Having a lot of problems with my brand new mac studio on ventura

[inglesworth]

I recently bought a brand new Mac Studio withteh M1 Max chip, and 64GB RAM and it came with Ventura on it.

I bought this machine to replace my old, yet very stable hackintosh that wasrunning OSX 10.12.

I did get it upgraded to the 1TB SSD, but I need more HD storage space than is even available to upgrade in the Mac Studio - not to mention that upgradeing the storage space on a new mac like this is so ridiculously expensive. So I bought some nice little cases and pulled a couple of SSDs out of the old machine and am using those to store my work files.

I'm having some problems. First, the most annoying, yet probably benign one. Is every time my computer restarts, it forgets my multiple display arrangement. I've got 2 displays and it will always switch the right and left ones around. At first, it happened maybe every 3rd or 4th time I booted the machine. I got tired of having to set it up every other day, so I went and actually switched the ports on the cables in the mac and thought if it just keeps trying to set them that way, it will just stay there and it will be fine now. Well, now my display arrangement is messed up virtually every time my mac boots it's different. Just this morning, I woke up to my Mac having rebooted itself "because of a problem" (fourth time that's happened this week). The displays were messed up. But I also noticed that one of hy hard drives was not mounted and wasn't even viewable in disk utility (more on this shortly) so I just restarted the machine without changing the displays. This time it booted up with the displays in the correct arangement. So it's not like I am setting it and then it forgets it when it reboots, it's literally just choosing whatever damn arrangement it wants every time it starts up and I can't figure out how to make it just stay the same every time I turn the computer on.

My other big problem is with the external SSDs. I have three of them. I have 2 thuderbolt docks/hubs. One is one is plugged in to one of my front Thunderbolt 3 ports and goes from the computer at the front of my room to my desk where I have some USB interfaces plugged in (keyboard, mouse, MIDI keyboard and an audio interface) and 1 of my external SSDs. The second hub is plugged in to the back of the computer on one of the TB4 ports. It contains my other 2 SSDs.

Seemingly at random, one of my external SSDs won't mount, or even just drops it's mount state on the computer. And it's always a different one. It has ahappened to all three of them at random times. I've run first aid in disk utility, and every time I plug one of these drives into my old computer, it mounts just fine and never has an issue. I have no reason at this point to believe that there is an actual problem with any of the SSDs themselves. But I've had a drive not mount upon booting the computer, not viewable in disk utility, only to restart and have it be there again. I've had drives drop out in the middle of working on the computer. The computer responds just fine, and the drive itself is still shown as mounted on the desktop. If I double click the icon it opens a finder window but it just has an empty window and the beach ball for eternity. If I try to unmount it, nothing happens. In this circumstance, when i try to restart or shut down the computer, it won't finish the shutdown process because it is hanging on the stuck drive. If I unplug the drive, the computer immediately completes the shutdown and/or restart sequence. Then when the computer boots back up the drive is there angain and fully usable.

The last of my big problems is that several times a week so far, the Mac will just power off without the shutdown process and then reboot itslef and it tells me it restarted itdelf "because of a problem". As mentioned earlier in the post, it happened overnight last night. I left my mac on doing an archive process that was going to take well into the middle of the night. It seems like the restart apparently happened after it completed and the data seems intact. But I were that if this were to happen while the computer is actively reading from or writing to a drive that it may cause a problem with the drive itslef at some point. Feels very much like I am playing with fire. Is this the way new macs handle Kernel panics instead of throwing up the giant grey power button and 12 different languages on the screen? If so, is there a way to figure out where it's hanging up and make it not do that anymore?

There are probably other small things, but these are the big ones that are making me want to declare this new machine a paper weight and returning it and just working on my old (stable) computer for the rest of eternity.

Has anyone experienced these problems? If so, did you fix them, and how?

 

[ignatius345]

How confident are you in your SSD enclosures and cables? Could be they're flaky or just aren't playing well with the Mac. It sounds like some of your mystery restarts, too, are related to the external drive(s). Do you get the restarts with nothing attached?

 

[inglesworth]

How confident are you in your SSD enclosures and cables? Could be they're flaky or just aren't playing well with the Mac. It sounds like some of your mystery restarts, too, are related to the external drive(s). Do you get the restarts with nothing attached?

TOobe quite honest, at first I was sure that my problem was coming from the external drives and/or the enclosures. But I am less inclined to believe that at this point for a few reasons. First being thatI actually returned one of the enclosures and replaced it with a different one and it didn't seem to help the problem. Second being that it does not seem to be limited to one drive in particular, it seems to randomly happen to different drives. Third being that I can plug any of these drives into my old computer and they mount no problem and have no issues there - granted, I am not leaving them plugged into that computer for any extended period of timne, as I am using them to work on my new computer.
As for restarts happening with nothing attached, I don't know. They seem too random, and again, I am using these drives to work on the computer, so not having them hooked up and leaving the computer alone to hope it crashes and reboots isn't really feasible for me right now, unfortunately.

 

[jz0309]

I got a Mac Studio like 3 weeks ago and I have a 2TB Sandusky extreme as well as an older enclosure that has 2 SSDs in it (SATA) and no issues whatsoever, those are both attached to ports in the back.
And I do not have random reboots either, been totally rock solid for me.
And I upgraded to the latest Ventura when I got it

 

[MrScratchHook]

I recently bought a brand new Mac Studio withteh M1 Max chip, and 64GB RAM and it came with Ventura on it.

I bought this machine to replace my old, yet very stable hackintosh that wasrunning OSX 10.12.

I did get it upgraded to the 1TB SSD, but I need more HD storage space than is even available to upgrade in the Mac Studio - not to mention that upgradeing the storage space on a new mac like this is so ridiculously expensive. So I bought some nice little cases and pulled a couple of SSDs out of the old machine and am using those to store my work files.

I'm having some problems. First, the most annoying, yet probably benign one. Is every time my computer restarts, it forgets my multiple display arrangement. I've got 2 displays and it will always switch the right and left ones around. At first, it happened maybe every 3rd or 4th time I booted the machine. I got tired of having to set it up every other day, so I went and actually switched the ports on the cables in the mac and thought if it just keeps trying to set them that way, it will just stay there and it will be fine now. Well, now my display arrangement is messed up virtually every time my mac boots it's different. Just this morning, I woke up to my Mac having rebooted itself "because of a problem" (fourth time that's happened this week). The displays were messed up. But I also noticed that one of hy hard drives was not mounted and wasn't even viewable in disk utility (more on this shortly) so I just restarted the machine without changing the displays. This time it booted up with the displays in the correct arangement. So it's not like I am setting it and then it forgets it when it reboots, it's literally just choosing whatever damn arrangement it wants every time it starts up and I can't figure out how to make it just stay the same every time I turn the computer on.

My other big problem is with the external SSDs. I have three of them. I have 2 thuderbolt docks/hubs. One is one is plugged in to one of my front Thunderbolt 3 ports and goes from the computer at the front of my room to my desk where I have some USB interfaces plugged in (keyboard, mouse, MIDI keyboard and an audio interface) and 1 of my external SSDs. The second hub is plugged in to the back of the computer on one of the TB4 ports. It contains my other 2 SSDs.

Seemingly at random, one of my external SSDs won't mount, or even just drops it's mount state on the computer. And it's always a different one. It has ahappened to all three of them at random times. I've run first aid in disk utility, and every time I plug one of these drives into my old computer, it mounts just fine and never has an issue. I have no reason at this point to believe that there is an actual problem with any of the SSDs themselves. But I've had a drive not mount upon booting the computer, not viewable in disk utility, only to restart and have it be there again. I've had drives drop out in the middle of working on the computer. The computer responds just fine, and the drive itself is still shown as mounted on the desktop. If I double click the icon it opens a finder window but it just has an empty window and the beach ball for eternity. If I try to unmount it, nothing happens. In this circumstance, when i try to restart or shut down the computer, it won't finish the shutdown process because it is hanging on the stuck drive. If I unplug the drive, the computer immediately completes the shutdown and/or restart sequence. Then when the computer boots back up the drive is there angain and fully usable.

The last of my big problems is that several times a week so far, the Mac will just power off without the shutdown process and then reboot itslef and it tells me it restarted itdelf "because of a problem". As mentioned earlier in the post, it happened overnight last night. I left my mac on doing an archive process that was going to take well into the middle of the night. It seems like the restart apparently happened after it completed and the data seems intact. But I were that if this were to happen while the computer is actively reading from or writing to a drive that it may cause a problem with the drive itslef at some point. Feels very much like I am playing with fire. Is this the way new macs handle Kernel panics instead of throwing up the giant grey power button and 12 different languages on the screen? If so, is there a way to figure out where it's hanging up and make it not do that anymore?

There are probably other small things, but these are the big ones that are making me want to declare this new machine a paper weight and returning it and just working on my old (stable) computer for the rest of eternity.

Has anyone experienced these problems? If so, did you fix them, and how?

I recently bought a brand new Mac Studio withteh M1 Max chip, and 64GB RAM and it came with Ventura on it.

I bought this machine to replace my old, yet very stable hackintosh that wasrunning OSX 10.12.

I did get it upgraded to the 1TB SSD, but I need more HD storage space than is even available to upgrade in the Mac Studio - not to mention that upgradeing the storage space on a new mac like this is so ridiculously expensive. So I bought some nice little cases and pulled a couple of SSDs out of the old machine and am using those to store my work files.

I'm having some problems. First, the most annoying, yet probably benign one. Is every time my computer restarts, it forgets my multiple display arrangement. I've got 2 displays and it will always switch the right and left ones around. At first, it happened maybe every 3rd or 4th time I booted the machine. I got tired of having to set it up every other day, so I went and actually switched the ports on the cables in the mac and thought if it just keeps trying to set them that way, it will just stay there and it will be fine now. Well, now my display arrangement is messed up virtually every time my mac boots it's different. Just this morning, I woke up to my Mac having rebooted itself "because of a problem" (fourth time that's happened this week). The displays were messed up. But I also noticed that one of hy hard drives was not mounted and wasn't even viewable in disk utility (more on this shortly) so I just restarted the machine without changing the displays. This time it booted up with the displays in the correct arangement. So it's not like I am setting it and then it forgets it when it reboots, it's literally just choosing whatever damn arrangement it wants every time it starts up and I can't figure out how to make it just stay the same every time I turn the computer on.

My other big problem is with the external SSDs. I have three of them. I have 2 thuderbolt docks/hubs. One is one is plugged in to one of my front Thunderbolt 3 ports and goes from the computer at the front of my room to my desk where I have some USB interfaces plugged in (keyboard, mouse, MIDI keyboard and an audio interface) and 1 of my external SSDs. The second hub is plugged in to the back of the computer on one of the TB4 ports. It contains my other 2 SSDs.

Seemingly at random, one of my external SSDs won't mount, or even just drops it's mount state on the computer. And it's always a different one. It has ahappened to all three of them at random times. I've run first aid in disk utility, and every time I plug one of these drives into my old computer, it mounts just fine and never has an issue. I have no reason at this point to believe that there is an actual problem with any of the SSDs themselves. But I've had a drive not mount upon booting the computer, not viewable in disk utility, only to restart and have it be there again. I've had drives drop out in the middle of working on the computer. The computer responds just fine, and the drive itself is still shown as mounted on the desktop. If I double click the icon it opens a finder window but it just has an empty window and the beach ball for eternity. If I try to unmount it, nothing happens. In this circumstance, when i try to restart or shut down the computer, it won't finish the shutdown process because it is hanging on the stuck drive. If I unplug the drive, the computer immediately completes the shutdown and/or restart sequence. Then when the computer boots back up the drive is there angain and fully usable.

The last of my big problems is that several times a week so far, the Mac will just power off without the shutdown process and then reboot itslef and it tells me it restarted itdelf "because of a problem". As mentioned earlier in the post, it happened overnight last night. I left my mac on doing an archive process that was going to take well into the middle of the night. It seems like the restart apparently happened after it completed and the data seems intact. But I were that if this were to happen while the computer is actively reading from or writing to a drive that it may cause a problem with the drive itslef at some point. Feels very much like I am playing with fire. Is this the way new macs handle Kernel panics instead of throwing up the giant grey power button and 12 different languages on the screen? If so, is there a way to figure out where it's hanging up and make it not do that anymore?

There are probably other small things, but these are the big ones that are making me want to declare this new machine a paper weight and returning it and just working on my old (stable) computer for the rest of eternity.

Has anyone experienced these problems? If so, did you fix them, and how?

just from what you've wrote, it would seem that new mac isn't playing nice with external components. the fact that it restarts itself with nothing plugged in, if i were you i would call up apple support and get them to figure this out and if they cant i would return it for an exchange if possible, or just return it completely and keep the old machine. i totally understand wanting to be on the cutting edge of technology, but sometimes that's not always the best move if the former cpu is already stable.

 

[haralds]

The behavior of your Mac Studio points to a problem with one of your peripherals or how they are cabled.

Be aware that Thunderbolt without active cables has a length limitation. Also, make sure that your drive cases are truly running Thunderbolt and not USB 3. This is one of the issues with the type of USB-C connector and funky labeling. On my system, an occasionally used USB 3.1 drive for image backups does have the standard "disconnect on sleep" behavior. I would recommend the app Jettison from St. Claire Software to automate dealing with that issue.

Once that has been examined, look at your hubs and monitor cabling. The reordering of monitors could be related to the order in which they come online during boot. I would try to connect the monitors directly to the Studio and see, whether that solves your issue.

I have two OWC Envoys using Thunderbolt permanently attached to add 4TB and 2TB to my internal 4TB. They do not compete with the very high performance of the internal drive but are adequate. Apart from true file duplication, it is hard to tell a difference in real use. They are each connected directly to one of the rear ports of my M1 Ultra. I have NEVER had trouble with mounting at startup or drives disconnecting.

I am using this with a Mac Studio monitor. One of its ports is connected to a BlueRay UHD writer. Not used often, but I have never a problem with that, either.

I have a large number of other USB devices connected. Most of these are for audio and MIDI. I have two large USB 3 hubs. One is USB3.1, the other 3.2. I did find that many MIDI devices using USB2 as a base have trouble in the 3.2 hub.

With the current release of Ventura, the system is quite solid. My only complaint is with BlueTooth performance with more than three HID devices connected. It makes AirPods stutter and creates lag with Sony PS5 controllers.