TunderBay8: Last three of the green drive LED's are always on, the rest go off after disk activity stops - Functionality Issues

RE: TunderBay8: Last three of the green drive LED's are always on, the rest go off after disk activity stops

SoftRAID Support — Wed, 15 May 2024 13:56:23 +0000

@whitedb

Open a chat with support, as there may be a fix you can do without needing to replace the enclosure over lights.

RE: TunderBay8: Last three of the green drive LED's are always on, the rest go off after disk activity stops

whitedb — Wed, 15 May 2024 12:40:16 +0000

As instructed, I took out the three new 12TB drives and replaced them with 3 old 8TB drives. With the light sector switch to ON, then their LED's were on brightly. Looking closely the LED's for the other 5 drives were on but dimly. With the selector switch to DIM, they were all off. So the behaviour is as before.

I was impressed that SoftRaid does a smart check on the new drives and immediately spotted that one had bad blocks (which is why it had be retired)

RE: TunderBay8: Last three of the green drive LED's are always on, the rest go off after disk activity stops

SoftRAID Support — Tue, 14 May 2024 15:18:12 +0000

@whitedb

SoftRAID does not care what order, or what enclosure/bus that drives are connected to. It will not harm anything.

RE: TunderBay8: Last three of the green drive LED's are always on, the rest go off after disk activity stops

whitedb — Tue, 14 May 2024 15:07:59 +0000

Thanks for the reply. I unmounted both volumes (right click and eject on the Mac) and the three lights stayed on, no change.

I noticed there is a switch on the front panel at the top RH corner with three positions: LED: Off, Dim, On. It was in the On position. When I switched it to Dim, the three LED's for F-H went off. In this position they flash come on for a disk access but go off again, the behaviour I would expect. I put the switch back to On and the LED's come back on and stay on.

Before I switch out the three new drives I just wanted to check that I will not damage the data on them if I keep them in the correct order?

RE: TunderBay8: Last three of the green drive LED's are always on, the rest go off after disk activity stops

SoftRAID Support — Mon, 13 May 2024 23:29:05 +0000

No this is not normal.

If you unmount both volumes, after a minute or more, do the lights go off?

If you shut down, swap the three drives with different drives, what happens?

TunderBay8: Last three of the green drive LED's are always on, the rest go off after disk activity stops

whitedb — Mon, 13 May 2024 22:48:22 +0000

I am setting up new Thunderbay 8 and started by installing 5 drives and setting them up in a Raid 5 volume. Today I added a further 3 drives and set them up as a separate Raid 5 volume. The two volumes appear correctly on the desktop. Now the strange thing. The green LED's for drives F, G & H, the new volume, are always illuminated. Lights for A-E are off. I tried ejecting the second, 3 disk volume, and the lights are still illuminated. I rebooted the Thunderbay and all the lights flashed as it started up but once the disk activity stopped, lights F-G stayed on and the others were off.

Is this normal behaviour, is it delineating the two volumes or is there a way to get both volumes to behave the same?

Thanks.

(Mac Studio running Sonoma, SoftRaid 8.0)