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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.
I feel like that's Apple's goal, to make PCIe look outdated compared to Thunderbolt. But if I was in the market, this move doesn't convince me that a Studio is fine, all it did is convince me that I should skip on both the Pro and the Studio.
 
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.
Just the picking of a nit, but the term spinning rust is literally correct. Mechanical hard drives use metal oxides to store data on a spinning disk. It's the term that the companies that make the drives use. It is not derogatory in any way. They are spinning disks covered with a very thin layer of rust.
 
Yeah SATA is legacy but what if you need 100TB for audio and video. You gonna pay for iCloud 😀? Don’t get me on Thunderbolt enclosures they also go nuts when Mac sleeps
 
It certainly has more than hard drive issues. It has 'why does it exist' issues.

Apple has been so die hard on iPad like computers that they killed their own ability to make a modular tower.

Their dream has come true. Pay them for any updates pay them up front no changes or edits allowed just go buy a new one.

Cell phones masquerading as desktops
 
The previous intel Mac pro had a socketed cpu and then expandability for GPU, RAM, storage and Apples expansion modules like the afterburner cards. They could absolutely have an afterburner style card with an M2 Ultra for the Mac pro, is that how computers work?
My first guess is that would be even more difficult than making SATA drives actually work correctly.:rolleyes: But seriously, they probably could have spent time and made something like that work, but I would expect that the thunking to translate between the processor architectures would have restricted the speed and also made it an expensive upgrade. It doesn’t sound like that many Mac Pro users swapped the processors even when it was the same Intel socket, and I expect a Frankenstein add-in would be even less appealing.
 
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 proces
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. ..."

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.
Also I don't think I could fix a mechanical issue with a modern HDD. I vaguely recall they're filled with some gas... and if it is tampered with, the heads will impact the platters, and it's all over, or something like that.
 


In a support document published today, Apple said certain SATA hard drives might unexpectedly disconnect from the 2023 Mac Pro after the computer wakes from sleep. Apple said it is "aware of this issue" and will fix it in a "future macOS update."

Mac-Pro-Feature-Red.jpg

While the Mac Pro is configured with SSD storage, it has SATA ports for connecting internal hard drives, and some can disconnect due to a bug.

"Certain models of internal SATA drives might unexpectedly disconnect from your computer after your Mac wakes from sleep," said Apple. "This can occur if your Mac automatically goes to sleep or if you manually put your Mac to sleep. If you see a message that your disk was not ejected properly, you can restart your Mac to reconnect to the drive."

As a temporary workaround, users can prevent their Mac Pro from automatically going to sleep by opening the System Settings app, clicking on Displays → Advanced…, and turning on "Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off."

Released on Tuesday, the new Mac Pro features Apple's M2 Ultra chip. The desktop tower has the same design as the Intel-based model from 2019, but lacks graphics card support and user-upgradeable RAM due to Apple silicon's unified architecture. Customers who do not need PCIe expansion should consider the Mac Studio instead.

Article Link: New Mac Pro Has Hard Drive Issue, Apple Planning Fix in macOS Update
If your Mac Pro is still under warranty or covered by AppleCare, it's best to reach out to Apple Support directly. They can provide assistance and guide you through the troubleshooting process or advise on the best course of action.
 
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.

You get my point, but even that Scalar SSD uses SATA and would presumably be affected by this issue anyway...
 
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What a great start to anyone making a $7k investment. It's already got problems.
Does anyone even test anything these days?
The concept that someone would spend that much for a computer and stick 20+ year old hard drive tech in it instead of now much more reliable now far more inexpensive than when introduced SSD's was overlooked.

Understandably.

They'll fix it. They need dinosaur users too, ya know.
 
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.
I would not be at all surprised if the architecture of the ASi Mac Pro uses a Thunderbolt bus for the internal SATA drives, as it does for the external ports on other ASi machines, and this turns out to be another symptom of the same problem. I'd be happy if it was, actually, cause then whatever fix they push for the Mac Pro might also solve it everywhere else.
 
I would not be at all surprised if the architecture of the ASi Mac Pro uses a Thunderbolt bus for the internal SATA drives, as it does for the external ports on other ASi machines, and this turns out to be another symptom of the same problem. I'd be happy if it was, actually, cause then whatever fix they push for the Mac Pro might also solve it everywhere else.
but why do that when the cpu has pci-e lanes? to put an in TB to pci-e and then pci-e to sata chips.
When you just need an pci-e to sata chip
 
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The concept that someone would spend that much for a computer and stick 20+ year old hard drive tech in it instead of now much more reliable now far more inexpensive than when introduced SSD's was overlooked.

Understandably.

They'll fix it. They need dinosaur users too, ya know.
I have yet to see 18-20tb ssd available where as 18-20tb HDD via satas are plentiful. Can't move to new technology when there is none. Just like the courage apple had to remove every freaking port on the pro. Way to go Joonny.
 
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!
The A2088 Bridgeboard was actually from Commodore and I seem to recall it came out before that, and the A1060 Sidecar predated both! And I also remember Commodore having a software emulator for the original A1000 Amiga. It was all pretty cool stuff in it’s day, but the PC guys would disparage it as “a game machine”. Funny that the PC guy insult now is that it is NOT a game machine.
 
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Left out “Affects only small number of users”. Isn't that the standard tagline for every Apple issue?!
They didn't need to, as only a small number of users were willing to pay the extra $3k over the same performance Mac Studio to buy these things in the first place. It is basically a $3k Pre-Apple-Tax for avoiding the 400% Apple Tax applied on SSDs for all other Macs.
 
They had four years to come out with another Mac Pro, and the new one can’t do something as basic as making sure internal drives stay connected.

Can’t innovate, my ass!
Nor work out how to add plug-in RAM. Plus, the wheels lacking brakes, but priced as if they are nuclear powered. Sheesh, what an embarrassment this machine is.
 
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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.
Oh yeah, I am sooooo sick of Apple REMOVING functionality from Preferences. FFS, give us more functionality with each iteration, not less. Thank the *nix gods for the terminal. The problem with terminal commands though, is knowing that they even exist. Anyone got any good comprehensive lists of such macOS terminal commands, ideally with good explanations of what they do, which someone other than a full blown systems admin, or linux nerd, can comprehend?
 
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.

Yeah, I remember running my A2000 with 3 MB RAM, but only 880 KB storage. Weird times. I believe the Mac Pro SSD would be multiple times faster that that old RAM disk, though.

OWC has a PCI card that holds 8 NVME SSDs, and that card actually makes me want a Mac Pro.
 
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