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New Mac Pro Has Hard Drive Issue, Apple Planning Fix in macOS Update
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More like tagline for every software issue, but Apple is the one always using it to the point of being untrue. To be fair, for Apple to claim something causing trouble for majority of users, it would mean 99% of user base, so in that sense, they are technically not wrong.
It should, because backup drive can fail too, and recovering of those may not even be possible. Information is generally more expensive than HDD or SSD.
Somebody may have expressed this before in this thread, but to me it's clear that something has gone completely wrong during the development proces of the new apple silicon Mac Pro. Something has turned out not to work, and they were not able to fix it anytime soon - be it the new CPU, a completely new concept for modularity or something else. The machine that they've come up with is a last minute effort to somehow try to keep the most demanding pros in the Mac universe. Actually, I can respect that in a way. Sometimes things don't pan out perfectly. As a prosumer myself, I really hope that Apple keeps up the effort to truly keep themselves in (or even in front) of the pro market. I'm deeply invested in the Apple/Mac ecosystem and no universe where I would realistically be able to switch to Windows unless I really had no other options.
The Accelsior 8M2 is also from OWC and it sounds like a great use for a Mac Pro:
OWC Accelsior 8M2 Adapter Card: Fastest PCIe SSD for Mac Pro
Upgrade your 2019-current Mac Pro and experience blazing 12,000MB/s speeds, max capacity, and unmatched reliability.
eshop.macsales.com
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I just wonder if this is Apple's own way of killing off the Mac Pro, as so much of it in its current form doesn't make much sense, financially or operationally.
I'm still staying out of upgrading our kit until M3, as for me M2 was a stopgap solution and I suspect Apple has a surfeit of M2's that it is offloading in any way it can.
Now I'm not suggesting M3 will be the magic bullet, but I don't believe its a stopgap solution like the M2.
The M1 iMac was a super desktop for many home users and impressed many, including myself where the one I bought for the kids exceeded my expectation, but where our business needs are for something much more powerful, but where I can get by on what we have for the time being and I am pleased we've not committed a lot of capital to anything M2.
I'm still staying out of upgrading our kit until M3, as for me M2 was a stopgap solution and I suspect Apple has a surfeit of M2's that it is offloading in any way it can.
Now I'm not suggesting M3 will be the magic bullet, but I don't believe its a stopgap solution like the M2.
The M1 iMac was a super desktop for many home users and impressed many, including myself where the one I bought for the kids exceeded my expectation, but where our business needs are for something much more powerful, but where I can get by on what we have for the time being and I am pleased we've not committed a lot of capital to anything M2.
Mac OS has always dsconnected external drives while sleeping, it's annoying on how much of an issue it has been.
My main work machine has two SSDs and a large SATA spinning rust drive for stuff that isn't needed on a daily basis but is nice to have handy. And I'm just writing code.
I could imagine a designer type having much larger files and keeping the current projects on SSD but keeping the last 12 months of finished projects on an internal spinning rust drive just in case one of their customers wants a quickie modification...
Not being funny but… at this point, what else is the Mac Pro for?! PCIe I/O and that's about it… Gah.
Exactly, I have an 8tb HDD, 2 1tb Sata SSD and a 2 tb NVME in my workstation, but I am completing a build of my new NAS unit from an old acer mini server I have hanging around where it will have a 256gb nvme ssd in an pci e slot and 4 18tb hdd in it for storage. HDD still has a large use case imo.
How was this not tested? Seems a simple test but they don't mention which hard drives have the issue. It isn't all of them, just certain ones. Maybe they only tested the drives that ship with the Mac Pro accessories Apple sells and not other WD lines, Toshiba drives or Seagate ones etc. Glad it isn't the hardware, just software that can be fixed.
I would just be hooking up 22TB WD drives, if I was upgrading right now. I'm sure they tested those.
I would just be hooking up 22TB WD drives, if I was upgrading right now. I'm sure they tested those.
I’ve had problems with sleep/wake/external HDD raid for years. Over multiple OS releases and two different Macs
The chip was never designed to be modular and Apple has backed themselves into a corner.
Just having hundreds of GB of memory soldered to the chip means Apple is going to have some angry customers and expensive warranty repairs down the line.
All because SoC works so well in an iPhone they thought it would work all the way up to pro machines, which is nonsense.
Not sure I would call it nonsense 😉 I’m pretty sure you can find plenty of art that was created on higher-end Apple Silicon.
It's about the mac pro, no issue with that device could affect a large number of users
2023 Mac Pro must officially represent the least amount of time Apple has ever spent on a computer.
Given how few people have already bought an M2 Mac Pro and have SATA HDDs in them, Apple could say it only affects a few users. It does however, affect every user who is in that situation.
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They also aren't too expensive. You can buy an 8 TB SSD for $400. That's not "enterprise class" but with a good backup system, those drives are workable in most production environments.
If someone wants a HDD, $400 buys you at least 20 TB of an enterprise-class drive. If you need a lot of space, spinning drives will be more cost efficient for some more years than SSDs.
If I was buying a Mac Pro and needed let's say 100 TB of storage, I'd rather fill it up with faster SSDs and then keep everything else in a NAS to transfer what I need over for local work. If the speed limitations are not going to work for you, configure it with 8 TB of storage when ordering and dump as many high speed drives as you can fit inside. With 7 PCIe slots, you should be able to add at least 14 NVME drives, plus whatever else you can fit with the SATA connectors. That will cost a lot but this is part of why the Mac Pro exists.
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Can’t imagine there’s more than a handful Of people wasting money on this machine
LTO-3/4 are pretty popular for long term (offsite) backup storage for a reason...
It´s kinda overkill, but people can use it for server purposes, or raw storage in a raid array (where you can store the bulk of the files on a large "cheap" HDD array and have one or two SSD/NvME acting as the cache for the most used files), I would do that if I worked with huge files on a daily basis and expended this much on a machine like that. HDDs are pretty usefull for large ammounts of data storage and data reliability even today. I myself currently have 16tb on two Western Purple disks conected externally to a Lenovo m70q running as a mirror setup, looking to upgrade to a proper solution using a jonsbo N1 tower that supports 5 HDDS + 2 SSDs for cache with some effort and as many M2 NvME drives your mobo can accept to run 5x8tb in a RAID array (40tb total, 32tb usable, 8tb for parity).
This was also an issue early on with the M1 MBP's & MBA's in that when they were connected to a dock with external drives plugged in, and then the Mac went to sleep, *issues* happened. Granted, when these were introduced, there were a lot of issues. but this was one that stuck around for a bit and was thankfully fixed with Ventura. I would expect this to be addressed quickly.