New Chassis and all new Drive Certification Failure

Attach a SoftRAID tech support file. Also, try running DriveDx, in trial mode, which can get SMART data over USB (SoftRAID does not ship a USB SMART driver for this, we are waiting for Apple to add SMART to its USB driver, which we hope will happen in a future MacOS release)

I can take a look. Note: the point of a certify is to pre-test a disk. Drives are shipped untested, so about 2-3% of drives will fail a certify. Better to find out immediately, than in a year or two, that a drive is bad.

A failed IO can cause the USB bus to hang, so its possible a failed IO could cause what you see. Certify is 100% a hardware issue. It either has to be the USB enclosure, cable, or drive. SoftRAID's driver is not involved at all in a certify, its essentially all MacOS tools performing the test.

Hi @softraid-support,

Thank you for the response, I have let the certify run complete as as expected all four drives were failed.

I am attaching the Tech Support File. I installed the SAT USB Driver and used DriveDX. I also ran a short self-test from within DriveDX which passed on each drive but I cannot seem to attach the reports  in either .txt, .pdf or .zip form. DriveDX is not reporting any issues with the drives.

I can provide a iCloud URL or email them if you want to view them.

I saw some stuff on the Apple Support around making sure to balance the Thunderbolt connections / buses so will after posting this shut the machine down and upload everything but the Display and Mercury Pro Chassis from the Mac and then restart the machine.

I have also turned off all of the Energy Saving settings (also from a recommendation on Apple Support) even though I was running Amphetamine On during the pass, and will try another certify on just one disk (the one that reported 4 errors) just to see if there is a change.

Thanks.

Michael

@mpschaefer 

My opinion this was a bus error, or cable error (or jiggled cable?). All more or less happened at the same time, it does not appear one drive triggered the others to fail.
If DriveDx did not show any reallocated sectors, that is all I needed to know, I do not need their report.

You should be able to initialize and use all the disks immediately.

Energy Saver is more important on Thunderbolt than USB, and if you have Amphetamine to keep the drives spinning, that may be enough for you. Hibernation is the main MacOS issue these days, but spin down's are also annoying.

@softraid-support Sorry for the delay in responding. I continued to have errors even when the Mercury Elite Pro was the only device plugged in so I swapped the USB-C cable shipped with the unit for a Apple Thunderbolt 4 cable I had spare and tried the certify process again.

I'm glad to report that on the Apple Thunderbolt 4 cable the certification process completed without any errors and I was also able to initialise and create the RAID array. I bought a shorter version of the Apple Thunderbolt 4 cable (I didn't need 3m of cable floating around) and once that was in place ran a verification of the RAID Array (no data on it so it only took 9 hours) and that too completed without error.

So, I think we can put it down to a dud cable in the box.

I'm currently 25% of the way through the data copy from my failing Drobo and no errors to report so far. Hopefully it will be smooth sailing from here.

That you very much for your assistance.

Michael

@mpschaefer 

If it is our enclosure, you can also contact customer service and get it replaced, we warranty the cables also.

Glad this had a simple solution!

@softraid-support Thanks again for all your help.

I'm not 100% sure anymore if it was the cable but the Apple TB4 cable + Energy Saver Settings + Amphetamine (same settings as Energy Saver) did allow me to get the Mercury Elite Quad RAID array all setup my old Drobo Data copied across without any errors.

I did encounter an error message about the Mac Sleeping on the enclosure which was a tad odd given the Energy Saver Setting and Amphetamine Session was Active (I have it start on boot and run indefinitely). This occurred during verification of the copy (I did an inline verification as each file was copied) and then followed up with a full drive verification between the Drobo and Mercury Elite afterwards.

Both times this error occurred, the only thing in the console I could find was a failure within Spotlight. So, I added the Mercury Elite to the Privacy list to remove it and added a Drive Alive setting for it in Amphetamine just in case.

It's been running fine since then with no further errors to date, so I can not be sure it was the cable. I'll just tag it with a '?' and it will probably spend it's life as a charging cable with minor data duties.

I performed a Validation of the completed dataset via SoftRAID which completed without any detected bad bits so am really happy that it seems to be settling in. 

Thanks again.

Michael

@mpschaefer 

Storage should be seamless. Its not, sadly. glad you have everything working now.