You were right, this had nothing to do with SoftRAID and instead was some strange permissions issue on the volume.

In terminal, I ran ls -al /Volumes/externaldrive and noticed a new test folder I had created did not have the same permissions as all the other folders.

Here's how to reset the permissions: Right-click the OWC Drive, "Get Info", unlock the padlock, click (...) and "Apply to enclosed items". Spotlight instantly started working and remains working, even after indexing is complete.

Thread can be closed, thanks for the help.

This is simply an external, removable volume.

Disk Utility has nothing to do with it. Neither does "RAID". Its simply a volume.

There are several bugs in MacOS where Apple engineers fail to properly treat SoftRAID volumes, but according to developer guidelines, a volume is a volume is a volume, and all are the same to Finder, as they are published objects. Whatever is "underneath" the volume does not matter to Spotlight, Finder, etc. As long the volume is correctly published, which SoftRAID is.

If this is a MacOS bug, it would reproduce with RAID 0 or non RAID, so that may be worth testing. And it might reproduce with Apple RAID. (Note Apple does not "support" Apple RAID.) Spotlight should work on all MacOS volumes.

I don't have time to test this specifically, but as mentioned if you can file a bug report, we woudl be happy to make sure Apple Engineering becomes aware of it. that is all we can do.

Also, this should reproduce with a Thundrive, or external USB drive, if the bug is with "removable" volumes. That is the only real difference I can think of for Spotlight. It could have a rule about not indexing removable volumes.

The only other post I could find mentioning this in the OWC forums is: https://forums.softraid.com/sonoma-issue/spotlight-using-softraid-drive/

Apple says they cannot help because this isn’t their hardware, nor does their Disk Utility support RAID-5, and referred me back to OWC for support. I will call Apple again and try working with a different agent, but I appreciate if you can look into this as well.

If you can reproduce it, report it to Apple as a bug. If you do, you can let us know the bug number and we can try to follow up, if we are able to.

Spotlight/Finder search will not find any results on my RAID volume.

When I add and then remove the volume in the Spotlight exclusions list (System Settings > Spotlight > Search Privacy), suddenly Finder will display the search results.

But this only works for about 20 mins while Spotlight is indexing the volume. Once the indexing is complete, the search feature stops working again.

Device is an OWC 4M2 Express, with 4x 4TB Crucial P3 Plus NVMe drives. Volume is formatted as APFS (Encrypted), RAID-5, optimized for Workstation.

I have also reproduced this behavior on a Monterey 12.x Mac. I’ve tried deleting the Spotlight preference .plist, deleting the “.Spotlight-V100” folder on the root of the volume.

This issue only impacts the OWC RAID volume and does not impact other non-raid external drives.

Please advise, thanks.