Disappearing disks... this time in MacOS 12.3.1

@henry-in-florida 

One note that is easy to miss, there is another thunderbolt chip in each connector end, including each end of a cable. (no way to measure this with an app) As an example, fiber optic Thunderbolt cables are great for long connections, but heat causes the same eject issues and apparently it develops/gets worse with time, as after a year or two, they inevitably are no longer usable, as the disks eject so often. OWC used to sell them, but way too many returns.

I think you may not see this as much on non SoftRAID disks, as SoftRAID reports all events, it does not ignore anything. macOS may not report disk ejects if an app does not detect a change in the time a volume was off line.

Lets hope your configuration stays stable now!

Posted by: @softraid-support

@henry-in-florida 

One note that is easy to miss, there is another thunderbolt chip in each connector end, including each end of a cable. (no way to measure this with an app) As an example, fiber optic Thunderbolt cables are great for long connections, but heat causes the same eject issues and apparently it develops/gets worse with time, as after a year or two, they inevitably are no longer usable, as the disks eject so often. OWC used to sell them, but way too many returns.

I think you may not see this as much on non SoftRAID disks, as SoftRAID reports all events, it does not ignore anything. macOS may not report disk ejects if an app does not detect a change in the time a volume was off line.

Lets hope your configuration stays stable now!

@softraid

Very interesting. I don't have long cable runs, each is 0.5-1.0m long. If you have any other resolutions to this from your aspect, please let us know here. Understand that you're dealing with a macro issue affecting all kinds of use cases, not my specific single issue. 

I've been connecting/disconnecting every few days the T3 connection using the MBP off the desktop and doing manual battery optimization (about 30-40min/time) because the auto-optimization macOS Monterey software doesn't meet my battery readiness needs (another story, actually quite bad, it stinks and I've complained to no avail). There's plenty of in-usage testing on the cable ends at the MBP end, which are in great shape. The T3 connection is far superior to its predecessor, IMO.

@henry-in-florida 

At this time, all we really have to offer is disabling sleep settings, including set display sleep to never.

If there are ejects, moving connections around, trying to find a combination that does not trigger disk ejects.

After that all one can do is replace various devices, or reduce what is connected. TB should be far better than this, it was designed to be.

Since the upgrade to MacOS 12.4 this hasn't troubled me further. My dock and my EXT Monitors operate fine in closed clamshell mode. Sleep of the monitors is OK and wakeup works as expected. Just upgraded to SoftRaid 6.3, also good. 

Don't know if this is a bug or intended action... If the System Preferences>Security & Privacy>General Allow button is not checked and the Restart is selected from the popup (instead of the Restart after the Allow button is selected), the Restart has to be done again, since the Allow button remains unchecked. Is there a way around this dual restart? Has it always been thus? I usually go into Systems Preferences and do the restart from that notification. Maybe the bug should be titled, "dual notifications." Guess I'll report that separately. 

@henry-in-florida 

Only one restart is required, but you get a notification from SoftRAID, and also System Preferences.

With 6.3 the SoftRAID one is not modal, so you can restart from System Preferences.