Thunderbay 4 RAID 5 constantly spinning up and down

This is a MacOS behavior. SoftRAID does not manage the volume contents/file system, etc.

If the drives are spinning down during usage, then there are some third party utilities that keep them spinning.

You can also try setting all sleep settings to "never"

amphetamine, caffeine are two such utlities. Let me know if any of these ideas help.

I have a Thunderbay 8 with Raid 5 (8x 18TB) and this keeps happening to me as well. It's incredibly irritating. I have a M4 Mac mini with all the latest updates, Sleep is set to Never.

SoftRAID Support, please correct this issue. Do not just pawn this off as a MacOS problem and third party apps. You advertise these devices to work with a Mac and specifically for Digital Video.

You currently say:

• Work faster: up to 2586MB/s¹ real-world speed for up to 8K multi-stream video editing and AR/VR workflows

You forgot to mention that I have to constantly wait for the disks to spin up, even if I'm just idle for a few minutes.

This is very much a OWC problem that you need to take ownership of, and work to find a solution for it, otherwise this has been a complete waste of $5,000.

You should immediately bundle Amphetamine or Caffeine with SoftRAID (if they in fact work as you describe). Or here's an idea, write some code that does the same thing and integrate it into the settings of SoftRAID.

In the meantime you need to explicitly state on your product page that this issue exists with your machines and software, specifically when it comes to Video Editing.

The fact that this is even necessary for a customer to say this is mind-numbing. 

@westsideraid5 

I understand your complaint. We have brought this up to Apple engineering. There are many sleep related bugs, which are slowly being fixed one at a time with MacOS releases. I don't know when this one will be fixed, but it will be. Note that it will likely have something to do with "Energy Star" certifications, which would explain why it has not been fixed already.

As mentioned in this thread, SoftRAID is not involved with what happens inside a volume, or sleep. SoftRAID is a filter driver. MacOS asks SoftRAID what to do with data, and SoftRAID points to the disk, MacOS performs the reads/writes. SoftRAID cannot control sleep behavior.

We do not bundle open source, or shareware applications. We avoid writing "special case" code, as it is impossible to maintain over time. That is why so many applications turn into bloatware over time. Consider SoftRAID is now 30 years old. Each release we look for code to remove, not add. Your data is at stake, every extra line of code adds risk. Especially once it has been embedded long ago. Its not how SoftRAID is managed. We keep our code base clean.

Chances are, if you do a "clean install" (second system, which you can do without affecting your existing system), you won't have this same issue, the disks powering down randomly during use seems to be not on all MacOS installs, unlike other sleep bugs in MacOS.

If you are afflicted with this bug, it will occur with all removable drives you would connect to your Mac, its just more obvious with RAID volumes, as many disks need to spin up and you are waiting for the slowest. This issue is why those "keep your drives awake" utilities exist, not because of SoftRAID.

I have this issue also. Can I get a plain-english solution to try please OWC?

Thank you! Curt

@curtd 

Plain English, this is a MacOS issue. It might be addressed in this octobers release.
Your solution options are, until Apple fixes this, are:
Set sleep settings to never
Use a third party app like Caffeine or Amphetamine.

SoftRAID does NOT control sleep in any way. You just notice it more on SoftRAID volumes when there are 4 disks, not one.