HDX2 issue in Sonnet Mac Pro 6.1 Sonnet chassis (xMac Pro Server)

[antonis]

Hey all,


I will be working in this old system for the next job. It has one HDX card and it works absolutely fine. I decided to install another HDX card to draw a bit more power from this ageing Mac.



I installed the second HDX card - and the yellow-black power supply cable inside for both cards. But when I started the Mac up again, it fails to see both HDX cards. Instead, upon launching Pro Tools, it goes through a loop of three error messages, one being that there's not enough RAM for Pro Tools, one that it cannot see a I/O hardware connected (which, definitely is connected) and one to change the Playback Engine. The system never recovers from that, one has to Force Quit to get back to normal. One of the error windows has the option to press a 'Cancel' button. But the system just hangs after doing so.



I have now removed the second HDX card, and I am working as normal. My go to thinking is that the chassis cannot draw enough current for both cards and it just fails. But I've been in another places, with exactly the same hardware (Mac Pro 6.1, inside the same chassis, with HDX2, same Blackmagic card on the 3rd PCI slot, etc.).

Has anyone faced anything similar before?

[LDS]

Originally Posted by antonis

Hey all,


I will be working in this old system for the next job. It has one HDX card and it works absolutely fine. I decided to install another HDX card to draw a bit more power from this ageing Mac.



I installed the second HDX card - and the yellow-black power supply cable inside for both cards. But when I started the Mac up again, it fails to see both HDX cards. Instead, upon launching Pro Tools, it goes through a loop of three error messages, one being that there's not enough RAM for Pro Tools, one that it cannot see a I/O hardware connected (which, definitely is connected) and one to change the Playback Engine. The system never recovers from that, one has to Force Quit to get back to normal. One of the error windows has the option to press a 'Cancel' button. But the system just hangs after doing so.



I have now removed the second HDX card, and I am working as normal. My go to thinking is that the chassis cannot draw enough current for both cards and it just fails. But I've been in another places, with exactly the same hardware (Mac Pro 6.1, inside the same chassis, with HDX2, same Blackmagic card on the 3rd PCI slot, etc.).

Has anyone faced anything similar before?

Power consumption shouldn't really be an issue. If you are pumping 4K video in and out of the Blackmagic card at the same time, thunderbolt bandwidth could become an issue.

You mention the yellow/black cable, but did you also install the SATA 3 cable that links the two cards? It might be worth tossing each card into the system separately to run Digitest. If the firmware is really different, it could be a thunderbolt/firmware update related issue that is tripping things up.

[antonis]

Hey LDS, thanks for the reply back.


I *think* the issue was that one card might have had a driver update/ firmware update that came with 2023.9. I did the update with the 2nd card and then installed both and everything worked fine.