New Mac Studio M2. SoftRaid 8.3. ThunderBay Flex8. All Volumes Disappeared Waking Up - Not A Good Start!

@softraid-support I won't hold you to it, but found the original sales invoice. Sure enough, the invoice itself sure makes it look like 5-years (on the invoice it says 5-years and doesn't even mention 3 anywhere). I wouldn't have thought to even check at all if not for your post, so thanks for getting me as far as looking up the invoice. But I'll still call sales tomorrow with the order/invoice number just to gather the information either way. I'm still holding out hope though that everything's just fine with my enclosure. Either way, it is a good thing to double-check what the warranty status may or may not be (which I'll do very soon).

@guitarflex 

I have a request for you to try:
unmount your volume. Wait 30 seconds (make sure all lights are "off" on the drives, then sleep. wait the appropriate time, then wake up the system.
Do you get the same behavior?

Thanks for the request -- got notified and was able to try this quickly for you. 

Yes, following your request to the letter, it does the same thing. All lights were "off" on the drives, BUT....

The main "OWC" logo light remains on/blue and the enclosure itself remains "on" (I can still feel the fan circulating air if I put my hand behind the unit). No disk activity and no disk lights after unmounting, just the enclosure itself remains on. Is that okay? 

@guitarflex 

It may take as long as 2 minutes for the enclosure to sleep. then the light will go orange.

thanks....will do this right now and report back....you're saying the enclosure should go to sleep and the light orange with the computer still on, right? 

Quick update -- have now had the volumes unmounted with the Studio still on for about 15 minutes. The enclosure has not gone to sleep and the OWC light is still blue, not orange. 

Currently installing some SSD storage into a U2 Shuttle and would like to start certifying some storage. Hopefully you don't need me to do anymore tests with the Flex 8 in the near future since it'll be busy certifying now for the next few (?) days.

(Also called the sales/support/service line and officially confirmed with the order number/invoice --- thankfully it turns out the enclosure is in fact warranted until 2026. So that was a good thing to find out). 

@guitarflex 

The computer needs to sleep for the enclosure to sleep, sorry if I wasn't clear.

(And the drives will spin up every 45 minutes, also, a MacOS "feature".)

That makes things much clearer, thank you. Yes, when the computer goes to sleep, the enclosure goes to sleep.

About to start a 3-pass certification for a couple new NVMe blades. How many passes is protocol on the pre-certified Flex 8s? I know the Help file says at least 2 passes with SSD, but how many passes should I realistically be giving it? 3? 4? 

And for the Random Access Testing, is the default 15 minutes good? Or would a factory certification enable Random Access Testing for longer? 

Got to start certification now since it will take a few days, but hopefully I can pause and re-adjust the settings if you recommend changing any of those settings beyond the default (3-passes, 15-minutes Random Access Testing). They're 4TB Aura Pro IV blades from OWC.  

@guitarflex 

If you bought with drives/blades, we certify them first, its part of the service, and whyt we can offer 3 year replacement warranty, unlike most vendors that only give "refurbished" drives after a few months, if they fail.

The 3 passes is plenty, 15 minutes is standard. As long as the drives get good cooling 15 minutes does no harm to them. You need at least 2 passes to certify, so a random pattern can be written/read, then zeros. Only doing zeros is not really a test and the last pass of a certify is zeros.

@softraid-support thanks for this reply, it helps

I'm running into some bizarro but similar issues. Ive got a Flexbay 8, 8 x 20TB Exos Drives, and SoftRAID 8.3. Brand New Studio M.2 Max, running Sequoia 15.2. (15.3 is scheduled for install tonight, though) Apple Certified TB4 Cables. No other accessories. 

When I reboot, it will hang at the loading bar for days, unless I unplug the Flexbay, then it will finish loading almost instantly. 

Randomly throughout the day, the drives will look normal in SoftRAID,Volume is Mounted, but I can't open Apple Music without it crashing. Everything is slower. And all of my storage is pointed to the built in Storage Drive. I just have some random files stored on the External Drive. 

It's a work computer, so all of the energy stuff is turned off, no sleeping, not even a screensaver. I'm not sure where to start looking. Its just strange with this much new power, its this buggy. Theyre unplugged right now, and everything is a rocket. 

@tssrshot 

Attach a SoftRAID tech support file and I can start looking.

This is clearly not normal.

@softraid-support I guess maybe kind of dumb, but I generated a Tech Support File in SoftRAID, but upon upload it says this is an invalid file format? Any trick I am missing? Seems pretty easy lol.

@tssrshot 
It should be easy. The forum has has some issues with uploading files, but we thought we fixed it. I will look into this, sorry.