Issues and questions with transferring array to Mac Mini

jalari — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 12:15:22 +0000

Hello! First, I am sorry for this massive book, but this has been a long struggle over many, many months in the making, so I have a lot to explain here before I get to my questions.

So I have a pretty unique setup where I have 4 x OWC Express 4M2 4-Slot M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure's, each with 4 x 4TB NVMe drives (a generic brand of drives, all from the same maker) for a total of 16 drives in a RAID 5 config. I've had to purchase the drives over time, so unfortunately, despite all being purchased the same way on Amazon, I would sometimes get a slightly newer model than the others, so that could partly be related to my issues, but not sure. I have them wired up to a Windows 11 computer (I am mostly a windows user) using an "ASUS ThunderboltEX 4" card that works with the Asus board that computer has, and they are daisy chained to each other and the connected to the 40GB/s port (TB4 port) on the card. The primary use of this array is for long term storage of all my Blu-Ray movie and TV shows that I have been ripping myself so they can be played over the network on my media playing computers.

Since setting it up, it has been working for the most part excluding some initial issues I had and eventually resolved. (Had a few bad drives) So before I transferred my data over after my 2nd attempt to set this all up, I did run the certify on every drive to make sure everything was 100% this time since my first time doing all of this, I had bad drives causing me all sorts of headaches. While eventually every drive was certified, I did find that I had to certify only a couple at a time and wait for them to finish. If I tried to do too many at once, they would randomly fail the certification. This issue could be related to all of my issues below, just not sure.

Once the data was transferred over, I've had random issues with data being corrupted. At first I thought it was just a problem here and there, but when I started to run into files that were inaccessible, I ran a video health check on all of my Anime (since a large portion of my collection is Anime). The video health check software basically attempts to decode the videos and see if it has any trouble doing that. After it was done, I found that 88+ episodes seems to be corrupted beyond recovery. It's a small amount considering I have over 25k video files related to anime alone, so I was not super concerned at the time. However I later started to notice that even way more files seem to have data corruption at the very start of the video for some reason. Only happens at the start of the videos and only lasts a few seconds, but it's never in the middle or end which is strange. I am seeing this as I watch all the anime to verify they work and the subtitles play right (while also watching show's I've never seen). I am also doing this since I generally watch Japanese dubbed and need to edit the files so the English subs are the default track. None of these files with this issue were logged by the health check since they are playing, but clearly something is broken somewhere.

So that's the basic detail of what I've been dealing with, but what brings me here today is I've recently received an error from SoftRaid 8 saying that my data is out of sync and I need to rebuild. First I need to mention that since setting all of this up, the Read/Write speeds were WAY lower than I expected considering the NVMe drives can get around 2000~3000MB/s on their own, but in the array, the transfer speeds to the computer were around 60~80MB/s. Recent updates to the windows version of SoftRaid did seem to improve on that and now I get around 125MB/s if I'm lucky, but clearly nowhere near what it should be, but I suspect its because I have so many drives in this array, their mixed models, and I think I also used the wrong setting when I first set the array up (selecting it to be Optimized for Digital Video instead of workstation or whatever the other option was). This largest factor may be because the enclosures are TB2 and probably only use a single PCIe lane, so I suspect those are the main reasons.

Now with all that backstory out of the way (sorry lol), lets get down to my issue. So with the error coming up saying I need to rebuild and the corruption issues, I told the software to try the rebuild. It starts it and everything seems like its working, but the SSD activity from each drive almost always stays at 0%, and the estimated time to complete the rebuilt gets larger and larger, settling at around 20 days or longer which makes no sense to me. The first time I tried, it said around 40 days if I recall right after it had been running for a few days. I know its a 64TB array (54.6TB really after formatting and the RAID 5 config), but that still seems like way too long to me, especially since the SSD activity almost never does anything except for the occasional spike in activity here and there. Despite all that, I let it run hoping everything gets resolved, but sadly things go down hill from there.

If I let it run and eventually I would find the computer has restarted and the rebuild is no longer running. At first I assumed it was windows update running and making the computer restart after the updates were done, but I finally got to witness this happen in real time after trying again and it seems that windows is just crashing. Not sure if its a blue-screen or what since the computer this is running on does not have a monitor hooked up (Using remote desktop to manage it) and the event logs have no details about why it suddenly restarted. I just know that every time I try to do the rebuild, at some random point it will crash windows and ends up rebooting.

Because of all of these issues, I've sort of reached my limit and feel like I need to take it to the next and extreme step. I just ordered a 2023 model Mac Mini M2 with TB4 ports. I just don't trust the windows software anymore what with all of these issues and the issues I had initially, so thought it may be worth it to try using a the latest Mac Mini for this, plus I can use it for other things with my work so it will be a win=win I hope.

The Mac should arrive today and I will start the process to move things to it, but this is where my questions finally come into play. I know I need to transfer my Softraid license to the mac, but will this also require me to format the array and start it fresh using the Mac partitioning and all that? I only ask because I spent weeks/months ripping and organizing all my media files, and I really do not want to do all of that again, but I will if I have to. I could try to copy the data off onto several 16Tb external drives I got because of all of this, but I am not sure there is any point to me copying the data if a lot of it is corrupted. I haven't even checked all of my movie and TV show rips to see if they have the same issues. The Anime was the first media added to the array and my most important media, so its what I checked. I am a bit torn on the best course of action once I get the mac. My hope is that I can plug it into the mac, and try to run the rebuild on that instead and hope for better results, but considering its a windows NTFS partition, will that even be possible or do I need to start from scratch?

Any suggestions on what I should do once I get the Mac? I don't have much experience with Mac's except for an older Macbook air I recently purchased for use in beta testing with my job, but it only had a TB2 port and hooking the drives up to it would of needed several adapters from what I can tell, plus its not super powerful so not the best option for all of this. I've tried to attach the OWC diagnostics data just in case, but the website wont let me attach that file type it seems. Not sure the proper procedure for that so let me know if I just need to include a certain file, if at all. Thanks again for any advise anyone can give, and again, apologies for the long book, lol.

A disk is failing - Your data is at serious risk + Restarting Issues

amsterdamned — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 22:42:18 +0000

Hi All.

I recently purchased a new OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad and have it attached to a Dell Optiplex Micro 7060. The cable is connected to a 10Gbps port on the rear of the computer. I'm running SoftRAID 7 on Windows 11 (22H2) and seeing an issue that has just popped up after I finished copying all the data across. The disks I'm using were previously in a Thunderbay 4 TB3 so I had to delete the array and recreate, as Windows couldn't write to the Mac-formatted volume.

The Softraid system icon is showing red and hovering over it shows "A disk is failing - Your data is at serious risk" but the Softraid application shows no issues with any of the disks; all are healthy.

The other issue I'm seeing, which may or may not be related, is restarting is taking a very long time. I restarted the PC 5 minutes ago and the screen is still showing "Restarting". In fact the PC may never restart as I get to 10 minutes then hard reset which is less than ideal. If I disconnect or power down the OWC unit the PC restarts as normal. If I shut down the PC shuts down normally; the issue only appears when restarting.

It's also worth noting I've tested on a secondary 10Gbps sub-c port, at the front of the machine, and the issue still occurs.

Let me know if you need logs and I'll send them across.

Thanks :-)

Thunderbay mini 4 RAID 0 system errors

fuduro32 — Tue, 17 May 2022 08:22:04 +0000

I have recently purchased a Thunderbay 4 mini and installed 2 x 4TB Samsung 870 EVO SSDs. I have configured them as RAID0 and disabled caching for maximum speed. They were in use for a few days.

Yesterday the computer got stuck at boot and had to be hard shutdown. Upon reboot, windows started scanning the RAID drive for errors. After it completely booted, some files on the RAID volume were missing, others had 0KB.

After looking at the system logs (event viewer -> system), there appear to be thousands(!) of errors of type "Event ID 11, Disk: The driver detected a controller error" starting right after I configured the RAID volume. I have disabled RAID and use the enclosure as a simple external drive.

Can you tell me how I can debug this issue or what could cause it? If I cannot create RAID volumes, the enclosure is of no use to me...

The computer is a Lenovo P15 2nd gen, the Thunderbay is connected directly to the native Thunderbolt port (no hubs etc.). Windows 10 with latest updates.

Very slow speeds using Thunderbay 4 TB3 in RAID 5 (Windows)

jthain — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 19:16:23 +0000

Using Softraid for Windows the OWC Thunderbay 4 can only sustain 30-60 MB/s write speeds. Tried this on two computers, one with Windows 10, another with Windows 11. Same result. OWC claims that my model of Thunderbay should achieve around 400MB/s in RAID 5.

OWC tells me this is a known Windows-only Softraid issue.

Windows Critical Issues - SoftRAID Forum

Issues and questions with transferring array to Mac Mini

A disk is failing - Your data is at serious risk + Restarting Issues

Thunderbay mini 4 RAID 0 system errors

Very slow speeds using Thunderbay 4 TB3 in RAID 5 (Windows)