Hello everyone.
A little backstory. I was a hackintosh user for over a decade, with my latest machine being an i7 6700k running Catalina. The machine was/is absolutely bombproof, super stable, quiet, and always worked with everything I threw at it. Never felt any bottlenecks with even the most intense low latency mutlitasking (for instance I could easily record 36 tracks at 32 sample buffer, whilst also encoding H264 in OBS, sending it to youtube, and writing it to an internal NVMe drive. No lagging, no nothing) I work in audio and with the arrival of M1 the writing was on the wall. I have moved to this MacBook Pro and in general, its.... alright. It's nice to drag around compared to a Fractal case but honestly it seems a little less stable under full load than my old hack and I'm on the verge of throwing it at a wall at the moment.
Anyway.
None of my SMB shares are working at all and it's also starting to corrupt files. Just to give you a walkthrough of what I am hoping to do:
I edit audio for a living, and my Hackintosh had an internal SSD called Current Projects. Every hour this would be uploaded through Arq backup and once a day it would be sent to my RAID5 NAS (EX4100) using Carbon Copy Cloner. It works so well, with versioning on Arq it's a pretty bombproof set up and I've not had to worry about it for years and years.
So when I migrated to my MacBook, the hackintosh went on the floor for a bit and I started thinking about how I wanted to handle my files. Started using File Sharing to access my Current Projects drive and also load my Samples SSD. Any changes would then propagate through the backup system on the Hackintosh machine. (to Arq, to the NAS).
However there's a big problem with the MacBook machine. Any time I write to any SMB share, either on macOS Catalina, or the NAS, the writing will eventually slow to a crawl and freeze. Sometimes the files sent will show up on the drive as Zero Bytes and be corrupted. Trying to replace the files manually gives a Finder error about permissions, or sometimes just an error number. Reading files seems to be fine, but writing files seems to be a big problem. Sometimes I'll get a good run of an hour or so of good operation but always, eventually, finder starts to freeze, files don't save and then the originals get lost and replaced with "Zero Bytes" versions. I recently ran in to some big problems and lost a few hours work becuase of this. I was saving my sessions, but they were actually not being saved at all and being replaced with 'Zero Bytes' files, all with no indication from the apps I was using. I was also consolidating files to new WAVs and these files would end up corrupted, again with no indication anywhere that it had happened. Then these corrupt files would propagate through Arq and to my NAS. You can see the behaviour with Blackmagic Disk Speed test. Starts off fine, about 100MBs as to be expected and then after a few cycles it will start to freeze intermittently, and then completely stop and freeze. CarbonCopy Cloner is the same, when moving files back to the Current Projects drive. Starts off okay, and then stops writing and the process freezes. Finder freezes too. I'm currently moving files to the internal storage to work and moving them back. But even simply moving them back is creating problems.
In terms of network, it seems to not make a difference. Built in Wifi, PCIe based Ethernet over Thunderbolt Dock, or crappy USB-C dock with USB-based ethernet. They all suffer the same fate. I've also tried consolidating my current TB set up as it's quite large: MacBook Pro -> HP Zbook TB 3 Dock (DisplayPort 4k display, 16 port USB rackmount hub, PCIe based Ethernet) ->Lennovo Booststation PCIe Enclosure running my soundcard, an RME RayDAT. This device also has it's own Ethernet connection, which acts the same. Everything else in my TB chain works great, including the soundcard, and everything connected to the USB dock ( a few midi controllers, usb storage keys, auth keys, usb-c cables for devices,stream deck, control surface)
One big giveaway is my mounts have custom ICNS files and they flicker every few minutes on my desktop. I assume this is something to do with the problem.
I've tried every SMB related thing I can find here, such as turning off signing for sharing and receiving on both devices, disabling everything except SMB 3, and other .conf related things, deleting all keychain information related to usernames and passwords for SMB shares, I've tried SMB through Connect to Sever... I've tried browsing through the network and using Bonjour URLS as well. I've tried AFP but it will not share an APFS drive from catalina. There's no difference in behaviour. I've tried Jumbo packets, I've tried regular packets. I've tried energy efficient off, on, on both machines. All the posts I see are related to NAS but honestly writing to the NAS seems slightly better behaved than writing to the Catalina shares. Smbutil shows the SMB version as 3.0.2 between the Catalina machine and the MacBook but 3.1.1 betwen MacBook and NAS... perhaps this is a problem?. I'd ideally not upgrade the macOS on this machine as I know it's rock solid for audio work and will need it on location next year for a big job but if upgrading from Catalina will fix the problem then I'd probably do it. MacBook Machine came with 12.5 and it's currently on 12.6.1 with no change in behaviour.
I've had this problem since I bought the laptop in August and now I'm starting to consider having to hang all my storage off SATA to USB adapters which sucks.
I understand my TB dock is not the greatest but it seems to work fine. I'd move to a Caldigit TS4 if it will solve the problem but it's an expensive purchase if it doesn't and I can;t see why it would.. Internet and LAN connectivity is perfectly fine on all my available options and I still get SMB problems over WiFi with absolutely nothing connected to the MacBook Pro. As far as I can see anywhere online, the long and short is SMB is in bad shape on these machines. I guess I'm just hoping i've missed something before I spend more money on SATA adapters, and say goodbye to using the old machine for good. I really would prefer to keep the Arq and CCC work on the old Catalina machine, so I never have to think about it again or disable it when using the MacBook for recording sessions. My ideal set up would be to move this machine back to my little server room (Cat6) once I can get this MacBook's SMB behaviour sorted.
A little backstory. I was a hackintosh user for over a decade, with my latest machine being an i7 6700k running Catalina. The machine was/is absolutely bombproof, super stable, quiet, and always worked with everything I threw at it. Never felt any bottlenecks with even the most intense low latency mutlitasking (for instance I could easily record 36 tracks at 32 sample buffer, whilst also encoding H264 in OBS, sending it to youtube, and writing it to an internal NVMe drive. No lagging, no nothing) I work in audio and with the arrival of M1 the writing was on the wall. I have moved to this MacBook Pro and in general, its.... alright. It's nice to drag around compared to a Fractal case but honestly it seems a little less stable under full load than my old hack and I'm on the verge of throwing it at a wall at the moment.
Anyway.
None of my SMB shares are working at all and it's also starting to corrupt files. Just to give you a walkthrough of what I am hoping to do:
I edit audio for a living, and my Hackintosh had an internal SSD called Current Projects. Every hour this would be uploaded through Arq backup and once a day it would be sent to my RAID5 NAS (EX4100) using Carbon Copy Cloner. It works so well, with versioning on Arq it's a pretty bombproof set up and I've not had to worry about it for years and years.
So when I migrated to my MacBook, the hackintosh went on the floor for a bit and I started thinking about how I wanted to handle my files. Started using File Sharing to access my Current Projects drive and also load my Samples SSD. Any changes would then propagate through the backup system on the Hackintosh machine. (to Arq, to the NAS).
However there's a big problem with the MacBook machine. Any time I write to any SMB share, either on macOS Catalina, or the NAS, the writing will eventually slow to a crawl and freeze. Sometimes the files sent will show up on the drive as Zero Bytes and be corrupted. Trying to replace the files manually gives a Finder error about permissions, or sometimes just an error number. Reading files seems to be fine, but writing files seems to be a big problem. Sometimes I'll get a good run of an hour or so of good operation but always, eventually, finder starts to freeze, files don't save and then the originals get lost and replaced with "Zero Bytes" versions. I recently ran in to some big problems and lost a few hours work becuase of this. I was saving my sessions, but they were actually not being saved at all and being replaced with 'Zero Bytes' files, all with no indication from the apps I was using. I was also consolidating files to new WAVs and these files would end up corrupted, again with no indication anywhere that it had happened. Then these corrupt files would propagate through Arq and to my NAS. You can see the behaviour with Blackmagic Disk Speed test. Starts off fine, about 100MBs as to be expected and then after a few cycles it will start to freeze intermittently, and then completely stop and freeze. CarbonCopy Cloner is the same, when moving files back to the Current Projects drive. Starts off okay, and then stops writing and the process freezes. Finder freezes too. I'm currently moving files to the internal storage to work and moving them back. But even simply moving them back is creating problems.
In terms of network, it seems to not make a difference. Built in Wifi, PCIe based Ethernet over Thunderbolt Dock, or crappy USB-C dock with USB-based ethernet. They all suffer the same fate. I've also tried consolidating my current TB set up as it's quite large: MacBook Pro -> HP Zbook TB 3 Dock (DisplayPort 4k display, 16 port USB rackmount hub, PCIe based Ethernet) ->Lennovo Booststation PCIe Enclosure running my soundcard, an RME RayDAT. This device also has it's own Ethernet connection, which acts the same. Everything else in my TB chain works great, including the soundcard, and everything connected to the USB dock ( a few midi controllers, usb storage keys, auth keys, usb-c cables for devices,stream deck, control surface)
One big giveaway is my mounts have custom ICNS files and they flicker every few minutes on my desktop. I assume this is something to do with the problem.
I've tried every SMB related thing I can find here, such as turning off signing for sharing and receiving on both devices, disabling everything except SMB 3, and other .conf related things, deleting all keychain information related to usernames and passwords for SMB shares, I've tried SMB through Connect to Sever... I've tried browsing through the network and using Bonjour URLS as well. I've tried AFP but it will not share an APFS drive from catalina. There's no difference in behaviour. I've tried Jumbo packets, I've tried regular packets. I've tried energy efficient off, on, on both machines. All the posts I see are related to NAS but honestly writing to the NAS seems slightly better behaved than writing to the Catalina shares. Smbutil shows the SMB version as 3.0.2 between the Catalina machine and the MacBook but 3.1.1 betwen MacBook and NAS... perhaps this is a problem?. I'd ideally not upgrade the macOS on this machine as I know it's rock solid for audio work and will need it on location next year for a big job but if upgrading from Catalina will fix the problem then I'd probably do it. MacBook Machine came with 12.5 and it's currently on 12.6.1 with no change in behaviour.
I've had this problem since I bought the laptop in August and now I'm starting to consider having to hang all my storage off SATA to USB adapters which sucks.
I understand my TB dock is not the greatest but it seems to work fine. I'd move to a Caldigit TS4 if it will solve the problem but it's an expensive purchase if it doesn't and I can;t see why it would.. Internet and LAN connectivity is perfectly fine on all my available options and I still get SMB problems over WiFi with absolutely nothing connected to the MacBook Pro. As far as I can see anywhere online, the long and short is SMB is in bad shape on these machines. I guess I'm just hoping i've missed something before I spend more money on SATA adapters, and say goodbye to using the old machine for good. I really would prefer to keep the Arq and CCC work on the old Catalina machine, so I never have to think about it again or disable it when using the MacBook for recording sessions. My ideal set up would be to move this machine back to my little server room (Cat6) once I can get this MacBook's SMB behaviour sorted.
Code:
==================================================================================================
SHARE ATTRIBUTE TYPE VALUE
==================================================================================================
Current Projects
SERVER_NAME 192.168.1.200
USER_ID 501
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB1_ENABLED
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB2_ENABLED
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB3_ENABLED
SMB_VERSION SMB_3.0.2
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_128_CCM_ENABLED
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_128_GCM_ENABLED
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_256_CCM_ENABLED
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_256_GCM_ENABLED
SMB_CURR_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHM OFF
SMB_SHARE_TYPE DISK
SIGNING_SUPPORTED TRUE
EXTENDED_SECURITY_SUPPORTED TRUE
UNIX_SUPPORT TRUE
LARGE_FILE_SUPPORTED TRUE
OS_X_SERVER TRUE
FILE_IDS_SUPPORTED TRUE
FILE_LEASING_SUPPORTED TRUE
MULTI_CREDIT_SUPPORTED TRUE
DIR_LEASING_SUPPORTED TRUE
ENCRYPTION_SUPPORTED TRUE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
STORAGE
SERVER_NAME 192.168.1.200
USER_ID 501
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB1_ENABLED
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB2_ENABLED
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB3_ENABLED
SMB_VERSION SMB_3.0.2
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_128_CCM_ENABLED
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_128_GCM_ENABLED
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_256_CCM_ENABLED
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_256_GCM_ENABLED
SMB_CURR_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHM OFF
SMB_SHARE_TYPE DISK
SIGNING_SUPPORTED TRUE
EXTENDED_SECURITY_SUPPORTED TRUE
UNIX_SUPPORT TRUE
LARGE_FILE_SUPPORTED TRUE
OS_X_SERVER TRUE
FILE_IDS_SUPPORTED TRUE
FILE_LEASING_SUPPORTED TRUE
MULTI_CREDIT_SUPPORTED TRUE
DIR_LEASING_SUPPORTED TRUE
ENCRYPTION_SUPPORTED TRUE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PPT
SERVER_NAME 192.168.1.4
USER_ID 501
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB1_ENABLED
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB2_ENABLED
SMB_NEGOTIATE SMBV_NEG_SMB3_ENABLED
SMB_VERSION SMB_3.1.1
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_128_CCM_ENABLED
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_128_GCM_ENABLED
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_256_CCM_ENABLED
SMB_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHMS AES_256_GCM_ENABLED
SMB_CURR_ENCRYPT_ALGORITHM OFF
SMB_SHARE_TYPE DISK
SIGNING_SUPPORTED TRUE
EXTENDED_SECURITY_SUPPORTED TRUE
LARGE_FILE_SUPPORTED TRUE
FILE_IDS_SUPPORTED TRUE
DFS_SUPPORTED TRUE
FILE_LEASING_SUPPORTED TRUE
MULTI_CREDIT_SUPPORTED TRUE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------