Its very minor and we intend to fix it quickly. there are no data implications, and has only affected a dozen or two users, out of many thousands.

It is a minor UI bug, we intend to make a fix for it. Some kind of "race condition".

If this is a known issue, shouldn't it be on the 'Known Issues' page, or in the release notes?  I'd have held off updating with this info.

Very sorry. From your description, a disk hung when shutting down, which is why the rebuild. SoftRAID rebuilds are "smart", they only rebuild changed sectors.

Its possible/likely that the hung disk was when the volume was writing out the cache, and it was interrupted. APFS in theory is supposed to auto recover from this, however.

The volume is mountable, but the volume's container is damaged (object map is invalid), which results in Disk Utility being unable to finish the verification and finds the volume corrupt and unrepairable.  I'd only tried Disk Utility after the Finder threw error -43 at me for trying to rename a file this morning.

The corruption would have occurred during the SoftRAID update/reinstall/downgrade.  After the downgrade, the SR interface began working again, and the drives in the center of the Thunderbay enumerated quickly, slots B and G took a couple of minutes to show, and slots A and H took nearly 10 minutes to join the party.  Once that happened, SoftRAID popped up a dialog saying "SoftRAID Volume Out-Of-Sync.  The SoftRAID driver has automatically started rebuilding this volume. You can continue to use this volume while it is rebuilding."

That rebuild finished within a few seconds of hitting the 'OK' button on the dialog.  Didn't need to use the RAID just then (it was EOW yesterday), and I discovered all this today.

EDIT: I have Spotlight indexing disabled for all my external drives, including this one.  Been that way for over a decade.  I am using Carbon Copy Cloner to move my 11TB to another disk so that I can reformat my SoftRAID.  Can you say 'days lost'?

You mean that the volume was not mountable?

There are still no repair options for APFS volumes. And the stability of internal drives is clearly not there for external devices. I am guessing that it has to do with the drive cache's not being flushed correctly, even though that is supposed to be built into the APFS file system to manage that.

I ran 9 years with an Areca box that never gave me a hint of trouble.  Less than a year into SoftRAID and I'm hosed.  Guess I'm the idiot.

Not sure what would cause the disks to drop out like that. It would be a separate issue from SoftRAID 7.0.1, but glad you are working. Post again if disks disappear.

Then I uninstalled 7.0.1, and reinstalled 7.0.  Initially it still wouldn't mount, 3 disks available, then one came back.  Shortly after, 2 more came back and I got on a support chat with OWC.  During the chat, the other 2 disks finally came back online and the volume was able to be mounted and repaired.

I'm sticking with 7.0 for now, got work to do!