Internal 4 bay RAID5 will not mount while a WD My Passport is attached via USB 3

[mavots]

Moving forward with upgrading my 2010 Mac Pro 3.46 6-core.
Running current 10.14.3 with v140.0.0.0.0 BootROM
PCIe Slots:
1-Radeon Sapphire 7950
2-Sonnet Allegro Pro 4-port USB 3.1
3-Velocity Solo x1 with 500GB Samsung SSD (cloned boot drive) and 3TB WD Black stashed in the lower optical bay.
4-kyroM.2 with 1TB Samsung EVO (boot drive)
Internal drive bays x4 4TB WD Black HDDs in RAID5

Problem is with the internal RAID5 drive. It will occasionally not mount and just disappear.

Disk Utility, DiskWarrior, and SoftRAID did not see it. I tried swapping the PCIe cards around to no effect, even tried putting in an older Inatek KT4004 USB3 card.

Turns out the RAID5 is not mounting when I attach a WD My Passport HD into the Sonnet USB card. I have tried several other USB drives and the RAID5 mounts with no issues. Used three of the four ports and all mounted at reboot, until I added the My Passport drive. I tried the drive in all four USB ports with the same result-no RAID5. The My Passport always mounts and I can plug it in after booting up with the RAID5 mounted as well. The volume is HFS+. I even tried reformatting and changing permissions with no effect.

Any ideas why the RAID5 will not mount at boot when the My Passport HD is plugged in?

 

[bsbeamer]

Internal RAID + Mojave has many issues. You may be running into one of the many... been having RAID issues since testing original Mojave release.

Does this happen with WD Passport connected via USB2? Is WD Passport also 4TB or another capacity?

First suggestion: install DriveDx and check the reports. Pay attention to the health reports. Make sure to install optional plugin for external drives.

Second suggestion: clear the contents of RAID. Reformat each drive individually. Then attempt to establish as a new set with SoftRAID 5.7.5.

 

[mavots]

Hmm, Mojave issues w/internal RAID does not sound inspiring. I'll need to look into the forums about that.

Yes, the RAID5 does mount when the WD Passport is connected to an original USB2 port.

I have now discovered that the RAID 5 WILL mount if I shut down/boot up as opposed to simply restarting.
I populated the Sonnet USB3 PCIe with two WD Passports, a Samsung T3, and a RAID0 external (2x 6TB HDDs) drive that is my primary backup for the RAID5. All drives and internal RAID repeatedly mounted properly.

1-I'll check out DriveDx and the plugins. Not familiar with that.

2-I was actually surprised the RAID5 mounted when I transfered the HDDs from my OWC Thunderbay 4 drive to the Mac Pro. I upgraded to SoftRAID Pro 5.7.5 (trial) and matched up the drivers on both the 2017 iMac and Mac Pro. I figured I would have to re-format the drives and rebuild the RAID5 but it mounted to my surprise. I'm thinking I should probably re-format anyway.

SoftRAID question: What is the process for reformatting the RAID? Should I "Initialize" or "Zero Sectors" each individual disk first or "Delete " the entire volume?