[Sticky] Big Sur on M1 machines and SoftRAID issues

@mountaincat

Do you have your system unchecked on "Put drives to sleep"?

I assume this happens only when your system goes to sleep.

If you disable sleep, no issues, correct?

@softraid-support

I have the disabled "put drives to sleep" long ago. I am not sure if it only happens during sleep/wakeup. I am willing to turn off sleep for experimentation, but I hope you are not saying that is the solution. Because I cannot have a 4-drive array operating at full blast 24/7 in my home.

@mountaincat

Since you are suffering from this, you can unmount your volume and unplug it at night. Inconvenient, I agree.

At least test keeping the system up and see if there is an issue. Perhaps disable screen savers also, (LED Monitors use very low energy on vs screen saver and they do not get "burn in" like CRT's) See if this can go away first. Then you know the cause. And can choose how to deal with it.

We really hope Apple addresses this, as it is an incredibly frustrating issue.

Hi @MountainCat,

I have 6 drive enclosures in a single Thunderbolt chain hanging off my M1 Mac mini. The first enclosure in the chain is a Thunderbay 4, which has a power on/off switch. When I'm done working on my system for the day, I select all the enclosure drive volumes and unmount (eject) from Finder. I then switch the power off to the first enclosure, which then automatically puts all the other enclosures in the chain offline. At this point, I can either leave the Mini running all night or shut down. When I want to use the drives on the next day, I just turn the power back on to the first enclosure, which automatically puts online and mounts all the drive enclosure volumes.

This seems to work well for me and not too much of a hassle. Would this approach help you with managing your enclosure(s)?

p.s. I have enabled "prevent computer from sleeping automatically when display off". I also have disabled the screen saver and disabled "put drives to sleep".

pruthe

Anyone tested BigSur Beta 7?

Answsering myself :) Just updated to 20E5229a and it's working fine, everything is there, no new "allow" stuff or anything the like, Monitor working (6.0.1 release).

@softraid-support

After updating to macOS 11.3 beta 7 I received a notification that a drive in the array failed and the array had been locked. As far as I have been able to determine the array was never actually locked, none of the drives actually failed, and I never lost access to the array. What I did lose is a significant measure of confidence in the reliability of the entire RAID array.

Configuration: Thunderbay mini with a Thunderbolt 2 interface, formatted APFS, configured RAID 5.

@sunstarfire

Everything seems fine from report on beta 7. Since there was a new beta, release is probably at least 2 weeks away still

@joemikeb

If the volume was not locked,then yes, this is a bug in SoftRAID Monitor generating a false alarm. We are going to be fixing this, now that we have 6.0 out the door. Sorry for the loss of confidence.

The volume locking that does lock the volume is a kernel bug, we are trying to get this resolved through Apple. disks are being renumbered "live", which should be impossible. It is like putting your system to sleep, the moving the disks around in the enclosure. We lock the volume to prevent data corruption.

What you just saw seems to be a false alarm. It is high on our current bug tracking list.

Posted by: @softraid-support

@matty1551

There is a bug here, we have reported to Apple, where you cannot enter your serial. I finally solved it on one machine by creating a new volume (inside the main APFS container, not a partition), then installing Big Sur into that. Booted from that volume, then into recovery mode, then I could reset security on the desired volume.

 I made a new volume and was able to set the security on the original volume as desired. I'm still unable to mount my softraid volumes. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling softraid with no luck. I noticed I wasn't prompted by the security & privacy settings to allow the app/extension to be run during the reinstall. Could this be my issue? Mac OS 11.3 Beta 20E5224a & Softraid 6.0.1

@matty1551

Did you do this?
https://support.apple.com/en-lk/guide/mac-help/mchl768f7291/mac
Select reduced security and enable this:
Select the “Allow user management of kernel extensions from identified developers” checkbox to allow installation of software that uses legacy kernel extensions.

If you did not, do this, then reinstall the driver and you should be able to  "Allow" OWC as an identified developer?

Posted by: @softraid-support

@matty1551

 

Did you do this?
https://support.apple.com/en-lk/guide/mac-help/mchl768f7291/mac
Select reduced security and enable this:
Select the “Allow user management of kernel extensions from identified developers” checkbox to allow installation of software that uses legacy kernel extensions.

If you did not, do this, then reinstall the driver and you should be able to  "Allow" OWC as an identified developer?

 

I've already set reduced security on the volume. I just uninstalled and reinstalled softraid again and no prompts came up. Is there maybe a pref file somewhere that needs to be deleted to force the prompt?

@matty1551

I looked at your extensions and did not see any problem ones. Try resetting the extensions cache, maybe the problem is there:

Uninstall SoftRAID (uilities menu)

Run the terminal.app and paste these two commands in:

sudo kmutil clear-staging

sudo kextcache -i /

resrtart.

Run SoftRAID. See if you get the "System Preferences dialog box from macOS when you install the driver.

getting message saying softraid beta expiring in x days/ hours.  what should I do?

@softraid-support

I have a new issue with SoftRAID 6.0.1 and macOS 11.3 beta 7. Everything was working so well I decided to upgrade to larger capacity drives. The project went without a hitch and had no trouble formatting, initializing, and verifying the new drives. Everything works as it should until I select the array in Time Machine. Time Machine indicates it is preparing the drive and then freezes so completely I can't even capture a screenshot of the frozen Time Machine window and has to be Force Quit to regain control. After that the SoftRAID app still sees the array, but cannot mount it and Finder doesn't "see" the array or the individual drives, even after a reboot. The only way I have found to recover access is to delete and re-create the array. This behavior is 100% repeatable.