Disks on my Thunderbay 6 never stop spinning - Functionality Issues

RE: Disks on my Thunderbay 6 never stop spinning

SoftRAID Support — Sat, 14 Jan 2023 10:34:38 +0000

All I can really offer is SoftRAID does not initiate any IO on drives, unless you are rebuilding, or some task with the application. It behaves like any other volume in MacOS. So whatever is accessing the volume is a MacOS task.

You can run lsof, to see if there is some task you can identify. If you have indexing off, then there should be no indexing functions listed.

sudo lsof /Volumes/myDrive

Where myDrive is the name of your volume. if it has a space in the name, put the name in quotes, such as

sudo lsof /Volumes/"my Drive"

RE: Disks on my Thunderbay 6 never stop spinning

tatyree — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 11:08:59 +0000

@softraid-support unfortunately that wasn't the problem. It started doing it again immediately after reboot even though I'd excluded the volume. It's rattling away right now. Any other thoughts or suggestions?

RE: Disks on my Thunderbay 6 never stop spinning

SoftRAID Support — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 16:53:59 +0000

@tatyree

Note: this will not decrease the life of the drives according to a google study of 100,000 disks and data from other cloud storage platforms.

My guess is this is a broken index. Exempt this volume from spotlight. restart. that should stop the accessing, correct?
then delete the exemption and after the indexing is completed, it should be normal again.

Disks on my Thunderbay 6 never stop spinning

tatyree — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 08:02:06 +0000

I have two arrays attached to my Mac Studio (Monterey 12.6 - M1 Max): An older Thunderbay 4/thunderbolt 2 with 4TB Seagate drives and a newer Thunderbay 6 with Toshiba drives. Since updating SoftRaid to 7.0.1 the drives on the Thunderbay 6 never stop spinning. There is nothing in the SoftRaid logs and nothing in Activity Monitor. The activity lights on the enclosure aren't lit at all, yet multiple drives in it are all constantly rattling away. This is not happening on the Thunderbay 4.

Energy Saver -> 'Put hard disks to sleep when possible' is off as is 'Wake for network access'.

This does not seem to cause any problem when using the array. The main problem is that it is annoyingly loud, constant from the moment the machine powers on and I'm worried about it decreasing the lifespan of the drives.