Ventura 13.3 Update - Thunderbay 8 won't mount

@dmetz 

I understand and also that you literally disconnected the enclosure for the upgrade. So the upgrade has nothing to do with this.
what about power offs? (I am assuming while you have been restarting, there have been few or no shutdowns?

Its perplexing. And can be hard to find the trigger.

In December, did you also have a pause before the drives showed up?

There are only a couple reasons why drives would not even show up, none of them software.

Since the Mac is an M1, it needs to be shut down to get into recovery or safe boot.  There have been a few other plain restarts for non-OS software updates.  I had the same drive appearance timeline today as in December - first, 3 members appear relatively quickly; then 2 more about 5 minutes later; then the last 3 about 15 - 20 minutes after that.

@dmetz 

OK, perhaps a clue. I suspect those are major "TRIM" operations, when an SSD takes the drive writes and actually erases them. (when you delete on an SSD, the file is not deleted, as it is too slow, so it is just marked deleted.)

Can you open a support case with Crucial? We would be happy to help them diagnose this issue, it may be an issue with TRIM in macOS.

While I sometimes see APFS issues where a volume can no longer mount, it is nothing like this, nor repeatable. And those are definite symptoms of TRIM.

So I suspect a TRIM related issue. If true, Crucial should be interested. I have seen issues with Flash manufacturers that take a long time to resolve obscure macOS related issues. Some of the manufacturers do not care, but most do. I suspect Crucial is one that will be very interested in resolving this issue.

thanks

Hm.  Those drives have built-in active garbage collection, but will obey TRIM commands from the host.  Crucial site info states that a powered drive left idle will take care of its garbage in short order, and my enclosure is on 24/7 except when I'm doing maintenance.  I haven't forced any TRIM operations, and there was nothing in the Mini's system log, so am at a bit of a loss.  I'll get in touch with Crucial, but I need to find a reliable RAID yesterday.

Which SSDs do you guys test?

We have two SSD's we offer. One is made by the largest OEM in the world, the other are ours. Both are good performers and reliable.

We have also tested Samsung quite a bit.

One last question for Support... the volume has been reliably mounting, but I do still have questions regarding TRIM.

I've not activated TRIM via the 'trimforce' command, so when I view my SSDs in System Information, they show "TRIM Support: No" - so the disks are currently relying on their internal garbage collection.  I'm waiting on a reply from Crucial, but in the meantime I'm wondering if there are ramifications regarding SoftRAID should I decide to enable it.

@dmetz 

TRIM is on by default now in MacOS. All SoftRAID disks will support TRIM, if available.

@dmetz 

TRIM is on by default now in MacOS. All SoftRAID disks will support TRIM, if available. Go ahead and enable it, I do not know why it is not already on in your system.

@softraid-support

When did 'on by default' happen?  I'm currently running an M2 Studio, and simply updated the default OS install out of the box.  Of course, it was active for Apple's internal storage, just not for 3rd party SSDs.  It is also not enabled on my M1 MBP.

Perhaps it's something to do with SATA SSDs vs others, but 'On by Default' for a SATA-based expansion box is not a thing in my experience.  I've enabled it on the Studio, and will also now do it on the laptop.

Here's a screenshot from the laptop, with an unformatted SATA SSD attached via TB:

@dmetz 

Guess what? I just reproduced this on SATA. Apparently, while TRIM is always enabled on NVMe, it is not on SSD. Without some research I do not know if this is ARM only, etc.
But sudo trimforce enable <restart> definitely works.

@dmetz 

In digging, it appears in Monterey, was when TRIM was disabled again. I never noticed, as I almost exclusively test with NVMe or HDD's not SSD drives.

@softraid-support 

Yeah, I've got it successfully working now on both of those ARM machines.  I've got a 2019 Intel iMac that I'll be checking later on, will let you know what I find (all are on Sonoma 14.3)

@dmetz 

I tested on a 2019 Mac Pro, where I discovered Big Sur has TRIM enabled by default, Vantura/Monterey/Sonoma do not. More data on this is, of course, good.