You can use a longer cable, yes. The supplied cable is designed to be "fastest".

Note: We have a "safeguard" feature, that when enabled you cannot accidentally erase a volume unless you disable the Safeguard on that volume.

When you try to mount the volumes, expand the volumes tile and see if there is a number by the "disk Identifer", which will tell you if the SoftRAID driver is loaded. There should be.

When you unmount your volume, how long do you wait? are there any lights flashing or on, on the enclosure?

I have a thunderbay 8 on a macbook pro running big sur. I have softraid 6.05 and the same 6.05 driver.

The thunderbay does not mount automatically when I start it up. I have to restart the macbook to get it to mount. It will not mount if I select to mount in the pulldown menu. It says 'mounting' for 10 seconds and then just says unmounted again.

When I want to turn the thunderbay off, I unmount it in de the softraid software but is it normal that the drives don't go to sleep? It seems like I just disconnect the drives when I power down. I hear them crash quitting (if thats what youu call it) which to me seems very bad for the disks and very risky to my data. 

Finally, the fact that the 'erase' and 'mount/unmount' in the pulldown menu are so close together are pretty discomforting imho.

This was a pretty expensive machine but I'm just not feeling safe with it to be honest.

Thanks for any advice you can give me!