Stupid questions about upgrading

It seems that all 3 of the replacement drives that I got from Amazon over the past couple of months are faulty. Sheesh. I've dug out another 'spare' drive from an old external drive. The system is not stuck in the rebuilding (but not actually rebuilding) , out of sync phase. The volume mounts but super duper can't get complete a copy operation due to some permission errors.

All my data is safe somewhere, but it looks like I'll need to do a fresh install and set up from the start. 

One new stupid question please. If I upgrade from Softraid 5XT to SR 6XT now for 100, can I then upgrade SR 6XT to SR 6 Pro for the additional 100 if I decide that I want to use it on non-Thunderbays please?

Wait, windows SR6 only supports RAID 0/1?

@chobochobo

Are the drives showing "predicted failure"? or just hanging? I want to make sure you don't have some other issue, for instance, an enclosure not supplying enough current to the drives.

Yes you can upgrade consecutively.

We are just entering beta on RAID 5 for Windows. Currently, 1 and 0 are all that is supported.

Cheers. I got my machine back. Reinstalling everything now. The volume with the Time Machine backups can't be read now. Although all my data is safe on SR RAID 5 volumes with backups of each, it's still a hassle doing a clean install. But then a clean install has it's advantages so I guess there's that. I think I'll put my TM onto my NAS.

Okay, I've hooked up my OWC thunderbay 4s with RAID 5 volumes up to the repaired computer. Something about the enclosures is not letting the computer shut down completely. It'll get almost to the end of shutdown, the thunderbay lights go to red, then it'll start up again and goes to the Apple black screen of death. Softraid isn't reporting any drive issues. I've captured the apple report and have also generated the softraid report. Do I post them here.

@chobochobo

The crash is a "watchdog" crash?

How many total drives are connected to your computer?

If you unmount your volume first before shutting down, all is normal?

I suspect this is an Apple bug. this would happen regardless of what driver controls the disks. Watch at shutdown, for each drive going green for a few seconds. I think the max time for shutdown is 30 seconds, else it panics. My guess is you have 8 or more drives?

Sorry, what's a 'watch dog' crash please? 

I have 4 sets of Thunderbay 4s connected plus one solo drive for Time machine. I haven't tried to test unmounting as Time machine is still encrypting - it's been almost 3 days now and I only have 60G or so of data on the mini itself

The most crazy thing was that I realized the other day that Apple/Genius bar had put in a new logic board on my mac mini but this replacement only has half the (onboard) RAM that I originally have. So potentially, I have to give them this machine again. So I'm making sure all my drives, particularly my Time Machine backups are in order first before I go back to Apple. I may move my Time Machine backups to my Synology NAS later on. 

Okay, I just unmounted all the SR volumes before shutting down and the machine came back on after about 8 seconds. Interestingly, the computer and drives/ enclosures go to sleep (and wake) ok. 

@chobochobo

When you get the crash, and "report to Apple" more details and look at the crash log, on top it will show watchdog.

this crash is a known macOS bug. It happens when there are "too many" drives, essentially.

@chobochobo

I guess you are saying it crashed? Unmount ALL non boot volumes and try again. this is not a bug related to SoftRAID. You can reproduce it with all disk utility formatted, non RAID disks. You just need lots of disks connected for it to happen.

Okay, crash report from before says naer the end actually '>watchdog 1'

is that a 'positive'. First time I unmounted all the SR volumes, it still restarted with a black screen of death. Then second time, I unmounted all external drives, same. The other day I thought I sorted it out with a SMC(?) reset by holding the power down button for 10 seconds. Maybe I had this problem before too, but I've only really noticed it since getting my computer 'fixed' - minus half the RAM. Did I tell you? I got my machine back from Apple with half the RAM I was supposed to LOL

@chobochobo

So this problem is resolved with an SMC reset?

that would be very interesting.

Watchdog is not "good" news, but it means the problem is known.

I'm about to hand my mac over to the Genius bar again now. They're going to put in another logic board. See if that helps with the shutdown problem.

@chobochobo

Remember if you have 12 drives or more, this shutdown problem will happen 100% of the time. It can happen with less drives also, in some systems or drive combinations. In our experience, larger drives with more onboard cache trigger this more often. So I do not think a motherboard change will affect this issue.

I think the reason Apple added this "cache flush" feature at shutdown, was to improve the reliability of HFS volumes, which would get corrupted when the system shut down too quickly. The fix in my eye is to make these cache flush calls simultaneously, rather than sequentially. Not sure why that has not already been tried.