eSATA raid controller external drive problem error

[macmesser]

I have a PCI eSATA raid controller in my classic Mac Pro '09 running El Capitan which I am using in JBOD mode with an external 4 drive enclosure and also for a OS 10.8.5 external boot drive for running some essential legacy software. In El Capitan I keep getting this error even though I have neither ejected nor turned off the Mt. Lion boot drive (in OWC single drive enclosure):

Disk Not Ejected Properly - Eject "Mountain Lion" before disconnecting or turning it off

The same drive, when booted from, locks up while using unless disk sleep is disabled. The card requires a driver which is installed, configured and works with no problems for all but the Mountain Lion disk.

I'm guessing this is a card driver problem but I don't understand why it should be precipitated by sleeping the drive. Wouldn't the driver be loaded at boot time and remain in memory? Any ideas as to how I can troubleshoot?

 

[slughead]

I have a long history of using external RAID cards on my mac, usually in JBOD. Eventually I just gave up, but here's what I learned in the meantime:
1. Power supplies for external enclosures are usually crap, buying a $35 PSU and jerry -rigging it can solve a lot of issues
2. A failing drive can sometimes take down the whole array, especially when using a crappy PSU - I recommend you do a surface scan. failing drives chew up power.
3. Sleep is hit or miss. I turned sleep mode off on my mac for most of the last 10 years
4. you can go into "power options" on your mac and turn off drive sleep, this solves many problems
5. Often your raid card has write cache, read ahead, etc -- turning these features off sometimes helps

Also: which raid card are you using?

 

[macmesser]

Thanks for reply. Card is NewerTech MAXPower 4-port eSATA 6G PCIe 2.0 High-Performance RAID 0/1/5/10/JBOD Controller Card from OWC (https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/MXPCIE6GRS4E/)

Hate to disable sleep but it does seems to be a problem. The problematic drive is OWC 240 GB ssd in an OWC single usb3/eSATA III drive enclosure. Hard Drives in 4 drive enclosure are fine. Could be the ssd drive.

 

[slughead]

yes, it is possible it is the SSD. If you can, see if there's a firmware update for the SSD