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I have an M2 Mac mini acting as a home server, and have two OWC RAIDs connected - an 8TB 4M2, and a 4TB Thunderbay Mini Thunderbolt 2. Everything has been working fine for well over a month, but suddenly the RAID 4 in the Thunderbay won't mount. The RAID is 3x1TB Crucial MX500, with the parity on ½ of a 2TB Crucial BX500 (everything formatted APFS). I set it up this way because I had the BX500 on hand, and it is fairly notorious for awful performance for sustained writes, but I figured it should be able to handle parity data on a RAID that doesn't actually change much - it's largely an archive, plus my iTunes library of music and movies (I occasionally buy new movies, but not much else).
The other half of the BX500 is dedicated to iCloud caching (for software updates and iCloud data), and it mounts without issue, so the enclosure is still working. All four slots light up on system or enclosure restart, and there are no errors in SoftRAID 7.5, including with the individual disks. When I try to mount the RAID, the vertical progress bar in SoftRAID gets halfway, then stops, and the RAID fails to mount, but with no clues as to why.
Fortunately, I do have a nightly backup of everything on a 4TB hard drive, and I have a second offsite backup drive that is up to date, so I can nuke the RAID and start over, but I'm hesitant to do that without knowing why the current setup stopped working.
Posted : 19/08/2023 1:37 pm
No recent crashes or anything? Did a blade disappear for a while?
the SoftRAID driver is loading, this is not a driver issue. Most likely the directory is damaged.
If you run First Aid on t his, from Disk Utility, what kind of error does it come up with?
the shame about APFS is there are no "repair" tools like Disk Warrior, when something goes wrong with the directory.
Posted : 19/08/2023 3:49 pm
Topic starter
No crashes or issues with any of the drives that I'm aware of - I only access the machine via Screens, and noticed that the Thunderbay's main power light was orange last night, so I logged in to check it.
First Aid gives the following:
Checking the object map.
warning: (oid 0x290deb) om: btn: invalid o_cksum (0xec9db6aa7adf597d)
Object map is invalid.
The volume /dev/rdisk21s1 was found to be corrupt and cannot be repaired.
Verifying allocated space.
The volume /dev/rdisk21s1 could not be verified completely.
File system check exit code is 8.
Restoring the original state found as unmounted.
I checked the SoftRAID log, but it only goes back to Thursday night, and whatever happened was after the backup ran successfully early Thursday morning. Is there any way to go back further than that?
Posted : 19/08/2023 5:00 pm
Topic starter
I'm sure it's probably a coincidence, but the failure came after installing the macOS 13.5.1 update.
Posted : 19/08/2023 5:01 pm
I wonder if the 13.5.1 update cleared the logs. I generally remove all external disks when doing MacOS updates. There have been several famous MacOS upgrade incidents in the past, so I am cautious on upgrades. I would not discount the MacOS upgrade possibility.
Posted : 19/08/2023 6:08 pm
Topic starter
Interesting - I guess I'll just rebuild it and keep that in mind for OS updates in the future.
Posted : 19/08/2023 7:05 pm
I've had a number of issues with a Thunderbay 8 loaded with MX500 SSDs, which *I thnk* have been resolved by updating the firmware on all RAID members (no problems in several months).
I would strongly suggest you check the firmware versions of those drives, and update them if they're not current. You'll need a Windows machine to do so.
Posted : 23/08/2023 11:48 am
Thanks for posting. SSD's and NMVe's are not in the class as hard drives in terms of easy compatibility with various systems, Macs in particular.
Posted : 23/08/2023 11:52 am
@softraid-support - glad to help!
I meant to include a bit more info... my drives shipped with firmware M3CR043 (it's printed on the back of each SSD), and the Storage Executive software updated them to M3CR046. The Windows box needs to have an internet connection. There's an older convoluted way to update on a Mac, but you'd need a SuperDrive and an .iso file to burn a boot disc to optical.
Posted : 23/08/2023 12:02 pm
Apple is about the biggest company in the world, with a major MacOS customer base, and "drive" manufacturers still cannot be bothered to do simple things like port their firmware updaters to run on MacOS, or at least a linux startup image for a Thumbdrive.
Posted : 23/08/2023 1:31 pm
Yeah, that is seriously jacked up. I keep an old 2014 Mac Mini for this kind of thing, as it's been Boot Camped (maxed out at Catalina and Win10) and I've got a USB toaster for the bare drives.
Posted : 23/08/2023 1:38 pm
