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New Mac Pro Has Hard Drive Issue, Apple Planning Fix in macOS Update
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Once upon a time... 35 years ago, someone came out with a contraption to plug in an X86 processor, next to the Motorola processor in an Amiga. Not sure if there was similar for the Mac, which was using the same Motorola processor.
ETA: found it! https://amitopia.com/atonce-gave-amiga-500-286-pc-capabilities/
All the crazy stuff there was back in the day before oligopoly/consolidation eliminated competition, invention, and innovation in the hardware space!
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This is a classic USB external drive issue. I wonder if Apple had to fudge/convert SATA to a USB bus for Apple silicon? 🤔
I was running a Nvidia GPU over thunderbolt on a 2012 Mac mini and everything was fine, but you can't even do that anymore.
The Pro should have had additional memory slots and also GPU support. 3K for a case and basic motherboard is a massive insult.
Apple manages to design new chips for security, for their new headset, to run the Touch Bar so they should have been able to engineer a solution.
The Amiga had mode memory options with chip ram, fast ram and slow ram. I remember being able to use the expansion ram as hard drive and being able to render large images into it, much more than a floppy would allow at the time.
You pay $7,000 and have issues with a SATA drive? Come on Apple. You can do better than this.
This problem of disconnecting drives been around for a longtime. I have an external drive that says this drive disconnected improperly for at least two years on my MacBook Air. Reported, no fix ever. Something to do with the timing. Does not seem to impact the data and starts backup on its own. Just annoying message.
This is not restricted to the new Mac Pro, and it is not a new problem - Apple just refused to acknowledge it until now. I've been dealing with this on my external video RAID for over a year at this point, ever since upgrading to Monterey.
Basically the OS wants to put your drives to sleep constantly to save power, regardless of what you've selected in the Energy Saver control panel. This works fine for SSDs since they can "wake" instantly, but for anybody using HDDs (for instance, people with an external RAID array used for video editing or backup), this is a huge problem because it can take several seconds for some drives to spin back up. And it does each one in the RAID array one by one - so if you've got 8 or more drives, have fun sitting there waiting for a full minute for them all to spin up. And then the OS will put them back to sleep and spin them down again 30 seconds later, even if you're actively accessing them. This results in constant interruptions in your work, and basically makes the computer unusable. God help you if you have more than one external array plugged in.
The good thing is it usually goes away after restarting - until you put/let the computer go to sleep once, then it starts up again. Sometimes it also has issues waking the drives up as it's waking from sleep, which is where the "unexpected disk ejection" comes in. You'll start a large media copy, walk away from the machine, and come back to it having gone to sleep in the middle of it, your file copy failed, and your media drives unmounted and file structure possibly damaged, all because the OS expects every external drive to behave like an SSD.
Apple is only looking into now because Mac Pro users disproportionately still use ext HDDs for large file storage and backup.
The Apple silicon precludes that. The speed of the architecture relies on memory being integrated with the CPU and I'm assuming that applies also to external graphics. Apple might be able to engineer external GPU support but in order to increase memory, they would most likely need to design Apple Silicon with more integrated memory.
I hate to say it but those looking for more memory and / or GPU support, should consider different solutions than the 2023 Mac Pro.
10+ year old drives were simpler . The push to make HDDs go deeper and deeper into hyper density storage is likely to bring complexity that high performance SSDs have had to juggle all along. ( muliptle bits stored in single 'cell' , logical mapping of data, etc. )
' ... utilizing their unique OptiNAND technology. This technique marries mechanical and flash storage technologies to achieve higher capacity with a form of conventional magnetic recording (CMR) that's much faster than competing Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives. ..."
Western Digital Red Pro 20TB HDD Review: OptiNAND on a Platter
WD’s own approach to high-capacity NAS HDDs
CMR is basically capping out at capacity. Once HDDs don't have a capacity ($/TB) advantage ... bad news coming in terms of units sold.
Peeking and poking on drive platters is less and less an excuse to skipping doing backups.
P.S. same with data privacy standards increasing. Peeking and poking at an encrypted drive isn't going to recover much if have lost the key.
and a lot of $$$Many SSD are SATA. Many people still use HD because they need more space than is practical with SSD. What if you need 50TB? That's a lot of SSD's...
Well, these are internal SATA hard drives the article is talking about, not external drives. This was not a problem on my Mac Pro cheese grater with internal SATA hard drives running High Sierra for example, and not a problem with other more recent cheese graters running more recent versions of macOS with internal SATA hard drives, unless you were running those internal drives off a third party PCIe SATA card.
On the flip side, I have this issue with an external USB-C SSD drive that's connected through a Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4 hub.
What they're saying, though, is that this issue has been around for a while- it's the behavior of macOS specifically, not the type of drive in question.
Yes, this has been a problem with external drives for a while... but my point was that specifically, AFAIK internal SATA hard drives in the Mac Pro were not an issue, until this latest Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
I still have this problem in Ventura on my M1 Mac mini, albeit only occasionally, with my Samsung T5 external USB-C SSD connected through my Plugable Thunderbolt 4 / USB 4 hub. I do not have this problem with my Samsung T7 Shield external USB-C SSD connected directly to the Mac mini.
I'm sorry but with the latest Mac Pro Apple is clearly signaling that the Mac Pro is dead. This issue is just an exclamation point.
It should be able to address the SoC memory and also additional memory added via expansion.
I get the chip needs memory close to the cores for a lot of operations but it should be able to be designed to use additional memory as well, may be slower, may just be where software can store the data it needs rather than streaming it from disk which I can't see being faster.
Soon.
Reminds me of that clip 🤣
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But to be on topic... I say good job Apple! /s
How does something like this pass QA? I'm as much an Apple fan as the next but gees, some of these silly bugs... sometimes its just ridiculous.
I hate to be that guy, but if you are buying a Apple Silicon Mac Pro and still using Hard Disks, maybe you should rethink your digital setup.
10+ year old drives were simpler . The push to make HDDs go deeper and deeper into hyper density storage is likely to bring complexity that high performance SSDs have had to juggle all along. ( muliptle bits stored in single 'cell' , logical mapping of data, etc. )
' ... utilizing their unique OptiNAND technology. This technique marries mechanical and flash storage technologies to achieve higher capacity with a form of conventional magnetic recording (CMR) that's much faster than competing Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives. ..."
Western Digital Red Pro 20TB HDD Review: OptiNAND on a Platter
WD’s own approach to high-capacity NAS HDDswww.tomshardware.com
CMR is basically capping out at capacity. Once HDDs don't have a capacity ($/TB) advantage ... bad news coming in terms of units sold.
Peeking and poking on drive platters is less and less an excuse to skipping doing backups.
P.S. same with data privacy standards increasing. Peeking and poking at an encrypted drive isn't going to recover much if have lost the key.
CMR capacities are about to get a huge bump thanks to HAMR and similar technologies finally being implemented in enterprise (then trickling down to consumer) products.
Seagate is basically ready to launch 32TB drives, with a clear roadmap to 40TB and even 50TB in the not too distant future. Western Digital isn’t far behind either.
With SMR this may increase even further.
While of course I prefer CMR when possible, SMR isn’t inherently bad in a typical mass archival storage type application where a drive may only be written to once, and read many times to access data as it’s needed. The SMR penalty on write speed only comes into play when attempts are made to rewrite portions of the disk.
If they find a way to practically combine SMR with HAMR, we could be looking at single-drive capacities upwards of 70TB, maybe even as much as 100TB in the not distant future.
Of course my own data needs pale in comparison with that, but I do see these developments as a cause for excitement and I don’t currently foresee a future where I wouldn’t be making use of traditional spinning storage given that the cost/TB is looking to remain vastly lower.
Well there were "IBM" expansion cards for Apple II's (think Applied Engineering made one of them), and pretty sure there were some for Mac's down the line too.
I am sure everyone's racing to test the thing right this second and the first reviews will come later today.
I know this isn't your point, but there actually are 20TB SSDs, for example the Scalar-20T.
Blasting the platter with a laser isn't particularly "conventional" ( the 'C' in CMR).
Data recovery of failed drives is all read so in that sense it is still conventional. But failure modes due to mutating the store cells with power/heat are drifting toward NAND issues.The density increases are coming with more and more exotic stuff which gets less and less 'conventional'.
It isn't going to completely overlap what makes NAND recovery very hard , but the "I can save all your stuff even though you don't have backups" is likely going to get incrementally thinner.
On a $6000 computer "Will be fixed later" is not the answer I would be looking forward to.