OWC ThunderBay 4 Firmware update did not fix the issue of the drives ejecting

 

So after taking the time to do the upgrade on the firmware on my OWC Thunderbay as I saw in this post on their forums, and shutting down my computer over the night, I restarted and one of the drives disappeared.

Sure SoftRaid managed to fix it in under 10 minutes, but having this happen every restart or wake from sleep is not OK!
So I don’t want to have to do it, but I am going to try turning off Put Hard Drives to Sleep when Possible in my Energy saver to see if I can get around this issue (the post on OWC said that is the issue).

We shall see if that helps. And I have allot of spinning discs that I actually would like to have spin down when possible, but just not have my whole raid go down by dropping drives.
Super frustrating.

Problems with OWC ThunderBay 4 and AVID Media Composer

 

OK so if you saw my last post, I have been issues with my ThunderBay 4 with Raid 5 via full SoftRaid from the awesome OWC. This is different from the discs ejecting post and has to do with AVID Media Composer.

Because I am on Catalina 10.15.6 on my iMac Pro with 3GHZ 10 Core, with 64 GB of Memory and a Radeon Pro Vega 64x 16 GB I am running Media Composer 2020.8.0.55115.0. I have actually been running some assistant editor training courses, as I have never used Script Sync and wanted to learn all the ins and out. Anyway, the course came with a project and it’s own media.

I put the media on my Raid, in an Avid MediaFiles:MXF:1 folder. And when I opened the project which was also on the raid everything is online. The weirdness is when I go to the Media Creation tool and try and select the raid for the render files, and it just doesn’t show up. It is like the drive doesn’t exist, and yes I have tried going to the console and typing alldrives, but it has made no difference.

Now I did find this thread on the AVID forum, which is about this happening with G-SPEED raids, but this is an OWC RAID, but the issue seems to be longstanding and continues.

I have contacted OWC support and will see what they have to say, but I think it is an AVID issue, and it looks like it hasn’t been fixed in a very long time.

Super Frustrating!

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I have put a case in with AVID as well as I think this is an AVID issue and the same as the G-Speed issue in the thread I linked to. We shall see if they do anything about it, but it is something that needs to be looked into.

My OWC ThunderBay 4 Thunderbolt 3 has been having drive ejects, Firmware Update Available

 

So I want to preface this with the fact of just how much I love OWC. I have been buying their gear for many many years, and it has always been very reliable, and they have amazing customer service. I have had them replace ram, and quickly get back to me on issues for years and years.

Lately though I have been a few issues, and this post is about one of them.
So I have a fairly new Thunderbay 4 Thunderbolt 3 and am running a full version of OWC’s amazing Softraid to run it in RAID 5. It is way too small with 4 2TB drives, for a 6TB raid. I am on an iMac Pro running Catalina 10.15.6 and all the sudden have been getting drive drops often on waking up from sleep, or when restarting, forcing a quick rebuild or making me restart to get the drives back. And constantly having the drives be out of sync, though Softraid fixed this in a minute or two each time.
Now it hasn’t happen while I was working and I haven’t lost anything, but it has been annoying.
Now while looking at their forums for another issue I will post about in another post, I ran into this post about Disk Ejecting a firmware update. I quickly downloaded and went through the steps to install. It basically says it has to do with allowing drives to sleep in the energy saver control panel, but this firmware should permanently fix the issue.
As with most things of the sort it is made a bit of a longer process, because of having to disable SIP or System Integrity Protection, and is a multi-step process since you have to then install a kext file, restart and then eject your drives, and install the firmware update.
Now this is where I would add a note to the process, because while the instructions said it would take about 30 seconds, once I selected the firmware and hit the FWUpdate button. It did not take 30 seconds, in fact my computer sat beachballing for well over 30 minutes, before it successfully did the update. This is fine if it fixes the issue, but 30 SECONDS IT DID NOT TAKE!!!
The process then has you uninstall the KEXT, turn SIP back on restart and then turn back on all of your networking which you have turned off earlier.
When I restarted the final time Softraid again said the drives were out of sync, but lets hope that has fixed the issue.

Problems with iMac Pro and OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock and displayport connector

So when I got my new iMac Pro (as my MacPro 4,1 finally bit the bullet) I decided to get an OWC Thunberbolt 3 Dock with 14 ports and 85 watts of power to connect more peripherals to my Mac.

Overall I love Other World Computings products and their service. They are a great company, but the problem with this device for me is the mini displayport.

I have the iMac Pro and an LG 4k 27 inch monitor. I was trying to hook up the LG via the mini displayport in the dock. First I tried an Amazon basics mini displayport cable to displayport cable and it just didn’t work at all.

Then I tried an Amazon basics mini displayport to HDMI connector. This seemed to work, and both monitors worked, but whenever the computer slept the displays and woke back up the second monitor acted as if it was just found, and all the windows that were on it would be moved to the iMac Monitor. Super frustrating especially when using, Premiere Pro, After Effects or DaVinci Resolve across both monitors. The display also did the same thing when I connected or disconnected anything to the dock, including my iPhone or iPad using the front high powered ports, or the SD cards!

I thought maybe it was the connector, so I spent quite a bit more money and went to apple and got the Belkin mini display port to HDMI that they listed since I didn’t see a direct one from Apple. When I got it, it had the exact same problems.

I contacted support, and they got back to me very quickly, and after some back and forth, basically it came down turning sleep off, but I didn’t want to do that, nor turn off let hard drives sleep, as I don’t want to ruin my RAIDs by having them run all the time.

So after being frustrated for a while I went for a USB 3.1 to HDMI adapter, and this I connected to the back of my awesome OWC ThunderBay 4’s Thunderbolt port, and the monitor works great now! Everything (well almost everything, as Messages seems to jump back to the iMac monitor quite a bit) stays on the second monitor when the computer sleeps and I can leave everything going to sleep!

And I can connected and disconnect things with the dock without any issues. The dock works great when I am not using it for it’s mini displayport connector. I am not sure if my dock has an issue with it’s mini displayport, or if this is just an issue with this dock and an iMac Pro, but it is something to know in advance.