MP 14,8 20 SSDS/NVME in My 2023 M2 Mac Pro

[rondocap]

Just wanted to share the storage I'm running in my 2023 M2 Mac Pro, as others may be curious or wonder what works/doesn't work.

I have this setup, all working and recognized perfectly without any missing drives or other issues, also running on macOS Beta 15.1:

Bottom 16x slot has a Sonnet 4x4 NVME card with 4 NVME

Second 16x has a Sonnet 8x4 card with 8 gen 4 NVME

Slot 8x has an OWC NVME card with 4 NVME

Slot 6 at 8x has a Sonnet SSD raid card with 2x SSD

and then 2x SSDs with Sata with a Sonnet J3i

That's a ton of storage, all gets recognized without issues.

PCIe lanes and speed are of course dependent on what you are running. You cannot run the 16x slots at full speeds if running the other items, for example, but it will works fine.

Yes, my slot allocation in the expansion utility shows Pool A as 181% full and Pool B at 59%.

I use the majority of the large drive arrays as sequential Time Machine backups or manual mirror, meaning I'll only be using 1-2 at a time so speeds are fine.

I had a 2019 Mac Pro, so those cards worked great when moving over.

I tried a Mac Studio for a brief time, and it was a nightmare with clutter and tons of external drives for Thunderbolt 3, noisy fans, etc.

The M2 Ultra Mac Pro IMO for my use case is totally worth it - I also got mine around $1,500 off Apple's retail price, so not bad for fitting it all in, without desk clutter ha.

 

[MarkC426]

Icing on the cake would be a nice interior pic……

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

Very cool!

A lot of high bandwidth storage is a great use case for the 2023 (as well as the 2019).

 

[StuAff]

How many TBs is that?

 

[avro707]

I also got mine around $1,500 off Apple's retail price

Education discount?

A lot of storage, just looking at that 8x4 card what it can do!! I hope you don't get any drop outs like some others have experienced in the 2019 MP.

 

[Simon R.]

Great to hear about an actual MP 14,8 setup, from an actual user. Judging by the number of topics in this forum about 14,8 (yours is the only one I have seen actually, at least for a year!), it would seem you are almost the only one on the planet who bought one. Which I really hope isn't true. I hope Apple keeps it alive and will update it thoroughly next year!