Added an NVMe SSD (2TB) to my 2013 Mac Pro (trash can) via an OWC
expansion box (4M2)
This is with High Sierra.

Some comments/experience:

The Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adaptor has:
Female Thunderbolt 2 and Male Thunderbolt 3 ends. (Apple support gave me
wrong info). While Apple told me that it does not Support the Mac Pro
2013, it does. (the list of supported Macs only only those with native
Thunderbolt 3)

It took me over 24 hours to do something I expected would be very quick.

Disk Utility had no problem formatting the new NVME drive as APFS.
I then started to do a "Restore" from DMA5_old spinning (HFS) drive to
DMA5 (APFS SSD). It took forever, so after a few hours of not even being
halfway though I killed it. Reformatted drive, and then mounted drive,
booted normally and logged in as "root" (it's home directory is on
system drive, not on DMA5 which was now empty).

Used Finder to drag and drop the 10 or so large directories on drives
individually. Took about 4 hours to copy. All seemed fine. made sure
my login still pointed to /Volumes/DMA5/Users/jfmezei (CTRL key when
selecting username in "Users and Groups").

Logged out of root, logged into my account. The awfull default
background appears (sign of trouble), then lots of alerts that keep
repeating about needing to repair my Library. I was able to open a
Finder window and a terminal window to do a "pwd" to confirm I was at
/Volumes/DMA5/Users/jfmezei.

It turns out that most files were created as _unknown:_unknown
owner/group and so I had no access to them. But that also meant that
OS-X screwed all my setting in recreating a "default environment.
Interestingly, it also zapped the login screen background which I had to
restore from time machine backup (this is on system disk).

So I reformat drive again, and this time, use Disk Utility to do a
"restore" from DMA5_old to DMA5 and let it run overnight. This was done
from recovery partition.

This morning, I get to my computer, and Disk Utility completed the
process with a green "success" checkmark. Yeah ! Yippie ! I say.

Only problem, the SSD is devoid of a volume. just has the APFS
container. (so the formatted APFS DMa% was destryed) and the 8 hours or
so of copying lead to nothing.

So reformat again.

Long story short: Disk are now formatted with "ignore onwership on
volume" set by default. ( Select disk in Finder, File-> Get Info and it
is at bottom).

Interestingly, when those files were created as _unknown, _unknown, and
from the actual root account, doing a chown jfmezei:staff on it did not
change the owner.

What is needed is to:

- Format drive as APFS
- Mount drive, use Finder to remove the "Ignore onwership on volume".
- Dismount Drive
- Mount Drive

I was then able to use Fider to drag each major folder (my home folder
has over 460,000 files with 1TB of storage used :-).

These files get copied with wrong ownership in part because the source
had also been converted to ignore onwership at some point.

After the /Users tree was copied, I was then able to chown all the files
in my directory, and process the owners of the others in /user. I also
set all files in my home directory to have rwx for the user. (owner).

I was then able to login and all worked perfectly fine. And damned it is
muchj faster when home directory is an MVMe SSD at 20GBs on Thunderbolt 2.

Not mentioned: I also tried Carbon Copy Cloner. (took a while to get it
to launch, some sort of error when I would try to launch it). It
appears to do individual file copies (fine) but also comparisons, and it
also didn't set protections correctly. (hence reverting to using Finder
because by doing it directory by directory, once a directory is done, I
can get to work on fixing its owner/protection while another copy of
another directory tree is happening).

Note: I found recovery partition to be very limited. No "man" available
and limited command set at command line. So enabling root and logging
into the gui (had never done GUI as root before) allowed me to do
multiple taskjs, have full accesss to command line and web browser to
research error message at same time instead of going back to
Pre-Multifinder environment that is the recovery partition.

The other strange thing is that Disk Utility doesn't let you restore to
the formatted APFS VOLUME, you need to restore to the device (so "show
all devices" is a must. And when I did let it run, I have no idea what
it actually did.

I was unaware that my disks had had the ownership disabled and that
formatting new drive did it with onwership disabled by default. This
woudl have saved me much time, but would have still resulted in the Disk
Utility spending 8 or more hours copying to nowhere.

Note: Finder gives no clue on errors, so after the copy of a directory
tree has completed, use the get-info panel on old and new directory
triees to compare numebr of files and space used.

It is interesting to see OS-X High Sierra having native support for NMVe
drives (Note its is driven by Apple SSD controller, nas Trim enabled by
default). There is an MVMExpress item that "lights up" in System
Information with the drive info on it. Until the 2019 Cheese Grater Mac
Pro, I don't think Apple supported NVMe M.2 drives since it used its own
proprietary drives. (on the 2013 Mac Pro, the built in propritary SSD
shows up in the SAS/SATA section of the System Information app, not the
NMVE one). (There are adaptors to allow using M.2 drives into that
proproetary plug, so expected the built-in drive would be treated the
same as NVMe drives, but it isn't).

Apple SSD Controller:

CT2000P5SSD8:

Capacity: 2 TB (2,000,398,934,016 bytes)
TRIM Support: Yes
Model: CT2000P5SSD8
Revision: P4CR311
Serial Number: xxxxx
Link Width: x1
Link Speed: 8.0 GT/s
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk1
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
Removable Media: No
Volumes:
EFI:
Capacity: 209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)
File System: MS-DOS FAT32
BSD Name: disk1s1
Content: EFI
Volume UUID: 0E239BC6-F960-3107-89CF-1C97F78BB46B
disk1s2:
Capacity: 2 TB (2,000,189,177,856 bytes)
BSD Name: disk1s2
Content: Apple_APFS

On 2021-04-28 8:47 p.m., JF Mezei wrote:
> Added an NVMe SSD (2TB) to my 2013 Mac Pro (trash can) via an OWC
> expansion box (4M2)
> This is with High Sierra.
>
> Some comments/experience:
>
> The Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adaptor has:
> Female Thunderbolt 2 and Male Thunderbolt 3 ends. (Apple support gave me
> wrong info). While Apple told me that it does not Support the Mac Pro
> 2013, it does. (the list of supported Macs only only those with native
> Thunderbolt 3)
>
> It took me over 24 hours to do something I expected would be very quick.

That would be because you are utterly incompetent.

<snip>

In message <4%piI.152264$PE7.64321@fx39.iad> JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> The Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3 adaptor has:
> Female Thunderbolt 2 and Male Thunderbolt 3 ends. (Apple support gave me
> wrong info). While Apple told me that it does not Support the Mac Pro
> 2013, it does.

You are confusing "works" with "supported"; they are quite different. the
SUPPORTED use of a TB3 to TB2 dongle is to connect a TB2 device to aTB3
computer.

However, as I specifically told you, it did work to connect a TB3 device to a
TB2 computer. That does not, at all, mean it is a supported configuration.

--
King Kong is running wild again in the suburbs of Tokyo

On 2021-04-29 01:30, Lewis wrote:

> You are confusing "works" with "supported"; they are quite different. the
> SUPPORTED use of a TB3 to TB2 dongle is to connect a TB2 device to aTB3
> computer.

The specs on the Apple web site clearly state that it is bi-directional,
connecting TB2 device to TB3 computer and vide versa.

On 29/04/2021 10:34, JF Mezei wrote:
> On 2021-04-29 01:30, Lewis wrote:
>
>> You are confusing "works" with "supported"; they are quite different. the
>> SUPPORTED use of a TB3 to TB2 dongle is to connect a TB2 device to aTB3
>> computer.
>
> The specs on the Apple web site clearly state that it is bi-directional,
> connecting TB2 device to TB3 computer and vide versa.

I was going to say that I' seen that the Apple web site says that -
having discovered that not all TB2 to TB3 adaptors are bidirectional.

I have a TB3 RAID that I failed to connect to a TB2 Mini with a third
party adaptor, so was wondering if the Apple adaptor would work.

Thank you!

Dave

In message <%4viI.72140$9L1.17904@fx05.iad> JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> wrote:
> On 2021-04-29 01:30, Lewis wrote:

>> You are confusing "works" with "supported"; they are quite different. the
>> SUPPORTED use of a TB3 to TB2 dongle is to connect a TB2 device to aTB3
>> computer.

> The specs on the Apple web site clearly state that it is bi-directional,
> connecting TB2 device to TB3 computer and vide versa.

And? That has nothing at all to do with what is SUPPORTED.

--
"Yessir, Captain Tight Pants."