MONTEREY issues

I would rather you and others wait a few days (possibly less, but lets see) when we can get a SoftRAID beta out. It may be possible to make it work, but we need to test, as it is unknown what changes are in 12.0, and how stable it is. It is being tested already in house, unless we run into something, its likely this week we can have something.

http://www.softraid.com/sr_beta

Here is a link to the SoftRAID beta for Monterey. This is a perma-link, you can always go here for the latest version.

No significant changes from 6.0.5 in beta 1. Future versions will have more significant changes.

@softraid-support Thank you for that! Looking forward to the public beta to go live so I can give it a whirl, and keep my OWC 4M2 RAID working!

@zathras

Its live already. Go fetch it and try it out.

@ruzek

The beta is very stable.

We have significant changes coming with APFS support, that will come soon. I expect APFS will go smoothly, although we will want feedback to make sure we catch all the corner cases.

I believe all 6.0 licensees will enjoy a free upgrade, but these things are not pre-announced.

After weeks of problem free operation running SoftRAID 6.1 B6 and B7 on macOS 12 beta 4, 5, & 6, I installed SoftRAID 6.1 B8 this morning and within minutes the dreaded notification "the array was locked because one or more of the drives…". I rebooted and the array is working fine and B8 does recognize the APFS array format. It is just that I had not seen the notification since I turned "Prevent the Mac from automatically sleeping when the array sleeps" on and "Put hard disk to sleep when possible" Off. I was surprised and disappointed to see it pop up again! 🤦🏻‍♂️

@joemikeb

Its unfortunate. SoftRAID is trying to "look out for you" with this issue.

So with the impending public GA release of Mac OS Monterey, are we going to have to go through all the BS that we went through with Mac OS Big Sur, or do you guys have it figured out this time? When is the GA (non-beta) release of SoftRAID 6.1?

@softraid-support

It is unfortunate that when a user reports the re-appearance of an issue that in the past had made the use of an OWC RAID array problematic, SoftRAID support responds with a snarky answer. I have been a loyal customer of OWC and fan of SoftRAID for many years as evidenced by the multitude of OWC products surrounding my desk and in no way resembles the level of customer support I have enjoyed from OWC over the years. 

Yes, the warning is intended to protect the user, I get that. I got it the first time it appeared. It is a highly appropriate and necessary  safeguard. But, when it became a daily or more often occurrence that required constant rebooting and could not be confirmed by any other testing, it was more than annoying. I would have put it down to failure of one or more of the shiny new Hitachi drives in the array, but changing the energy saver settings effectively eliminated the issue for months and the array continued to perform up to expectations. When it recurred within minutes of installing the beta 48 update my assumption (before you get snarky again I am well aware of the danger of assumptions) was/is there might be something in SoftRAID code that is unnecessarily or incorrectly triggering the message. It might be a timing issue. It might be a condition unique to M1 computers. It might be an issue with macOS 12. Whatever it is, I do not have the resources necessary to perform the proper level of analysis to effectively troubleshoot the issue. That is the job of the developer, not the user. All I, or any user, can do is report the recurrence of the issue. The ball is in your court.

@cjglynn

We will release when we feel the quality is there. I anticipate being ready at or before the release of Monterey.

@joemikeb

Sorry, I was not being snarky, I was short-cut phrasing the fact the reason this dialog comes up to prevent data corruption when the disks are renumbered by this macOS bug. (as you indicated you understand). It was not intended in anything but answering the querry. I recognize you as a frequent poster, so used less words in responding.

We are doing what we can on this, it is a highly intolerable bug. Another thing that can trigger this is hubs, and even Monitors. Its clearly a macOS (or mac hardware) related issue,  but we have not been able to prove this to Apple engineering to get progress made on this issue.

We saw some evidence where a user discovered their drivers powered up during sleep, whereupon waking the system alerted them to the disk renumbering/volume locking bug. This means the theory of the bus resetting triggering this is correct. What causes this is not known.

thanks for understanding. My goal is to respond to posts as quickly as possible, and if I am less descriptive at times, apologies!