SoftRaid 7.5 - not showing drives.

@stmoddell 

Make sure SoftRAID app has "full disk access".

And without anything attached, do you see the internal disk? the app (or SoftRAID Monitor) is hanging gathering disk information, so the disks never show up.

So disconnect OS mirror AND the thunderbay? Got it will do. 

as far as this working reasonably well in 6.3, but not 7.5 and y’all already moved onto 7.6, where I can’t follow, should I just stick with 6.3 or are there significant bug fixes that shouldn’t be missed in later versions (and if so, should be trying to come forward to 7.? at the least? 

@stmoddell 

Go with the latest version. If you are on 10.14 or later, use 7.6.1

Ok, both external raid boxes removed and machine rebooted. internal drives shows up.

then I connect and power up Thunder Bay and the drives for that show up. 

then power on mirror hardware RAID for OS and it shows up

will try a reboot and see how everything goes. 

After reboot, and waiting on the mini for a good 10-15 mins after reboot before opening SoftRaid, and right back to no drives showing. 

Should I consider just using older version of SoftRaid, and what version is least likely to have me wasting time on this?

@stmoddell 

this issue is not "version related". Get everything working again, save a SoftRAID tech support file and attach it here. Let me look for ideas.

@stmoddell 

I think you have a connection or enclosure issue. Did you try a different Thunderbolt bus? Or a different cable? Drives not appearing in SoftRAID indicates a hardware issue. I do not see any recent events that could relate to anything but the cable connection (or perhaps enclosure) Your drives are either showing or not. It cannot be a SoftRAID issue, as if you ran Disk Utility, you would also not see the missing disks

That is the very odd thing. If I run disk utility the drives populate. At this point I'm suspicious of the internal drive in the mini and the small mirrored raid enclosure. I've tried different cables and different usb ports. I'll try to swap out the internal drive when I get a chance and same with purchase/swap of the mirrored raid enclosure, but expenditures on hardware are an unnecessary expense at this point in time. If it were possible to get a loaner of a mirrored raid enclosure for 2.5 drives, that'd help.

@stmoddell 

I do not see any signs of failure on your internal drives. Download SoftRAID 8 beta (softraid.com/sr_beta), we add NVMe SMART support, you can see if the wear indicator shows a problem.

Try moving the cable around. Try a different port on the Mini.

the reason I suspect the internal drive is that the partition with the OS on the internal drive (not the boot OS, but a backup just in case OS) showed with a "?" beside it the last time SoftRaid actually populated with drives and RAIDs. 

I'm reticent to try the newer SoftRaid 8 version as it isn't in my budget to upgrade past 7.5 partly due to OS, and partly just due to expense. I'll try swapping cables and ports, but have done so in the past with no notable change to behavior.

@stmoddell 

SoftRAID is not designed to manage non SoftRAID disks, so sometimes Apple drives have an ? by them, as we did not do the work to add support for every kind of partition map configuration. So a ? on the disk tiles does not mean anything useful.

If this is a mini and you replace an HDD with an SSD, you will of course get a great performance boost, but otherwise, no need to replace a drive unless you want to increase capacity or there is a known issue.

good to know, the internal drives on the mini is only used for emergency booting if/when the external mirrored OS RAID is unavailable. I'll proceed with swapping ports and cables as I'm able to arrange downtime 

Ok, so this has been dormant for an age, but I think I've finally tracked down the issue. I have an UPS for my server and raid set up.

The Mac mini can attach to the UPS monitoring so as to allow alerts when UPS is triggered and allow for everything to shut down when UPS reaches a certain level of remaining power.

IF that USB-A to RJ-45 cable is plugged in then the SoftRaid software fails to detect the RAID array for monitoring purposes.

Additionally, I have apple Magic Trackpad and extended Keyboard, both bluetooth. If either of those have their charging cables (USB-A to apple specific end) connected, then SoftRaid software failes to read the drive information as well. 

This took forever to diagnose as the server is relied upon a great deal and disconnecting various cables to server resources is not permitted most of the time. 

Is there a possible patch for this? I need to be able to have UPS connected and be able to know if drives in RAID are having issues and neither feature is more important than the other.

@stmoddell 

I do not know how these can interfere.

Remove the cables and save a support file.

then connect the USBA to RJ-45 cable and save a support file.

Lastly,  Plug in the Magic Pad charging cable (not RJ-45) and save a support file.

this should be enough to investigate. thanks!