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Alert fatigue, and no notification for a drive failure?

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(@faolan)
Posts: 2
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Topic starter
 

I was initially excited about the alerts being added to SoftRaid, but over time ended up filing them off to their own mailbox. A bit of alert fatigue set in when I'd get 10 emails a day about excess hours on some disks. 

The 10 messages in one day warned me about these disks:

20:38 (disk2, Location: Thunderbolt, PCI bus, 931 GB)
20:38 (disk3, Label: "ThunderExpress 4M2 - C", SoftRAID ID: 09080BD92D2EE300, Location: Thunderbolt, PCI bus, 953 GB)
20:38 (disk0, Label: "ThunderExpress 4M2 - D", SoftRAID ID: 09080BD92D818B80, Location: Thunderbolt, PCI bus, 953 GB)
20:38 (disk2, Location: Thunderbolt, PCI bus, 931 GB)
20:38 (disk0, Label: "ThunderExpress 4M2 - D", SoftRAID ID: 09080BD92D818B80, Location: Thunderbolt, PCI bus, 953 GB)
21:21 (disk3, Label: "ThunderExpress 4M2 - C", SoftRAID ID: 09080BD92D2EE300, Location: Thunderbolt, PCI bus, 953 GB)
21:21 (disk0, Label: "ThunderExpress 4M2 - D", SoftRAID ID: 09080BD92D818B80, Location: Thunderbolt, PCI bus, 953 GB)
21:21 (disk2, Location: Thunderbolt, PCI bus, 931 GB)
21:21 (disk3, Label: "ThunderExpress 4M2 - C", SoftRAID ID: 09080BD92D2EE300, Location: Thunderbolt, PCI bus, 953 GB)
21:21 (disk0, Label: "ThunderExpress 4M2 - D", SoftRAID ID: 09080BD92D818B80, Location: Thunderbolt, PCI bus, 953 GB) 

There's no option I can find to acknowledge these alerts, so they just keep flooding the mailbox. I'd like to run these drives till a failure, and be notified if SMART shows signs of issues beyond just the hours of operation. These emails also all link to https://go.owc.com/softraid/notifications/excess-disk-power-on-hours which just drops me off at this URL https://software.owc.com/knowledge-base/ . Searching for "excess hours" finds nothing.

The bad part happened yesterday. I applied the macOS 13.6.9 update to my server, along with SoftRaid 8.1. I shut down the Mac, and disconnect the Thunderbolt enclosures during OS updates as they have a tendency to power cycle the external boxes frequently. Once the OS updates were completed, I attached the enclosures and powered back up.

HDD in bay D in a ThunderBay 4 suffered a failure (not bay D in the 4M2 being alerted about above). Drive doesn't show up at all in system information, and SoftRAID showed the RAID 0 stripe between C and D as having a problem. But there was never an alert mailed out saying there was a drive was near a failure state or a drive was missing. Instead Carbon Copy Cloner is what let me know something was wrong initially, because it's backup destination for nightly backups couldn't be found as it was on the RAID 0 stripe across the C and D disks.

So now at this point I don't see the value of these alerts, and this was the main reason I purchased an upgrade to version 8 and went along with the subscription changes. I'm not confident these alerts will tell me about critical issues, nor will they link to useful help if an issue does occur.

This topic was modified 2 years ago by faolan
 
Posted : 03/09/2024 6:14 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 9200
Member Admin
 

In SoftRAID email notifications, you can uncheck in Email Notifications, under SMART "Extended hours of use".
then you won't get any more of those.

Can you send a support file? I would like to check.
We should alert when a RAID 0 is missing a disk, I know we do when other RAID levels are missing a disk. thanks!

 
Posted : 04/09/2024 1:12 pm
(@faolan)
Posts: 2
New Member
Topic starter
 

Thanks, sent off the files to the support email. 

Regarding the extended hours of use, I found the toggle which will silence them across all drives.  

An idea for a future update, It'd be nice to have a way to still be alerted about a drive going past the threshold and to be able to acknowledge it for individual drives to turn off the 2-3x notifications a day, while still getting notified if a different drive goes over the threshold. Or an option to summarize them in the Periodic activity report.

 
Posted : 04/09/2024 4:54 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 9200
Member Admin
 

@faolan 

There should only be one notification a day, I will investigate this.
Yes it is in the eventual plans to enhance this, such as you describe, but probably a year away.

 
Posted : 04/09/2024 5:41 pm
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