New Mac Pro Has Hard Drive Issue, Apple Planning Fix in macOS Update

[persona1138]

The Mac Pro is the dumbest machine. Just buy a Mac Studio.

PCIe slots are nice and all, if you need a ProTools card or a Blackmagic capture card. But you can get external PCIe card enclosures with Thunderbolt.

And in the film and TV world, trust me, you don’t need BOTH of those cards installed… because the same person who MIXES the movie or TV show isn’t also capturing/editing it. Two different fields. I don’t need a ProTools card AND a capture card in the same machine.

The lack of GPU support means that cards like the ones I mentioned (or extra internal hard drives) is the only real use for the PCIe slots. (And internal third party drives clearly have a temporary problem, as illustrated by this MacRumors article.)

And speaking of storage… Don’t go for internal storage. Just get either a NAS with 10 gig Ethernet or a DAS with Thunderbolt.

The Mac Pro costs about $4000 more than the Mac Studio, which has the exact same specs. (And you should do anything I described above with a Mac Studio.)

Apple couldn’t figure out what the purpose of a modular Mac Pro was with their (excellent) chip architecture, so they just said: “Screw it, let’s throw a Mac Studio in our leftover Intel towers and call it a day.”

Just buy a Mac Studio, if you need that kind of power. It does the same job for $4,000 less.

 

[ChrisA]

Oh. Well, if you’re spending that much to get that much speed and performance, I don’t see why you wouldn’t use SSD.

Because you have a 4TB SSD as the main intrnal drive and then you decide you need a backup drive. The simplest thing to do is install a 16TB hard drive. This is 4X the size of the SSD and will hold years worth of data before it has to overwrite the older save versions. Even if you are rich you don't need a large SSD for backup.

Or let's say you are working of a video project and you need 32TB of storage. At some point the hard drive are needed

 

[bgillander]

The term 'spinning rust' is asinine. SSDs are an inherent innovation, but the HDD technology is not outright junk. I have 10MB hard drives that still work, and SSDs bought a few years ago that are unusable, it's always a gamble no matter what the technology is.

I never considered the term “spinning rust” an insult. The magnetic surface on the disks started out as iron oxide, so the term would actually be pretty accurate in its day. Now I guess it would be spinning cobalt. Not really asinine, though.

 

[Kashifnawaz85]

Oh. Well, if you’re spending that much to get that much speed and performance, I don’t see why you wouldn’t use SSD.

Actually SATA HDDs are dead cheap and available on much larger capacity then SSD.

 

[HackMacDaddy]

SATA GATE!!

 

[FelixDerKater]

You're backing it up wrong.

 

[retta283]

I never considered the term “spinning rust” an insult. The magnetic surface on the disks started out as iron oxide, so the term would actually be pretty accurate in its day. Now I guess it would be spinning cobalt. Not really asinine, though.

I've definitely seen it used as a derogatory term, people have actually been called out on other forums for using mechanical drives still. Even in older systems where there is little to no speed benefit for installing flash storage. Perhaps not here, but I have seen it before. People are very petty like that. I am aware of the origin of it, which is a very interesting story.

 

[mectojic]

What a great start to anyone making a $7k investment. It's already got problems.
Does anyone even test anything these days?

 

[retta283]

Recoverability, in case of failure, shouldn't be a factor in decision making. People need a proper backup plan.

Definitely, it was more of an academic comment, but I can clarify by saying that there are plenty of times when certain bits of data had been missing from my backup (usually from the same day, sometimes randomly) and on mechanical drives I have been able to recover 95% of these missing pieces, on flash none.

 

[George Dawes]

As if this thing needs any more bad publicity…

 

[Mr. Dee]

Where are the reviews?

 

[R3k]

This was also happening back on my 2019 MP with PCI-SATA / SSD Adapter cards. The card manufacturer, Sonnet, recommended that I set preferences to disable "stop hard drives going to sleep when possible" and it fixed it. Next MacOS update removed that option from Preferences and the hidden setting had to be switched off via Terminal. Guess Apple dont want to recommend a terminal command, or maybe its not possible now, but for whatever they recommend not sleeping the computer at all, heh.

Anyways, drives disappearing when things sleep has been an issue for ages, so hoping Apple puts this all the bed finally with a long term fix.

 

[R3k]

It's weird that is happening though, as it was never a bug on previous systems

See my post above- yeah, it's been an issue for many years under certain circumstances. I only dealt with the work around using my 2019 MP, but drives unintentionally disconnecting from Macs when the sleep has been a thing for a long, long time. The worse culprits always seem to be PCI storage adapters, whether eSATA ones from the cMP days or Modern PCI-SSD adapters

 

[lowkey]

I’m surprised someone actually bought one 😂

 

[R3k]

And speaking of storage… Don’t go for internal storage. Just get either a NAS with 10 gig Ethernet or a DAS with Thunderbolt.

10GB Ethernet Storage on the one port = 1250MB/ps approx total
Thunderbolt 3/4 Storage = 2500MB/ps approx per port
Internal storage...whats a NVMe blade going at these days? Definitely above 7000MB/ps on a PCI adapter card.

Plenty of people will prefer internal.

 

[Aston441]

Traditional hard drives are still just fine for data storage, when access is irregular enough that the read/write speed is irrelevant. Possibly more reliable in the event of failure as there is higher chance of recovering data from a failing HDD than SSD, unless the tech has gotten more advanced than what I remember.

The term 'spinning rust' is asinine. SSDs are an inherent innovation, but the HDD technology is not outright junk. I have 10MB hard drives that still work, and SSDs bought a few years ago that are unusable, it's always a gamble no matter what the technology is.

Edit: not necessarily disagreeing with your point considering the price of the thing, just some comments. Don't mean to sound condescending with this post.

I've recovered 30 year old failing/failed HDDs. In fact I've NEVER not been able to eventually at least partially recover a failed HDD, even had a few I had to blow the seals, crack open and physically mess with them, even swap platters, but eventually got most everything off of every trashed HDD. I've also NEVER been able to recover a failed SSD. When an SSD bites the dust, it's over.

 

[contacos]

Oh something similar has happened to my M1 Pro MBP since I got it and it was never fixed. One day my external SSD would randomly connect, the next time it doesn’t seem to even draw power yet it works fine on my old intel MacBook. Never fixed

 

[Aston441]

This was also happening back on my 2019 MP with PCI-SATA / SSD Adapter cards. The card manufacturer, Sonnet, recommended that I set preferences to disable "stop hard drives going to sleep when possible" and it fixed it. Next MacOS update removed that option from Preferences and the hidden setting had to be switched off via Terminal. Guess Apple dont want to recommend a terminal command, or maybe its not possible now, but for whatever they recommend not sleeping the computer at all, heh.

Anyways, drives disappearing when things sleep has been an issue for ages, so hoping Apple puts this all the bed finally with a long term fix.

In fairnese, drives disappesring has been an issue for all sorts of hardware, and all sorts of operating systems, since the concept of "sleeping" a computer first debeuted (1980s?).

 

[persona1138]

10GB Ethernet Storage on the one port = 1250MB/ps approx total
Thunderbolt 3/4 Storage = 2500MB/ps approx per port
Internal storage...whats a NVMe blade going at these days? Definitely above 7000MB/ps on a PCI adapter card.

Plenty of people will prefer internal.

NVMe blades don’t go that fast unless you’re talking about a RAID 0 configuration, which is very, VERY bad for pro-level data.

Plus, even multi-stream 8K doesn’t use that much bandwith. And Thunderbolt is capable of 40 GB/s… Well above the 7 GB/s you recommended. So, just get an external enclosure, if you need that much bandwith.

(Also, you do realize 10 GB Ethernet is… 10 GB/s, right? External enclosures cap out at the speed you said because they generally use 3.5” spinning hard drives for large capacity. But the top speed is still 10,000 Mb/sec.)

Just get an external enclosure or server, like every business in the world, dude.

 

[Pezimak]

How much did it cost again?……

 

[bmot]

This product is a disaster. Gladly overshadowed by all the good things Apple announced recently.

 

[Schizoid]

It’s almost like it‘s a hurriedly cobbled-together pointless, expensive rig they had to chuck onto the market to complete their transition.

 

[R3k]

NVMe blades don’t go that fast unless you’re talking about a RAID 0 configuration, which is very, VERY bad for pro-level data.

Here's one that does: https://www.amazon.com/WD_Black-SN850-Internal-Gaming-Heatsink/dp/B08PMLYV9H/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3EY1XSBG0JMQ3&keywords=nvme+2tb+7000&qid=1686810807&sprefix=nvme+2tb+7000,aps,147&sr=8-4&th=1

Plus, even multi-stream 8K doesn’t use that much bandwith. And Thunderbolt is capable of 40 GB/s… Well above the 7 GB/s you recommended. So, just get an external enclosure, if you need that much bandwith.

You will only get about 2500 Megabytes per Second read from a 40Gb/ps thunderbolt port no matter the storage medium. The data stream is saturated at that point. Look it up.

(Also, you do realize 10 GB Ethernet is… 10 GB/s, right? External enclosures cap out at the speed you said because they generally use 3.5” spinning hard drives for large capacity. But the top speed is still 10,000 Mb/sec.)

Just get an external enclosure or server, like every business in the world, dude.

10Gb-E is 10 GigaBIT ethernet. Emphasis on bit. It equates to 1250 MegaBytes per second.

Edit: Changed two B's to a b's for clarity.

 

[R3k]

In fairnese, drives disappesring has been an issue for all sorts of hardware, and all sorts of operating systems, since the concept of "sleeping" a computer first debeuted (1980s?).

True. But no idea when sleeping a computer became a thing, but I thought it was much later, like 90s...Hmm, I just dont remember and I was using SCSI drives in the late 90's too, haha.

 

[persona1138]

Here's one that does: https://www.amazon.com/WD_Black-SN850-Internal-Gaming-Heatsink/dp/B08PMLYV9H/ref=sr_1_4?crid=3EY1XSBG0JMQ3&keywords=nvme+2tb+7000&qid=1686810807&sprefix=nvme+2tb+7000,aps,147&sr=8-4&th=1



You will only get about 2500 Megabytes per Second read from a 40Gb/ps thunderbolt port no matter the storage medium. The data stream is saturated at that point. Look it up.

10Gb-E is 10 GigaBIT ethernet. Emphasis on bit. It equates to 1250 MegaBytes per second.

Edit: Changed two B's to a b's for clarity.

Here’s the fundamental question…

Why not put NVMe storage into something like the OWC ThunderBay Flex 8 - with 4 of them formatted in a RAID 0 - with 7 extra storage bays with 3.5” hard drives formatted as a RAID 5 for backup (and also pretty damn fast storage on their own)?’

Why limit yourself to just ONE drive bay, when I could basically do the same thing - with better data protection - for a lesser price, and STILL have the same speed?

Internal storage is useless with a DAS like that. AND I get more storage.

The Mac Pro is useless.