970 EVO+.
This mounting issue happened all the time with earlier versions of Sonoma; 'seemed to stop' or at least got a little bettter at 14.3.

The one thing that set this 'no mounting' off again - & including now on 14.4.1 - was installing some new sw & something with drivers, eg, UAD plugins, Softraid etc. Because of the drivers & re-boot I can only assume this could be something to do with mac os security bs [?] Otherwise, 14.4.1 now always mounts correctly.

The only thing that would bring mounting back correctly was indeed an NMC reset immediatey followed by zap PRAM. Still the very odd thing about that is that this computer is in effect ALWAYS with an SMC reser becuase this studio is powered down at a main UPS unit when not in use.

PS
don't get me started on the dreadful mess that is date-stamping on mac os. Unbelievable.
 
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doobydoooby

macrumors regular
Oct 17, 2011
209
255
Genève, Switzerland
Anecdotally, I've also moved the Sonnet sled from slot 5 to 4, which was a bit of a pain since I'm using the power port underneath slot 4 on a tight cable. Since moving it, I haven't had any intermittent mount fails on startup. Hmmmmm. I will keep you updated!
Update: moving Sonnet from PCI sled 4 to 5 hasn't improved anything. The random boot fail continues.
 

H2SO4

macrumors 603
Nov 4, 2008
5,660
6,941
Patiently waiting for MacOS 15. I don't see any changes or help coming from Apple in this OS build.
 

bax2023

macrumors member
Nov 14, 2023
46
66
Serbia
Patiently waiting for MacOS 15. I don't see any changes or help coming from Apple in this OS build.
I'm also looking forward to macOS 15. I will not even touch Sotona, I mean Sodoma, I mean Sonoma again.

External (PCIe) drives on latest Ventura with 0 (ZERO) issues:
1x PCIe toU.2 3.86TB Micron drive
1x PCIe to SSD drive
2x NVMe drives (Samsung 980 1TB) on Sonnet M.2 4x4 Silent
 
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mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,164
2,866
Australia
*staring at tracking intensifies*

ssds.jpg
 

aventham

macrumors member
Mar 6, 2024
49
11
I'm not having any more luck with my new Highpoint Rocket 1104 card than I was with my 1M2 cards.
 

aventham

macrumors member
Mar 6, 2024
49
11
I've just been looking into how to change the "put hard disks to sleep" setting in Sonoma. This is how my power settings were configured:
Screenshot 2024-04-14 at 15.53.17.png

But I've managed to update the disksleep setting by running the command "sudo pmset -c spindown 0" .
I've no idea whether this will make a jot of difference to the mounting problem, but it seems pointless and potentially counter-productive to have my computer set to spin disks down when there aren't any spinning disks!
 
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bax2023

macrumors member
Nov 14, 2023
46
66
Serbia
I've just been looking into how to change the "put hard disks to sleep" setting in Sonoma. This is how my power settings were configured:
View attachment 2368259
But I've managed to update the disksleep setting by running the command "sudo pmset -c spindown 0" .
I've no idea whether this will make a jot of difference to the mounting problem, but it seems pointless and potentially counter-productive to have my computer set to spin disks down when there aren't any spinning disks!
If they are of any help, here are my "pmset" settings on Ventura

Screenshot 2024-04-14 at 18.03.43.png
 
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mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,164
2,866
Australia
Thanks @bax2023 - disksleep didn't help with the mounting problem but I think I might as well leave it at 0. I've matched the other settings to yours though, just in case...

Refresh my memory - does this problem effect wake from sleep, or only boot. Also, have you set your machine to verbose boot?
 

aventham

macrumors member
Mar 6, 2024
49
11
Refresh my memory - does this problem effect wake from sleep, or only boot. Also, have you set your machine to verbose boot?
I had the problem once (I think - unless I just didn't notice that the drives were missing from boot) when coming out of sleep, before I turned on the "prevent automatic sleeping when the display is turned off" option. So I just thought it would be sensible to disable any other disk-related sleep settings. I suspect that the problem (more generally) relates to power management, so am on the look-out for anything related to that, which can be tweaked to see if it helps.
I did try verbose boot, but it didn't prevent the problem for me.
 

H2SO4

macrumors 603
Nov 4, 2008
5,660
6,941
I had the problem once (I think - unless I just didn't notice that the drives were missing from boot) when coming out of sleep, before I turned on the "prevent automatic sleeping when the display is turned off" option. So I just thought it would be sensible to disable any other disk-related sleep settings. I suspect that the problem (more generally) relates to power management, so am on the look-out for anything related to that, which can be tweaked to see if it helps.
I did try verbose boot, but it didn't prevent the problem for me.
Verbose eventually failed for me too after a promising start.
I've accepted defeat and gone back to the internal drive for now.
 

mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,164
2,866
Australia
I had the problem once (I think - unless I just didn't notice that the drives were missing from boot) when coming out of sleep, before I turned on the "prevent automatic sleeping when the display is turned off" option. So I just thought it would be sensible to disable any other disk-related sleep settings. I suspect that the problem (more generally) relates to power management, so am on the look-out for anything related to that, which can be tweaked to see if it helps.
I did try verbose boot, but it didn't prevent the problem for me.

*if* it's happening during sleep, I wonder if the trick of disabling all scheduled maintenance wake events would do anything for it... It certainly cured my display issues, which I put down to the system not fully waking up the GPUs & GPU drivers, which need to be fully engaged to drive all three displays.
 
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aventham

macrumors member
Mar 6, 2024
49
11
*if* it's happening during sleep, I wonder if the trick of disabling all scheduled maintenance wake events would do anything for it... It certainly cured my display issues, which I put down to the system not fully waking up the GPUs & GPU drivers, which need to be fully engaged to drive all three displays.
Is there a handy command for that?
 

mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,164
2,866
Australia
Is there a handy command for that?

Wih the caveat these are being used in Ventura, so check if Sonoma needs changes to it:

Unlock prior to any system updates.

Clear Sleep / Wake schedule:

Code:
pmset schedule cancelall

Lock Sleep / Wake schedule:

Code:
sudo chflags schg /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist

Unlock Sleep / Wake schedule:

Code:
sudo chflags noschg /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.AutoWake.plist

Check Wake reasons:

Code:
log show --style syslog | fgrep "Wake reason"
 

mattspace

macrumors 68040
Jun 5, 2013
3,164
2,866
Australia
To be clear BTW, the reason I'm using this technique to lock the sleep / wake schedule, is that the calendar app periodically wakes your machine from sleep to check if it's moved geographically, in order to make sure the "time to leave" notifications stay accurate to where the machine is located. When it does this partial wake, it doesn't fire up the full GPU drivers - darkwake - (without full GPU driver, eg during boot, the system only supports 2 displays), which results in some applications (affinity suite) having their window arrangement nerfed.

Reasoning being maybe storage PCI cards experience a version of this?
 
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