SoftRAID Volume Locked error

@mountaincat

I can brainstorm with engineering next week

You can also try reseating the drives tightly in the slots.

You can try swapping positions. If the 6TB is in AB move it to C or D, vice versa, to put it on the other PCI lane.

You can try removing the drive for a day and see if this happens (I assume you maintain backups regularly)

This is such a corner case it is hard to come up with ideas or explanations.

@softraid-support I will try the things you suggested. I also would appreciate you brainstorming with engineering and I am willing to be a guinea pig if that helps. My system is so vanilla and I have nothing to lose except time, since at this point I don’t feel comfortable completing my move to the new system. I understand that this is viewed as rare, yet I see that others have the issue and don’t get what it could be in my setup — new M1 mac, one Thunderbay directly attached, no docks or hubs, clean non-migration OS... just not much complexity here.

@mountaincat

And I will add to our tests, your drive scenario.

Its also possible your enclosure developed a fault

I also assume you are not using a KVM, switching off when the M1 is not in use?

Did you post a support file, so I don't have to go looking for it (if it isn't here)?

@softraid-support

I run Catalina on a 2020 iMac and have 2 Enclosures both are similar speed so don’t think it’s an enclosure issue. Anyway I replaced both now as Soft Raid 5x and 6x causes all sort of unexpected behaviour and Kernel panics with NVMe2 drives and in general. 

@steve223

Just an FYI: you may have a hardware issue somewhere then.

You are reporting too many issues that are not really related.

the SoftRAID driver is a filter driver, it uses macOS's disktool to communicate with drives. This has some limitations, but means there are no compatibility issues, as macOS is performing the reads and writes. That is why there are so few SoftRAID related panics.

go ahead and move along, but between crashes, slow performance, adn the other issues, there is something going on that needs diagnosing.

Make sure you run an extended hardware diagnostic test when you get a chance. And perhaps a RAM test with either Atomic (from Micromat) or Rmember (believe it is still free)

@softraid-support yea I don't think so, I had the same issue with a 2020 Mac Pro and everything comes back to Soft Raid

and it definitely causes Kernel Panics which I could reproduce over and over with Promise utility https://youtu.be/0MvZQCmDwIw  

I now have removed Soft Raid altogether and the issues are gone.

When speaking to Apple yesterday they pretty much said they don't support 3rd part Software Raid solutions and could not be bothered about it.

@softraid-support sorry wrong link here you can see re-producable kernel Panics https://youtu.be/80_mLJpLyDU

@steve223

You have mentioned more than once that your panic was triggered with the Promise utility. Even if it was the presence of the SoftRAID driver, it was the Promise utility, it appears that triggered it.

Apple Disk Utiltity has/had a kernel panic bug for years when initializing a SoftRAID disk. Apple could not be bothered to fix it. We finally wrote a workaround to minimize it to a "error". BUt it was not our bug.

Since the Promise utlity is essentially using Disk Utility to initialize a volume on a Promise LUN, maybe it was a related bug, I do not know without steps to reproduce.

BTW: Apple tech support does not support any RAID software, including their own.

@steve223

Unfortunately it does not play on my system. I am happy to look at this, maybe my system is too locked down, as lots of youtube videos cannot play on it.

@softraid-support the Promise utility triggered it only if a SoftRaid driver is present no issues with SoftRaid uninstalled.

I also ordered a Sabre 8TB NVME in Sabre Thunderbolt 3 enclosure I formatted the NVMe via Disk Utility but when SoftRaid Drivers are present there are issues copying to the drive.

Strangely the mere removal of the SoftRaid drivers fixes that issue and there is no issues copying.

Interestingly I had the same issue with a 4.0TB OWC Accelsior 4M2 PCIe which I purchased from you guy's earlier in the year and return because of the same issue (I had SoftRaid installed as well but at this stage did not associate it with it)

I'm not sure what is going on I can just tell you that if SoftRaid is removed all issue disappear. No crashes on wake up after sleep, no locked disk, no writing issues to NVMe, no Promise utility issue formating.

This may all be Apple problems but it does not change that at present your Software and Hardware Solutions that rely on it are not suitable for Mac. 

If a disk is in SoftRAID format, then Disk Utility cannot work with it to initialize. The solution is zero disk with SoftRAID to wipe the format off the disk. Same as "uninstall" SoftRAID driver. Then there is no driver to claim ownership of the disk, so Disk Utility can do its thing.

I am not always sure what you are referring to, but if you do not have any SoftRAID formatted disks connected, the driver is not even loaded. It cannot conflict.

What maybe you are seeing is a SMART issue. We do have SMART drivers that are loaded along with SoftRAID. If you have a device that has issues with SMART being checked, perhaps that is an issue. That would be more of a USB related issue though.

You see the forums. They have the worst of SoftRAID issues. There are many tens of thousands of SoftRAID users. And relatively few issues, considering the large population.

There is no generic driver issue as you claim, or there would be tens of thousands of complaints. I do not know what the trigger is in your case, as you described a lot of different issues. You are either the unluckiest SoftRAID user, or there is something uncommon that I have yet to identify triggering the excessive problems you have been seeing. Its kind of strange.

Its like when iStat menus would check for SMART every two minutes. (I am pretty sure that is fixed now) Users would blame SoftRAID for performance pauses. It took a while to figure out iStat menus was the cause, as a SMART test can make a disk go off line for a while, up to two minutes, although generally just 3-5 seconds. There are so many movinig parts in a computer system, moving at gigahertz speeds, issues can be very time consuming to figure out and hard to diagnose. We do our best to resolve issues, but it is challenging at times.

(I hope to post the Promise tests I performed by tomorrow evening)

@softraid-support yes I may well be the unluckiest Soft Raid user but two different Machines same issue.

SoftRaid drivers were loaded as I also had the Thunder Bay 4 running, again I can't give an explanation just can tell what I observed

and tested. Why that happens no idea, unfortunately. Maybe an incompatibility with something elase

@steve223

I wish I knew what was going on. Do you want to try to diagnose these, or is it all the past at this point?

@softraid-supportI have posted them before. It has been a few days since the last lockup, no idea why. But I am not holding my breath because it has gone a few days in the past. I am now on beta 8 but I doubt that is why it went a few days without lockup.  I also had a kernel panic a couple of days ago which forced a reboot. Maybe that resets something that alleviates the disk lockups for a while...I don't know.  Do you want me to post a new diagnostic file, even though there is no lockup to report at the moment?

@mountaincat

Wait until you have another event.

This is one of the most frustrating bugs, second only to Thunderbolt disk ejects.