Moving from Catalina to Windows 11

Okay. I recently got a Chinese windows tablet (Minisforum V3) and just out of interest, installed SR standard and plugged the flex 8 into the usb4 port. And it seems to work. It shows up in explorer and I can access files, but the app itself just says the app has expired. I then plugged the Flex 8 into my 'main' laptop (Lenovo yogabook 9i, the dual screen one which supposedly has 3 TB4 ports). It sort of 'interfered' with the dock that was plugged in next to it (ejected an external HDD and also blanked the external monitor) but everything reconnected. Flex 8 is in explorer and I can access it, even though the app says the volume isn't mounted and won't mount it. 

Despite the app issues, I think I might be ready to try SR8 if the 'getting started' discount offer is still open please. I'm faculty at a University, perhaps that'll give me a 'better' discount, LOL. Cheers.

Can't seem to load the third page

@chobochobo 

What is the third page?
when did you purchase your Flex 8? Was it bought with drives bundled with it?

Hi, I had some difficulty loading up the pages to see my last query which seemed to be on a 'third' page but never actually loaded. 

I got my Flex 8 from an OWC Garage Sale back in 2022, no drives.

@chobochobo 

Give me your SoftRAID serial number. I will delete it before approving.

This is the Flex 8  XT key which apparently was used to upgrade to SR 6

cheers

@chobochobo 

In your license for the Flex 8, f you log into your account, you should see  the SoftRAID 6 license. It recently expired on July 31.
You still qualify for a standard renewal at $79. go for it.

So I finally managed to tidy up my Mac Mini 2018, ready to decommision/consign it to secondary status. I installed Softraid 8 on my windows laptop. 

I put six 12TB drives into a Thunderbay 6 and connected it up to my Mac mini and made a RAID 5 HFS volume. I then connected it up to my windows laptop (TB4 port) and it was recognized. Great.

I wanted to transfer stuff from a 12TB external USB drive onto the thunderbay using my windows laptop. So I just drag and drop the files. It was late at night and it said it would take 18 hours for about 8TB of data, so I thought 'Fine, it'll be complete by the time I get back from work the next day'. 

I wake up and the thunderbay is not active (powered on but no disk activity). I log into the laptop which is of course asleep and the copying dialogue box is not doing anything - no activity. After a while, I decide to cancel/restart the laptop and continue the transfer before I go to work. It starts fine and I switched off all the bits in 'Power and sleep' that might put drives/laptop to sleep. 

I come back from work, some 8 hours laters, and it's stalled again at 15%. I restart and try again. This time, it copies for about 30 minutes (in front of me, machine on all the time) and then stalls again. 

Having run out of ideas, I decide to now use Softraid 8 (still trial version) to delete the volume and now format it as NTFS. I've restarted the copy process and it's trudging along at about 200MB/s. Fingers crossed.

Any ideas of what happened please? I would like to use my Softraid volumes primarily on my Windows machines now.

@chobochobo 

Not sure, but perhaps there was a file name, or a directory path that was not "legal" in windows, so the transfer stopped. I will ask around, but this is my guess.

The transfer completed to a NTFS softraid RAID 5 volume ok. The external drive was in EXFAT; usually I encounter problems copying HFS (particularly case sensitive) long file names etc to windows format but not usually the other way. File name restrictions on EXFAT should be stricter/more limited, so copying over to HFS should be less problematic (to this simplistic mind)?

@chobochobo 

ExFAT to HFS should be simple, yes.

Did you try listing in file view, alphabetical, looking for the last files copied, then recopying the folder that hung, to try to find the issue?

I didn't do the listing. I used the windows laptop to make a new NTFS volume. The Exfat drive copied over okay, as did another NTFS drive.

I tried to hook up an older Thunderbay IV with TB2 ports using an apple TB3-TB2 connector and the windows laptop wouldn't recognize it.  This is a hardware or software issue do you think please?

@chobochobo 

Hardware. Make sure your Windows machine is actually Thunderbolt 3, most are actually USB 3.1 gen 2, with USBC connectors.

The ports on my windows laptop (Samsung Galaxy book 4 Ultra) are supposedly TB4. It has an intel chip, so should be more 'authentic' than AMD machines...?

@chobochobo 

Samsung lists it as Thunderbolt 4, which means it is intel certified.

How is it working now as NTFS?