Another newbie with two Thunderbay 4

LOL, thanks.

So I didn't get the Mac Pro. In the end I found a cheap 2014 mac mini which has 2 TB2 ports. I got it mainly to keep things running whilst my 2015 MBP 15" had to go back to Apple due to the bulging battery - I cloned the drive to one of these now very cheap external SSDs, then booted the Mini off this SSD to run the my MBP setup. Quite nice.

Now that I have my MBP back. They replaced the battery, keyboard, trackpad and display - for free, thanks to Applecare. I'm up and running again with the old system, with a newly added Bootcamp setup.

I've also decided to use Mac RAID to JBOD my two oric external USB (5 bay enclosures). I had old HDDs in these, 6x4TB and 4x3TB. In the past I was using Carbon Copy cloner to backup the two Thunderbay IV (SR RAID5) in pieces to the individual drives. It was a bit annoying, so now I'm just going to JBOD them.

6x4TB to one 23TB JBOD to back up one Thunderbay with 4x8TB RAID 5
4x3TB to one 12TB JBOD to back up the second TB with 4x4TB RAID 5

Simplying it to 2 CCC jobs. If it works ok, I'll be much happier. Fingers crossed, hopefully the Softraid TB4 arrays won't die at the same time as the JBOD USB arrays. I guess something like a fire. My MBP is backed up to Blaze and most of my irreplaceable data is also replicated on a Onedrive business 5TB account.

Okay first hiccup. Mysteriously my 24TB JBOD would not mount, the disks are all there and 'online' according to Disk Utility. First aid says there is a B-tree node problem, and even booting from recovery doesn't help. So I bit the bullet and deleted it and started again. So i need to transfer 21TB of data back, which took almost 2 days before.

If it happens again, would I be safer using SoftRaid to do JBOD ie would I have a better chance of understanding the problem and fixing. If so, then i'd have to pony up 99USD for the upgrade (as the disks are in a USB enclosure).

USB is not as stable as it should be in OS X. Directory problems are going to be more common.

What you need is Disk Warrior. Run DW monthly, and you are unlikely to get a re-occurance. And, if you did, Disk Warrior is great a rebuilding damaging directories.

SoftRAID is a disk driver and does not talk to the file system. So it could not have prevented this problem.

APFS should eliminate or greatly reduce incidents like this. Apple still has to resolve the issue where APFS volumes are 50% slower than HFS on HDD's. We are working on some ideas here.

Cheers.

I bought Disk Drill Pro in the past, is that going to be comparable to DW for this purpose please?

Regarding the upgrade to full Softraid, part of me still thinks that the pricing is a bit skewed ie it should be a bit cheaper to upgrade, when it seems that all you get is to be able to use in on USB enclosures, which apparently not that great.

Right, my big JBOD (Apple RAID, 5x6TB) which was backing up my TB4 with 4x10TB in a RAID 5 has had mounting errors again for the third time. As it takes almost 2 days for the data to be transferred from my RAID 5 to the JBOD, I'm getting a bit sick of it.

My question is whether this is a problem inherent to JBODs or does it indicate that my Orico USB3 enclosures are failing, maybe both? I do have spare TB4s and Drobos that I can use to backup my RAIDs, but I guess I'm cheap and trying to eke out the last bit of value from my old USB enclosures.

Its unclear in this description whether the Apple disks or the SoftRAID RAID 5 volume is getting the directory damage.

A JBOD is independent disks.This would mean you have independent volumes. So your exact configuration is unclear.

One problem is always possibly unclean shutdowns. Make sure when you unmount your volumes that you wait 60 seconds before unplugging.

I have seen in tests, some USB chipsets corrupt data. I discovered this by testing mirror volumes. So it is possible your enclosure is defective, but I would not find it likely to cause "frequent" issues.

There are two ideas I can suggest:
Run Disk Warrior on a regular basis on your volumes. That keeps the volume directory optimal and Finder performance optimal.
Use Carbon Copy Cloner as your copy tool. It may take some effort to set it up the way you want, but once done, you will be happy with the results. You can also have it "verify" all the data on your copy.

Cheers. It's the Apple RAID JBOD disks with problems. There have been no unclean shutdowns recently. And I already use CCC to clone the SR volumes to the AR JBODs.

OK, then just use Disk Warrior on a weekly or monthly basis, will prevent your volume directory from corruption.

Thanks.

Or should I get the full SR that allows me to put a RAID5 on an USB enclosure? I know that you don't recommend this, but would it be better/ same than using Apple RAID JBOD?

I am confused by your terms. JBOD is just a bunch of disks. Apple RAID means you have mirror or stripe volumes. Can you clarify?

Is this a hardware RAID enclosure, that you have set to JBOD and have Apple RAID running as a 4 drive stripe, as an example?

Apologies. I used Apple RAID assistant to make what they call a JBOD volume, 5 drives in an Orico USB enclosure. This is my backup via CCC of my SR RAID 5 volume in an OWC TB4.

You can "convert" to SoftRAID format. Then at least when there are issues, you can see some details to help troubleshoot.

And it would be worthwhile to get a Thunderbolt enclosure, faster performance and probably more solid functionality!

Cheers. I have more OWC TB4 enclosures. I guess, I'm just a cheapskate for wanting to squeeze the last bit of 'value' from my USB enclosures.

Interesting. So I thought I'd 'backup' my 30TB SR RAID 5 to another TB4 4x10TB, and my 12TB 4x4 RAID 5 to a Drobo 5D. The latter has a thunderbolt 2 connection, so I thought that the TB4 to Drobo 5D cloning would be much quicker than the TB4 to USB enclosure cloning, but it's not, it's about the same. Anyway, time to put the USB enclosures out to pasture.

Okay, so if I have 25TB data, with 2 TB4 enclosures with 8 x 10TB drives, should I do SR RAID 5 with one enclosure and CCC this to the second as backup? Or do 1+0 ?