Are my internal NVMe drives causing PT to crash when recording multiple tracks?

[loud neighbor]

Looking for some wisdom regarding recording multiple tracks to internal PCIe M.2 NVMe drives.

The problem:

Quite consistently I have an issue where PT freezes in the middle of recording say 12-16 tracks at a time. It doesn't stop and give an error message - it simply hangs, frozen in time - tracks still red, etc. I can force-quit PT but have to restart my computer to re-open PT otherwise it hangs at launch. I also cannot simply hit "restart" from the Finder, I have to hold down the power button and do a forced restart because something hangs at shut-down as well.

The equipment:

16-core Mac Pro 7,1 (cheese grater) with 224GB RAM, PCIe M.2 NVMe drives for recording (4TB) and VI libraries (8TB) running PT 2020.5 on Catalina 10.15.3. The NVMe drives are set up for RAID 0. According to SoftRAID monitor all is well with the drives. RAM and NVMe drives are from OWC so I would hope there's not a quality issue there.

I never have this problem overdubbing 1 or 2 tracks at a time. Buffer size is usually 256. Maybe PT and M.2 NVMe drives aren't playing nicely together? Is there anything to this theory? I mean, have you ever tried to run full speed down a hill? Maybe these drives are too fast for their own good?

Any help is welcome - I am new to NVMe drives.

[JFreak]

Unless your SSD blade is seated badly, there should be no reason.

Why are you not on latest Catalina, btw?

[loud neighbor]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Unless your SSD blade is seated badly, there should be no reason.

Why are you not on latest Catalina, btw?

Hi Janne,

Thanks so much for the reply!

Everything was carefully installed and all drives pass their health tests.

I am not on the latest Catalina (10.15.6) due to the lack of official support from Avid but I will definitely download 10.15.5 and see if it's any better. According to the alert below, 10.15.3 and 10.15.5 are ok but 10.15.4 exhibited a similar problem to what I'm experiencing. Perhaps the issue is present in 10.15.3 as well. Copy/pasted from the 2020.5 compatibility page:

⚠️ ALERT: macOS Catalina 10.15.4 is NOT supported - FIXED on macOS 10.15.5 ⚠️
We have become aware of an issue that may affect certain machines running Pro Tools 2019.12 or later on macOS 10.15.4. When recording or playing back audio, the OS may lock up and require a hard reboot. We have found that Thunderbolt 2 spinning disk drives are more susceptible to this issue. We have worked closely with Apple to resolve this issue with high priority. We recommend that you continue to run Pro Tools on macOS 10.15.3 or 10.15.5, and refrain from installing macOS 10.15.4. Thank you for your patience.

[JFreak]

If I was in your shoes I would go straight to the latest. You are experiencing issues now, it cannot be any worse few releases later, can it?

[loud neighbor]

Originally Posted by JFreak

If I was in your shoes I would go straight to the latest. You are experiencing issues now, it cannot be any worse few releases later, can it?

Good point. I'm going to try 10.15.6.

After that I may also buy a convertible and drive it 6 mph over the posted speed limit. Not saying that the top will ever be down... but I could put it down whenever I wanted to. :)

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by loud neighbor

over the posted speed limit

Anything below 200mph is a walk in the park

[Marsdy]

Originally Posted by loud neighbor

Looking for some wisdom regarding recording multiple tracks to internal PCIe M.2 NVMe drives.

The problem:

Quite consistently I have an issue where PT freezes in the middle of recording say 12-16 tracks at a time. It doesn't stop and give an error message - it simply hangs, frozen in time - tracks still red, etc. I can force-quit PT but have to restart my computer to re-open PT otherwise it hangs at launch. I also cannot simply hit "restart" from the Finder, I have to hold down the power button and do a forced restart because something hangs at shut-down as well.

The equipment:

16-core Mac Pro 7,1 (cheese grater) with 224GB RAM, PCIe M.2 NVMe drives for recording (4TB) and VI libraries (8TB) running PT 2020.5 on Catalina 10.15.3. The NVMe drives are set up for RAID 0. According to SoftRAID monitor all is well with the drives. RAM and NVMe drives are from OWC so I would hope there's not a quality issue there.

I never have this problem overdubbing 1 or 2 tracks at a time. Buffer size is usually 256. Maybe PT and M.2 NVMe drives aren't playing nicely together? Is there anything to this theory? I mean, have you ever tried to run full speed down a hill? Maybe these drives are too fast for their own good?

Any help is welcome - I am new to NVMe drives.

I have the same Mac Pro. It came with 10.15.2. I was getting hard freezes. Sometimes the Mac would spontaneously restart! I tried 10.15.3 - same thing. From what I could gather there was an issue with the Radeon W5700X GPU so if you have that - it could be the problem. This was fixed in 10.15.4 apparently and installing that fixed it for me. No more freezes or restarts.

I didn’t come across the issues that Avid reported with 10.5.4 although I am now on 10.15.5 and that’s fine here.

I also have multiple m.2 NVMe drives, six in total for both Pro Tools audio and sample libraries and they work great.

EDIT: I’m not using SoftRAID by the way. Apple RAID here although I can’t imagine that would be an issue.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Marsdy

I didn’t come across the issues that Avid reported with 10.5.4

Me neither, but 10.15.4 or later is what you need for iCloud Folder Sharing and just speaking of myself cannot live without anymore. Have not noticed any difference between dot-four, dot-five, dot-six and dot-six with latest supplemental update

[louisenslinproduce]

HI Guys
Hope this might help, I have just completed my migration to my new Mac Pro 16 core with 386 gb ram and HD 2.


Originally I had the HDx card start at slot 2 as per avid and I have 2 x OWC 8TB NVM PCI drive at slot 4 and 5. I then found an article from OWC that stated they have experiences kernal panics with 2 or more NVM in slot 4 or 5


https://blog.macsales.com/62122-inve...-2019-mac-pro/


I only had one kernal panic ( mac restarting itself) so I moved the NVM drives to slot 2 and 3 and started HDX on slot 5 ( Also supported by Avid )


https://avid.secure.force.com/pkb/ar...-Configuration


Maybe this helps?

[loud neighbor]

Originally Posted by louisenslinproduce

HI Guys
Hope this might help, I have just completed my migration to my new Mac Pro 16 core with 386 gb ram and HD 2.


Originally I had the HDx card start at slot 2 as per avid and I have 2 x OWC 8TB NVM PCI drive at slot 4 and 5. I then found an article from OWC that stated they have experiences kernal panics with 2 or more NVM in slot 4 or 5


https://blog.macsales.com/62122-inve...-2019-mac-pro/


I only had one kernal panic ( mac restarting itself) so I moved the NVM drives to slot 2 and 3 and started HDX on slot 5 ( Also supported by Avid )


https://avid.secure.force.com/pkb/ar...-Configuration


Maybe this helps?

Very helpful - thank you! I don't remember which slots my two NVMe drives are currently in but I will move them to 2 and 3 if my recent OS update doesn't resolve the issue. I updated to 10.15.6 but am yet to do a larger multiple-track tracking session.

My Mac Pro must be lazy as it certainly doesn't bother to automatically restart. And why should it when there's a perfectly good (albeit fuming) human being within arms length? Perhaps my issue is more personal than software or hardware related. Will update with my findings.