The fact that "Disk Warrior" exists and works is proof enough. 20+ years it has fixed volumes that do not mount.

we have been trying to get this fixed, but the way Apple engineering works is reproducability. Show specific steps to reproduce a problem, they can fix it.

"First Aid" never did much.

APFS is all that is being managed at present, so if we get APFS issues, we can report those and given steps, or a corrupted APFS directory, we can send that to Apple for evaluation. Problem is usually users do not want to send their "data" to Apple, understandably.

this is a difficult kind of issue, as the occurances are relatively rare, and getting "steps to reproduce" extremely difficult.

The problem is they get closed. Also, if bugs cannot be easily reproduced, they are closed. In order to ensure a bug is fixed, we have to have very reproducible steps. On bugs like this, that is very hard to do.

Its been a bug for 15 years. Gotten better, but still exists. I don't know if we have a specific bug that is open.

 This has been an issue for 15 years+.

This seems like a major macOS bug, has SoftRAID filed a bug with Apple about this?  Is it possible to get a link to the bug report?

You can run First Aid, but it is useless, IMO

Only Disk Warrior can rebuild an HFS directory.

I rebuild my volumes about monthly, depending on usage. When you launch it gives a health indicator, which helps.

I have submitted the kernel panic dump via their online form.  (I did get a web confirmation, but I haven't received any email acknowledgement.)

Separately, other than don't have media attached during macOS updates, what general maintenance / preventive maintenance advice do you have for SoftRAID volumes?  For example ... Is Disk Utility safe to use on SoftRAID volumes?  Is there anything about running First Aid in Disk Utility that I should not do?  Should I proactively rebuild the directory periodically using DiskWarrior? 

Thanks again.

If you dont mind, report those crashes to alsoft, so they can fix it. I have not had issues running on Apple Silicon, but will try testing on a base Air I have here.

Well, DW fixed it (which is great), and thanks for your help, but it was an ordeal. 

I could not get DW to work on the 16GB Mac Mini M1, even though I followed your suggestion about running from a clean system.  (I also disconnected all non-essential accessories and tried safe mode as well.) It lasted perhaps a minute longer before crashing, and before it crashed DW displayed a new banner warning that the process would run slow due to low memory, but it still had the same kernel panic crash after only a few minutes. 

What did work was connecting the enclosure to a 96GB mid-2012 Mac Pro running High Sierra, installing SoftRAID 7.6, and installing and running DW.  The SoftRAID volume was very slow to mount.  DW took a long time (the RAID had 400k+ folders and 4.8M files) but rebuilt the directory without incident and no errors flagged by either DW or SoftRAID. 

The enclosure subsequently mounted back on the 16GB Mac Mini M1 as though nothing had ever gone wrong.  So I'm pleased that its fixed, but egads ... 2 days of my life stolen.  Thank god it happened on a slow work week. 

I'm quite skeptical that DW is functional on low end Apple Silicon running macOS 15.3 -- it my experience it is not.

Boy o boy going forward I will remember to disconnect external volumes before doing *any* macOS update.