Should SoftRAID be accessing my SSD?

@DianeMiller
I am not sure I follow

Can you attach a SoftRAID Technical support file? (Utilities menu)

What do you mean by the Monitor coming to life?
Is it reporting errors? What are you seeing?

When I access or save a document (Word, etc) that resides only on the SSD, the drive lights on the ThunderBay start what looks like some sort of check and I get the spinning beachball for a few seconds.  Those files are also in the cloud, but I don't think there is any cloud storage or backup on the ThunderBay.  Should my SoftRAID monitor show the SSD?  Is that the problem?  The constant checking/activity is like dragging around an anchor on my foot.

Picture of the monitor attached.

@DianeMiller

This is a macOS issue, not SoftRAID.

The SoftRAID application displays the SSD, yes, but it is ini Apple format, so the SoftRAID driver cannot perform IO to it.

the disks are controlled by SoftRAID's driver, but the SoftRAID driver cannot initiate any file system activity whatsoever. MacOS does all file system activity.

Its interesting that a read to your SSD is triggering reads to your HDDs. My guess is the read is "waking up" the drives by MacOS, which is a known problem. (MacOS is not intelligent to wake up only the device being accessed, it wakes everything up at once)

Do you have "put drives to sleep" unchecked? And set display sleep to never. See if these two changes help.

let me know.

Since getting the new laptop (about a year ago) I've always had the "put drives to sleep when possible" unchecked.  It seems not applicable for a laptop with a SSD.  (The only place I see it is under The Battery section in Pref's.)  I just set the screen never to be off but that's not a good long-term solution.  I'm using an external monitor and running the laptop with the lid closed, if that makes any difference. 

Any other places I could look to change anything?  This, along with an intermittently freezing cursor, is driving me nuts!

@DianeMiller

try downloading a utility that keeps your disks awake, either Caffeine, or Amphetamine

Thanks -- I'll try that! 

I'm pretty sure I had both places set to not put drives to sleep, but I did change to don't let the monitor sleep.  I don't understand why (and don't need to!) but that has fixed the problem!  (Without needing and "drugs"!)  Many thanks!!

@DianeMiller

MacOS has several sleep bugs. I Don't know why they have been so hard to fix. One is with NVMe drives, when the computer sleeps, they wake up every 45 minutes os so, constantly. then there are HDD issues. Glad you have a workaround in your case.

Yeah, mine has trouble sleeping.  Maybe somebody makes Ambien for Mac. 

I use a Wacom tablet and use its pen instead of the mouse 99% of the time and I've had a lot of trouble with it temporarily hanging (for up to maybe 30-60 sec -- a real nuisance).  I can grab the magic mouse and it works until the tablet wakes up.  I've always (through several computers) had a problem with the cursor disappearing in Word.  Frustrating.

@DianeMiller
I never use a tablet, but will see if we have any in the office, I can see if we see your behavior.

I haven't seen the cursor hang in the 2 days since changing the settings you mentioned above!!  (And the frequent unnecessary RAID access has stopped!!)  I'm pretty sure  I already had the drive told not to sleep in both the battery and power adapter settings -- but I did set the monitor to never sleep. (Strange?....)  I'm virtually always on the power adapter, tied to a desk.  But interestingly the halting cursor predates this computer.  I had a Mac Pro garbage can for several years prior and had the same halting cursor behavior.  (No external RAID then.)  Don't remember if it started with that one -- may have been even before.  I've used Wacoms for about 100 years.  But never had time to try to pin the cursor behavior down to it.  It does apparently lose its connection once in a while and I have to turn it off and back on.  These things always happen when I'm in the middle of something that's occupying all MY RAM and I just want to get things going again without looking at why it might have happened.