I have a Thunderblade (4x 960GB blades) that's doing something that seems weird to me. It's set up in SR 6.3 as a RAID4 volume using APFS with 16k stripe. iMac Pro on Monterey 12.6.

Here's what I find weird: If I Validate the Thunderblade using SR 6.3, it *always* needs to update blocks. Sometimes it's dozens, sometimes it's tens of thousands. If I do no conscious disk access (like maybe there's background Time Machine or something) and I just Validate in a manual loop over and over, every single run of Validation always needs to update more blocks. It seems like the longer I wait in between runs, the more blocks accumulate. I should note that this was not the case back when it was a RAID0 or RAID1+0 volume, though it's been a while since I had those setups.

Does this indicate a hardware failure in one of the blades? Or something else??

I ask because my other SR volumes, for all their complexity (I'm one of the M1 Max people who can't seem to get most of my arrays to work on the new platform), only seem to need block updates when they unmount during a crash or other obviously unusual situation. ?