Flex 8 and 2 Thunderbay 3 Bay's Are Paper Weights

I don't blame you for being upset. this is an M1 bug. We purchased and will receive a users computer/enclosure today (hopefully), which has this problem and intend to drive it to Apple to get this issue resolved.

Our supposition is this is a macOS issue, rather than a hardware conflict. Until we debug the unit we bought, we won't know specifically. All you can decipher from kernel panics is that the Thunderbolt bus is crashing, which is what is causing the panic.

Let me get some information:

Does each unit individually trigger the panic upon connection?

If you remove one disk from one of your enclosures (I am predicting they are RAID 5), and connect it by itself, does the volume mount? (if you connect to your iMac, the volume can be rebuilt with all drives inserted)

A clean install of macOS in the M1 might fix this (You can create a new volume using Disk Utility, install it as a second volume if you want to test this.)

We do not have an answer until we can work on this machine, and bring it to Apple. It seems to happen to well less than 5% of M1's. Perhaps 1%. none of our internal test M1 machines do this. That is why we purchased a failing machine.

Really apologize here, hopefully soon we will understand the cause better.

I just wrote a longish reply to another user with the same issue. This appears to be a M1/macOS bug.

Please read this link, and feel free to comment, it will keep this thread shorter:

https://forums.softraid.com/softraid-6-2-softraid-6-2-known-issues/flex-8-and-2-thunderbay-3-bays-are-paper-weights/#post-12554

When we do have something, we will post to the forum, hopefully soon, but we don't know what it will take to fix this issue, once we debug it in some detail.

@softraid-support thank you for the reply and thank you for diligently working to make it right.

1.  Yes each unit triggers the crash even when individually plugged in.

2. Yes, it works with 1 of the disks removed from the Raid 5 setup.

3.  I'll need to research how to perform the clean install on new volume.

Also of note, I get another drive/volume that shows up as "Boot OSX" that is 130.2MB in size when a bay is connected to my MacBook.

@pisseduser

Run Disk Utility

+ Volume, create a new volume. (APFS, which will "share" space on your disk with the existing volume, they do not interfere)

Shut down

Hit the power key, then release, hold it down.

Click options

Reinstall MacOS

go through the boxes, then point to the new volume.

macOS will do an internet recovery install to the new volume.

When done, give it the same admin name, so you do not have permissions problems.

when done, shut down, boot back into recovery mode and go to Startup Security Utility.

Set it to enable third party developers (has to be done for every startup volume)

Now run/install SoftRAID, "Allow" OWC.

Restart.

Connect your enclosure. Does it panic? Does it mount?

@pisseduser

My guess is you are running Acronis?

A fix may be to enable Full Disk Access to Acronis in System Preferences/Security/Privacy/Full Disk Access.

See if that fixes this.

@softraid-support

No I’m not using that.  I’ll give the new volume a try 

@pisseduser

When a volume is created, it has a macOS Boot partition that is hidden.

Acronis seems to make it mount. Maybe there is something else installed that tries to mount hidden volumes. I am not aware of any, this was an issue that showed up a few times around 10.7, then went away. It resurged with Acronis. I can't think of another time I have seen it, but my memory may be faulty there.

Brand new SoftRAID volumes created with 6.2 no longer have the boot OS X volume, btw, we removed it, since SoftRAID will never be bootable (nor any RAID volume) going forward on the mac.

@softraid-support

Just did the new volume and bays seem to working as they should with no panic.  How do you advise I should proceed? How should I transfer everything from old volume and should I just delete that old original volume?

Thanks

@softraid-support

After about 20-30 minutes of working, 1 of the 3 bays randomly had a disk go missing about a minute later a second disk went missing in the same bay.  I restarted and it still shows 2 missing disks and will not mount because of it.  

@softraid-support ok, so I power cycled only the bay where the drives disappeared and they are now back.  Hopefully just a fluke in that regard.

@softraid-support

I have found what is causing a panic.  On this new volume everything had been working fine (2 separate thunder bay 4's, a flex 8 divided into 2 separate 4 bay raid 5's with a 4TB SSD, 2 USB HDD and a 4K monitor all running into an OWC Thunderbolt 4 Hub.  The moment I installed OWC Dock Ejector I started getting the panic again.  Made sure OWC had permissions in the settings, restarted and left all drives unplugged, plugged in my thunderbolt hub and instant panic.   I uninstalled the dock ejector and I thought all was well because it wasn't an instant panic but the panic occurred about 5 seconds into the bays firing up.  Somehow the dock ejector ruins the volume of macOS even if uninstalled.  Will attempt another volume build tomorrow and not install OWC Dock Ejector 

@pisseduser

One comment. Disks disappearing can be of two "types".

Individual disks ejecting

All disks in an enclosure ejecting

the former must mean the enclosure has an issue. One disk is more likely a disk issue.

All disks ejecting is the infamous Apple/intel Thunderbolt chipset crash.

@pisseduser

Our team also wrote Dock Ejector and it has been extremely reliable and stable.

Next week I can ask if there are any similar reports, and we can go from there.