Any monitor tool to say what background processes are doing?

The User interface should tell you. This means either a voluntary user task is being performed:

Creating a volume, certify disk, initializing or something.

Or the application is still waiting for a disk to respond to the query about itself.

You should see in the disk tile, or volumes tile, the volume or disk in question.

Tasks like rebuilding, validate will not generate this warning, as they are background tasks done by the driver.

Hope this helps.

I have/had 4 volumes - 1 (5) disk raid (OW8 A TM 40 TB), 3 JBODs (OW8 B TM 6 TB, OW8 C 4 TB, OW8 D 4TB).  Due to the TM issue which you helped me with I pulled the JBOD OW8 B TM 6TB volume (without deleting it in Softraid, probably not a good idea) and replaced with with another disk.  At that point all of the disk activity lights went wild.  They have been on continuously for 24 hours now.  The disks for all volumes are showing activity, even the 3 volumes that were not affected by the replacement.

If I go into Softraid I don't see anything that indicates what is going on.  The disks aren't  associated with any volumes.  For example, here is shot of one of the RAID 5 disks which was/is in  the OW8 A TM 40 TB Raid volume:

However Finder does show 2 of the 4 volumes, and I can access files on those 2 even though they do not show as volumes in Softraid:

OW8 B (the JBOD volume that had the replaced disk) and OW8 D (a JBOD volume that was not touched) don't show in the finder at all

None of the volumes or disks shows in disk utility.

My guess is the enclosure has hung/crashed or similar. Do a shut down, then see if the lights are still flashing after 1 minute. If so, power of the enclosure for a couple minutes, then power it back on and all should be OK.

Thanks.  With drives still being constantly accessed I had to power off my iMac Pro as it was becoming unresponsive.  Got a panic report on boot.  

After reboot and powering off/on the Thunderbay8 I reformatted one of the JBOD disks as APFS.  It would not mount.

Feb 07 18:06:56 - SoftRAID Driver: The SoftRAID volume "OW8 D 4 TB" (disk20) encountered an error (E00002C1). A program attempted to read or write to a volume which was not open.

Feb 07 18:07:17 - SoftRAID Application: The volume erase command for volume "OW8 D 4 TB" (disk20) failed with an error (error number = 34).

Tried multiple times to delete the volume.  The log files did not log anything for 15 minutes, but on one of the delete volume tries got the error:

Feb 07 18:22:43 - SoftRAID Application: Deleting the volume "OW8 D 4 TB" (disk20).
Feb 07 18:22:48 - SoftRAID Application: The volume delete command for volume "OW8 D 4 TB" (disk20) failed because this disk is being used by another application (error number = 12). The disk disk19, SoftRAID ID: 08C920A248236F80, SATA bus 0, id 0 (Thunderbolt) prevented the volume from being 

Tried to find the application that is using it, but since the disk is not mounted (as shown in Finder, /Volumes) there seems to be no way to find it.  Even  though I had just powered off/on the unit the OWC disk light nolw shows continuous activity on that drive.

Powered off the OWC, rebooted and powered on.  Tried to reformat the OW8 DHD drive as APFS.

Got the error:

Feb 07 20:10:46 - SoftRAID Application: The volume erase command for volume "OW8 D 4 TB" (disk18) failed with an error (error number = 34).

Tried to delete the volume.  Got the error:

Feb 07 20:10:46 - SoftRAID Application: The volume erase command for volume "OW8 D 4 TB" (disk18) failed with an error (error number = 34).
Feb 07 20:16:52 - SoftRAID Application: Deleting the volume "OW8 D 4 TB" (disk18).
Feb 07 20:16:57 - SoftRAID Application: The volume delete command for volume "OW8 D 4 TB" (disk18) failed because this disk is being used by another application (error number = 12). The disk disk17, SoftRAID ID: 08C920A248236F80, SATA bus 0, id 0 (Thunderbolt) prevented the volume from being

The disk light for OW8 D is on continuously.  The disk is not mounted in /Volumes.

Ejected all of the mounted OWC drives.  Drive light for OW8 D on continuously. Powered off the OWC. Got the error:

The power-off also ejected my boot drive:

The driver is probably not loading.

Run this in terminal.app:

sudo kextstat -b com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID

My prediction is there is no response. (no driver present)

Thanks.  The driver issue is a major problem.  I removed all of my extensions, added some back along with the softraid driver.  Softraid worked.  Added another extension to test, rebooted,  and the softraid driver was not loaded.  I removed the offending extension, going back to the configuration which worked before, and rebooted.  Although the Softraid file is in extensions and this configuration worked before it now doesn't as  the command you gave indicates it is not loaded. Maddening!

In desperation to get a CCC cloned backup I removed all but the Sofraid driver and rebooted.  Although I got an error message that the APFS format had failed, the drive showed as formatted in Softraid.  I started a Carbon Copy Clone of my boot drive which ran for 6 hours and then failed after copying 3.3 TB.

The drive now was not mounted so I tried to mount it.  It would not mount. No errors in the log file.

I tried to erase the volume.  I was told that I had to disable safeguard, but even though I select "disable safeguard" it is not removed.  The log file shows that it was removed:

Feb 10 06:11:17 - SoftRAID Application: Changing the safeguard on the volume "OW8 C 4 TB" (disk13). The safeguard is now disabled so the volume can be deleted.

showloaded --bundle-identifier com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID

No variant specified, falling back to release

Index Refs Address            Size       Wired      Name (Version) UUID <Linked Against>

  213    0 0xffffff7fa23d7000 0x2f000    0x2f000    com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID (6.0.1b48) 12FF0061-5877-3C26-AF23-C1CC6C87175E <30 6 5 3>

@caprichoso

Note: While my instructions can "remove" extensions, you cannot as easily add them back.

Lets start over with softRAID. "Uninstall SoftRAID" from utilities menu. restart, run SoftRAID and install the driver. (You will probably need to "Allow OWC" again)

If your volume is not mounting, attach a new SoftRAID tech support file.

Er, that's what I did.  Did it again.  Same thing, will not mount.  The reinstall did fix the Safeguard is not enabled problem.  On bringing up the app for the first time

it shows that it is disabled.  Support file attached.

Posted by: @softraid-support

While my instructions can "remove" extensions, you cannot as easily add them back.

I may not be understanding what you said.  The command you gave me

Posted by: @softraid-support

sudo kextstat -b com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID

just shows that the extension is loaded, right?  Maybe I worded it incorrectly, but a major problem seems to be to get the extension to load consistently.  So does '"remove" extensions' mean removing the file from the extensions folder, or unloading them from the kernel?  Does "you cannot as easily add them back." mean loading the SoftRaid extension into the kernel is not an easy thing to do if it doesn't load on boot?

Thanks again for your quick responses.

Just noticed, all of the drive lights are now flashing as shown in the picture in my February 6 post. Again all I did was:

1.  Uninstall Softraid, reboot

2.  Install Softraid, reboot

3. Try to mount the drive, which failed

4. Generate the support file

When I submitted the support file above I don't think all of the lights were flashing.  They seemed to have started on their own.  OW8A is the only volume that shows as mounted in the finder.

I just ejected the OW8 A drive from the finder.  Now just the OW8 C light is on, continuously.  With all drives ejected (as shown in the Finder) I turned off the OWC unit.  Got two error messages:

What I mean is there are safeguards to prevent simple copying of extensions to the extensions folder. There is a process. Bes tway to do it is use the source application to perform the installation, in this case SoftRAID. Just "reinstall SoftRAID driver" should do it. What I meant was just copying the files over and trying to force the kextcache to build them, is not enough.

the kextstat command does show it is loaded. And you have a mounted volume. the other volume is APFS and I cannot tell if it is mounted or not, as the application does not support APFS correctly.

But this appears to be your APFS volume:

/dev/disk19 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +4.0 TB disk19
Physical Store disk17
1: APFS Volume ⁨Macintosh HD - Data⁩ 3.3 TB disk19s1
2: APFS Volume ⁨Preboot⁩ 298.8 MB disk19s3
3: APFS Volume ⁨Recovery⁩ 612.8 MB disk19s4

I don't know why you have the other partitions in there, perhaps when you made this a (system) data volume it added it.

"The other volume is APFS and I cannot tell if it is mounted or not, as the application does not support APFS correctly.

But this appears to be your APFS volume:

/dev/disk19 (synthesized):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: APFS Container Scheme - +4.0 TB disk19
Physical Store disk17
1: APFS Volume ⁨Macintosh HD - Data⁩ 3.3 TB disk19s1
2: APFS Volume ⁨Preboot⁩ 298.8 MB disk19s3
3: APFS Volume ⁨Recovery⁩ 612.8 MB disk19s4

I don't know why you have the other partitions in there, perhaps when you made this a (system) data volume it added it."

This is the APFS volume which was being cloned from my boot drive by Carbon Copy Cloner. The copy is aborted after something like 6 hours and the Softraid APFS volume is unmounted.  I have used CCC to clone an APFS volume on an another OWC enclosure, and it seems to work.  The size is about the same, so it actually may have completed the clone but for some reason ejected the disk when finished, I'm not sure.

So will this (APFS clone) and APFS copying eventually be supported?  I'm not sure that the SoftRaid application was involved, other then the initial APFS format.