New M1 Mac Mini - external hard drives hosed

[6119]

This week I bought a new M1 Mac Mini and an OWC Thunderbay 4 enclosure to house all four of my external drives. Everything seemed fine for a few days, then my Time Machine drive (AFPS) would inexplicably become unavailable. Today, I was streaming a movie from my Plex library (hosted on a 4TB WD Red) when the movie suddenly stopped playing. Looking into the problem I find that my Media drive (HFS+) is unreadable. I was horrified to find that my Media Drive Clone (HFS+) was also unreadable. Fortunately the Media drive was backed up to Crashplan. My Mini Clone and Time Machine drives (both 2TB WD drives) refuse to stay mounted for more than a few minutes. So this could all very well be a problem with the Thunderbay enclosure.

The two 2TB drives that house my time machine backup and CCC bootable clone are intact. However, my 4TB Media drive now shows up in Disk Utility as two separate uninitialized drives—not separate partitions—one 2.2TB drive and one 1.8TB drive. It's almost like the platters inside have become separated (a single drive shows up in terminal as disk4 and disk5). I do have the ability to format each "drive" but I can't combine them back into one. Is there anyway to recombine these other than setting up a software RAID? Or are these disks hosed?

 

[HDFan]

1. I take it the 4 drives are setup as JBOD, not RAID?

2. Do the drives show up in Disk Utility?

3. How old are the drives? Any unusual sounds? Do the drive lights show you anything?

4. If the drives do show in Disk Utility, have you

a. run WD diagnostics

b. tried repairing the HFS+ volumes with something like TechTool Pro?

I have a Thunderbay 4 and have had no problems, other than when using SoftRaid.

If I had to guess off the cuff it sounds like a problem with the WD drive. Their quality has improved recently, but was pretty bad in the past. I've had multiple failures.

 

[6119]

1. I take it the 4 drives are setup as JBOD, not RAID?

2. Do the drives show up in Disk Utility?

3. How old are the drives? Any unusual sounds? Do the drive lights show you anything?

4. If the drives do show in Disk Utility, have you

a. run WD diagnostics

b. tried repairing the HFS+ volumes with something like TechTool Pro?

I have a Thunderbay 4 and have had no problems, other than when using SoftRaid.

If I had to guess off the cuff it sounds like a problem with the WD drive. Their quality has improved recently, but was pretty bad in the past. I've had multiple failures.

1. Correct

2. Each 4TB drive shows up in Disk Utility as one HFS+ disk containing no data and one uninitialized disk.

3. The Drives are about 4 years old. No unusual sounds. No issues prior to this week. I don't think it's the drives going bad as it happened to two 4TB drives on the same day.

4. a. The drives do not show up in WD Drive Utilities even when I can get them to show up in Disk Utility.

b. I tried Disk Warrior which initially saw each 4TB drive as one HFS+ disk (containing no readable data) and one unreadable uninitialized disk. After I reformatted the uninitialized portion, Disk Warrior sees them as too HFS+ disks with no issues. But obviously I would prefer each drive show up as one volume as intended. However when they're installed in the Thunderbay, only the HFS+ formatted 2.2GB portion shows up in the finder. The 1.8GB HFS+ portion does not show up in the finder although it does show up in Disk Utility. WD Disk Utility does not recognize either disk. I can use Raid Assistant in Disk Utility to stripe them, but it's not ideal.

I set up a temporary Plex Library last night using an external USB 3 drive. It was "improperly ejected" overnight as well. I'm beginning to think that the Mini ejected my drives while in use and borked them.

 

[rpmurray]

I have a Thunderbay 4 and have had no problems, other than when using SoftRaid.

What kind of problems with SoftRaid? I've been using it with a couple of RAID 1 setups on Mac Pros (with no problems), and was getting ready to use it with the Thunderbay 6 I will be connecting to a 2017 iMac 27".

 

[HDFan]

It was "improperly ejected" overnight as well.

That can do it.

What kind of problems with SoftRaid?

My installation isn't typical as I have a lot of disks (JBODs, multiple RAIDs, thunderbolt NAS, etc.) attached. There are also a lot of kernel extensions and other software drivers. I am also powering on/off various units as needed. My initial problems also occurred during the V6 Beta. Had a lot of great support from OWC at the time.

As a software solution SoftRaid is subject to all of the things that can happen to software on a Mac. If some app somehow causes system problems it can affect SoftRaid. The following are a few of the problems that I experienced on my OWC Thunderbay 8 during the Beta.

I pulled the JBOD OW8 B TM 6TB volume (without deleting it in Softraid, probably not a good idea) and replaced with with another disk. At that point all of the disk activity lights went wild. They have been on continuously for 24 hours now. The disks for all volumes are showing activity, even the 3 volumes that were not affected by the replacement.

Answer: My guess is the enclosure has hung/crashed or similar.

I had to power off my iMac ... as it was becoming unresponsive. Got a panic report on boot.

I reformatted one of the JBOD disks as APFS. It would not mount.

apfs format failed with an error. Volume deletion gave an error.

Answer: The driver is probably not loading.

and so on.

I assume these problems have been fixed, and my errors didn't help. I decided that I needed a rock solid solution which wouldn't be so sensitive to problems which my Promise units provide. I have never had any problems with them, but of course you pay a lot for that reliability.

For less complex installations it is probably fine. A lot of people use it with no problems.