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Topic starter
I have a Mac Mini setup as a shared file server using a Thunderbay RAID 5 setup for the file storage (and a duplicate enclosure for time machine backup), running the most current version of SoftRaid. We then have 4 client machines, all running Mac OS, that mount the shared Thunderbay drive as a network share.
For about a month now, I'm running into an issue where transferring large amounts of data (say, 10+GB) to the shared Thunderbay drive across the network causes the Client machine to freeze and the Finder pops up the error that the shared volume is no longer available and ejects it. We are a design studio, so this happens frequently as we work on large Photoshop, InDesign and FinalCut projects.
Here's how I've been able to isolate the issue to potentially a Softraid problem:
-Network volume disconnect issue began a month or so ago when working on a large FinalCut Pro project. FinalCut was accessing the library across the network on the shared Tunderbay drive. I assumed it was a problem with FinalCut Pro not wanting to work across the network, so I tried copying the project library to my local machine using the Finder so I could edit locally. The library (160GB) would not transfer without causing the network share to freeze & disconnect suddenly. I had to physically move my computer to the server room and connect it in TargetDisk mode to transfer the files successfully.
-Once I completed the project, I wanted to copy the Final Cut library back to the server for backup - total of about 200GB. I tried four times to copy and every time, the process would freeze and the network share would become unavailable. I watched the server’s screen during this process and confirmed that the drive does not become unavailable on the local server when this happens, oddly enough.
So far, it was sounding like a Finder / Mac OS / network issue, but it’s this last part that makes me think it might be SoftRaid related:
-I decided to setup a new shared folder on the server that lived on the server's internal HDD instead of the Thunderbay. I then mounted that as a share and the entire library copied successfully - twice - without issue. Just for the sake of thoroughness, I tried one last time copying to the shared thunderbay drive but the share became unavailable again mid-transfer.
-The only way I could successfully transfer the library to the shared thunderbay drive was to copy each sub folder manually, the larges which was 6GB.
Any ideas what would be causing this??
Posted : 05/02/2020 12:19 pm
This is an OS X problem and we have reported it to Apple. the problem is not related to the SoftRAID driver, as far as we can determine. A future OSX release should fix this.
I will confirm this with engineering, but I believe I am correct on this.
Posted : 05/02/2020 12:38 pm
I had a similar issue with large files on my Thunderbay and ended up replacing the OWC cable that came with it with an official Apple TB3 cable. I haven't had issues since.
Posted : 05/02/2020 1:11 pm
Topic starter
This is an OS X problem and we have reported it to Apple. the problem is not related to the SoftRAID driver, as far as we can determine. A future OSX release should fix this.
I will confirm this with engineering, but I believe I am correct on this.
In searching the forums, I saw that an issue has already been raised about Softraid volumes suddenly disconnecting from their local machines on Catalina. In fact, that was my first thought: that the drives were suddenly disconnecting from the server locally, therefore making the network share suddenly unavailable
on the client machine.
However, I can confirm that when the network share drops, the drive is still mounted and accessible locally on the server and other client machines are still able to access. Add to that this only seems to happen with large file transfers, the problems didn't' seem related.
Posted : 05/02/2020 3:24 pm
