(Resolved) OWC ThunderBay 8 RAID 5 Kernel Panics on Silicon Macs when using DaVinci Resolve

[dysonvideography]

TLDR: DO NOT BUY the OWC Thurderbay 8. When simply viewing footage in a timeline in DaVinci Resolve, this raid and it's software SOFTRAID causes silicon macs kernel panics and pink screens forcing hard restarts. When brining this to OWC's attention, they told me they had never heard of this issue, the only solution they could provide was to update my OS to Ventura, and when the issue persisted, told me since I bought the hard drive through B&H, they couldn't accept a return. When I asked them to help bring the case to B&H that the product wasn't working as intended, they circumvented my request and just persisted asking for Mac First aid reports and to see if I could just format it as a raid 0 through disk utility instead of softraid. They don't want to admit that the drive is a lemon, and acknowledge that a simple google search shows the kernel panic issues happening to several users. I have attached our entire email thread to show that OWC is purposely trying to dodge responsibility that the product is faulty and has cost me near 5K in loss investment.


I bought the OWC ThunderBay 8 144TB 8-Bay Raid 5 array off of B&H to use as my main editing drive when editing with DaVinci Resolve. I already owned a G-Raid 8 Bay enclosure, but I wanted a second with higher storage capacity and speed. First mistake I made was failing to look closer at the OWC offerings before purchase. I didn't realize the amount of negative feedback Softraid received, not only for its technical short comings, but the fact that you had to buy it just to configure your raid if not previously set up. My raid arrived and I was super excited to get going with the product, it also claimed to be pre-configed to be raid 5, but softraid was glitching out and had every option greyed out effectively keeping me from formatting the raid with something as simple as a custom name (please see attached PDF). The pdf shows an email chain with OWC tech support conforming that softraid wasn't working as intended and we worked it out on the phone together and he even gifted me a full version of softraid on top of that. So far I felt OWC was at least making a good effort to make me feel comfortable with my purchase. Unfortunately that was the only good thing OWC did for me during this discourse.

Eventually I sat down to edit some footage off the drive, and suddenly my computer hard powers down and restarts. A warning is displayed that the computer shut down unexpectedly. I was not convinced it was the raid at first, but my solution to isolate the problem was drag the folder I was working with over to the G-Raid I mentioned previously and reopen the project from there. Issue resolved. As soon as I realized this I replugged in the OWC raid and sure enough the issue quickly repeated itself. I was able to get this issue to perform consistently every time and ended up calling OWC in early September to report the issue. I even took a video of it that shows it happening twice on while I was actively on the phone with tech support. In the email chain attached, I forwarded them the video and the generated Softraid report. They admitted to the panic report.

I figured this was a great start to the conversation to fix the issue since I had a video showing the problem and a report, I did expect them to have knowledge on this problem. I couldn't be the only person buying a raid to edit with. After a long time, they responded back to me and said trying updating the OS. I'm was running Mac OS Monterey on a 2021 M1 Max 64GB RAM. I was annoyed because it took them longer than I thought to email back so I was expecting a little more than that. I also didn't really want to upgrade to Ventura. I made a stink in the email because I didn't realize Ventura was well updated. I just never bothered to upgrade to it before and I was worried about plugins having compatibility issues. I made my concern aware to them. They told me that was the only solution so I gave in and updated. Issue persisted. It dawned on me that deleting softraid could be the key if that was the bottleneck the raid was experiencing. I did so and to my surprise, the raid no longer pink screen consistently like before. However, the raid also seemed bogged down, struggling to open files, mac spinning wheel frozen while it makes a crazy amount of noise loading a single clip in finder. Even worse is that the raid would stuggle to keep up while editing. Back to square 1... no more crashes, but now is a sloth and I can't reinstall the raid manager because the previous issue can come back. All of this was relayed to OWC, I tried to spare no detail. They asked for my Mac drive first aid report and then asked if I would be willing to format the drive as a Raid 0 through disk utility. Anyone that has a raid would know that's an insane solution... I wonder if anyone out there is activley using 144tb as a striped raid 0, but if I was looking for a performance drive, I would have bought a 24tb 2 bay raid enclosure. My G-Raid was 48Tb as a raid 6 and never caused any issues and was speedy and quiet... I couldn't believe OWC would advertise this raid for video purposes and it can't even open a clip without struggle as a Raid 5.

Finally I was like, I'm done, I don't want to email you ever day for the next unforeseeable months trying to solve Softraid's issues. Plus I have no idea if the raid's integrity after crashing 10 plus times through a series of testing. I just wanted to move forward with retuning the product and wiping my hands of this whole mess. They responded saying they can't refund it since B&H sold it to me. I responded saying ok lets work together to explain this to B&H because its been past 30 days and last time a product needed to be returned post 30 days, they refer you to the manufacturer. Last time, I was able to fix the issue with that manufacturer, but OWC on the other hand has kept me strung along this never ending email chain to fix what I consider to be their software issues. I feel gaslit when they say nobody has ever reported this issue. Looking at the B&H ad today, I saw someone else reviewed and mentioned the kernel panics. Second mistake was not reading the 1 star reviews...

I'm posting this mostly so if anyone googles the raid when considering their purchase, this thread pops up for them to read. The story is still in progress, I'll report it's conclusion when we get there.

Thanks for reading.

​

 

[OWC Larry]

First off a sincere apology for this entire matter. On so many just functional and support levels, should never have gotten to this point. We will support and make sure a full refund is provided to you. I appreciate your patience and sorry that this wasn't resolved better out of the box, regardless of what started this path. Support failed where there was ample opportunity to succeed.

On a couple of issues noted:
New is new and only new units should ever be provided on a new purchase. This is what we provide to our distribution and reseller partners and what they in turn should supply to you. You can find Open Box and used on our clearnance/garage sale which are noted as such... but the unit you purchased as new you should be the very first user of - as new. All of our solutions go our with an automated production setup that is consistent and without variance, you should not have to restore a unit to factory clean.

On kernel panic: Apple silicon support in MacOS introduced some corner case bugs that the Softraid team has been all over. The majority culprit included a migration of data (nothing to do with past use of Softraid of Softraid at all) using Apple's migration tool from a prior Intel Mac model in the chain of OS installation. This wasn't 100%, but pretty close. With each new MacOS it got better and since MacOS 13.3 and 13.4, eliminated. You should neither experience kernel panics nor slow performance with these solutions. These are used widely across audio and video projects and the sustained data rates of up to 1500MB/s in RAID-5 make them ideal for 4K and 8K workflow use - among many other things. All things being equal and with the performance issue - it sounds like something wrong with the hardware or the unit you received was compromised in some other way.

As what you are encountering is not something being experienced today on any Apple Silicon (or intel) - and definitely not with the latest MacOS versions, I thank you for time in still working with Mark @ Softraid. We're here because of customers like you and your interaction and feedback so we can provide the best solutions - period. I see what went wrong in initial support. We will determine why the unit you received from B&H has not operated correctly. And, again, do not worry for any issue on a refund being provided for this unit. Thank you.

- OWC Larry
Founder & CEO, OWC

 

[dysonvideography]

Thank you for your response. It makes a lot of sense that these problems probably occurred from the onset of opening it from the box and already having issues. I've already begun the process with Mark to return the raid. I appreciate the understanding and do feel you guys are trying to make it right and solve it so it doesn't happen to anyone else. I'll report the post as resolved.

 

[dizeotzio18]

TLDR: DO NOT BUY the OWC Thurderbay 8. When simply viewing footage in a timeline in DaVinci Resolve, this raid and it's software SOFTRAID causes silicon macs kernel panics and pink screens forcing hard restarts. When brining this to OWC's attention, they told me they had never heard of this issue, the only solution they could provide was to update my OS to Ventura, and when the issue persisted, told me since I bought the hard drive through B&H, they couldn't accept a return. When I asked them to help bring the case to B&H that the product wasn't working as intended, they circumvented my request and just persisted asking for Mac First aid reports and to see if I could just format it as a raid 0 through disk utility instead of softraid. They don't want to admit that the drive is a lemon, and acknowledge that a simple google search shows the kernel panic issues happening to several users. I have attached our entire email thread to show that OWC is purposely trying to dodge responsibility that the product is faulty and has cost me near 5K in loss investment.


I bought the OWC ThunderBay 8 144TB 8-Bay Raid 5 array off of B&H to use as my main editing drive when editing with DaVinci Resolve. I already owned a G-Raid 8 Bay enclosure, but I wanted a second with higher storage capacity and speed. First mistake I made was failing to look closer at the OWC offerings before purchase. I didn't realize the amount of negative feedback Softraid received, not only for its technical short comings, but the fact that you had to buy it just to configure your raid if not previously set up. My raid arrived and I was super excited to get going with the product, it also claimed to be pre-configed to be raid 5, but softraid was glitching out and had every option greyed out effectively keeping me from formatting the raid with something as simple as a custom name (please see attached PDF). The pdf shows an email chain with OWC tech support conforming that softraid wasn't working as intended and we worked it out on the phone together and he even gifted me a full version of softraid on top of that. So far I felt OWC was at least making a good effort to make me feel comfortable with my purchase. Unfortunately that was the only good thing OWC did for me during this discourse.

Eventually I sat down to edit some footage off the drive, and suddenly my computer hard powers down and restarts. A warning is displayed that the computer shut down unexpectedly. I was not convinced it was the raid at first, but my solution to isolate the problem was drag the folder I was working with over to the G-Raid I mentioned previously and reopen the project from there. Issue resolved. As soon as I realized this I replugged in the OWC raid and sure enough the issue quickly repeated itself. I was able to get this issue to perform consistently every time and ended up calling OWC in early September to report the issue. I even took a video of it that shows it happening twice on while I was actively on the phone with tech support. In the email chain attached, I forwarded them the video and the generated Softraid report. They admitted to the panic report.

I figured this was a great start to the conversation to fix the issue since I had a video showing the problem and a report, I did expect them to have knowledge on this problem. I couldn't be the only person buying a raid to edit with. After a long time, they responded back to me and said trying updating the OS. I'm was running Mac OS Monterey on a 2021 M1 Max 64GB RAM. I was annoyed because it took them longer than I thought to email back so I was expecting a little more than that. I also didn't really want to upgrade to Ventura. I made a stink in the email because I didn't realize Ventura was well updated. I just never bothered to upgrade to it before and I was worried about plugins having compatibility issues. I made my concern aware to them. They told me that was the only solution so I gave in and updated. Issue persisted. It dawned on me that deleting softraid could be the key if that was the bottleneck the raid was experiencing. I did so and to my surprise, the raid no longer pink screen consistently like before. However, the raid also seemed bogged down, struggling to open files, mac spinning wheel frozen while it makes a crazy amount of noise loading a single clip in finder. Even worse is that the raid would stuggle to keep up while editing. Back to square 1... no more crashes, but now is a sloth and I can't reinstall the raid manager because the previous issue can come back. All of this was relayed to OWC, I tried to spare no detail. They asked for my Mac drive first aid report and then asked if I would be willing to format the drive as a Raid 0 through disk utility. Anyone that has a raid would know that's an insane solution... I wonder if anyone out there is activley using 144tb as a striped raid 0, but if I was looking for a performance drive, I would have bought a 24tb 2 bay raid enclosure. My G-Raid was 48Tb as a raid 6 and never caused any issues and was speedy and quiet... I couldn't believe OWC would advertise this raid for video purposes and it can't even open a clip without struggle as a Raid 5.

Finally I was like, I'm done, I don't want to email you ever day for the next unforeseeable months trying to solve Softraid's issues. Plus I have no idea if the raid's integrity after crashing 10 plus times through a series of testing. I just wanted to move forward with retuning the product and wiping my hands of this whole mess. They responded saying they can't refund it since B&H sold it to me. I responded saying ok lets work together to explain this to B&H because its been past 30 days and last time a product needed to be returned post 30 days, they refer you to the manufacturer. Last time, I was able to fix the issue with that manufacturer, but OWC on the other hand has kept me strung along this never ending email chain to fix what I consider to be their software issues. I feel gaslit when they say nobody has ever reported this issue. Looking at the B&H ad today, I saw someone else reviewed and mentioned the kernel panics. Second mistake was not reading the 1 star reviews...

I'm posting this mostly so if anyone googles the raid when considering their purchase, this thread pops up for them to read. The story is still in progress, I'll report it's conclusion when we get there.

Thanks for reading.

​

View attachment 2290973

Maan my Thunderbay 8 is doing the same thing. Does this mean that if I have years of files saved here and this kernel panics happen that there is no way for me to retrieve my files? defeating the purpose of having a raid 5?? I did the exact same testing. deleting the software. I have a new M2 Max Mac Studio with the latest update and also an older Mac and this restarting with pink screen is happening to both.

 

[dizeotzio18]

First off a sincere apology for this entire matter. On so many just functional and support levels, should never have gotten to this point. We will support and make sure a full refund is provided to you. I appreciate your patience and sorry that this wasn't resolved better out of the box, regardless of what started this path. Support failed where there was ample opportunity to succeed.

On a couple of issues noted:
New is new and only new units should ever be provided on a new purchase. This is what we provide to our distribution and reseller partners and what they in turn should supply to you. You can find Open Box and used on our clearnance/garage sale which are noted as such... but the unit you purchased as new you should be the very first user of - as new. All of our solutions go our with an automated production setup that is consistent and without variance, you should not have to restore a unit to factory clean.

On kernel panic: Apple silicon support in MacOS introduced some corner case bugs that the Softraid team has been all over. The majority culprit included a migration of data (nothing to do with past use of Softraid of Softraid at all) using Apple's migration tool from a prior Intel Mac model in the chain of OS installation. This wasn't 100%, but pretty close. With each new MacOS it got better and since MacOS 13.3 and 13.4, eliminated. You should neither experience kernel panics nor slow performance with these solutions. These are used widely across audio and video projects and the sustained data rates of up to 1500MB/s in RAID-5 make them ideal for 4K and 8K workflow use - among many other things. All things being equal and with the performance issue - it sounds like something wrong with the hardware or the unit you received was compromised in some other way.

As what you are encountering is not something being experienced today on any Apple Silicon (or intel) - and definitely not with the latest MacOS versions, I thank you for time in still working with Mark @ Softraid. We're here because of customers like you and your interaction and feedback so we can provide the best solutions - period. I see what went wrong in initial support. We will determine why the unit you received from B&H has not operated correctly. And, again, do not worry for any issue on a refund being provided for this unit. Thank you.

- OWC Larry
Founder & CEO, OWC

Thank you Larry for being active here in the forum. I am currently experiencing this same thing on my Thunderbay 8. and mine is worst for it will restart with in 2 minutes of rebooting making it unusable. I would like to know because I love my OWC products and my enclosure but this is scaring me.

I also do Photo and Video and specially this year I am unloading so many files into my thunder bays. I would like to know, if I need to purchase a new enclosure then can I just pull out my drives from the old broken enclosure and plug them in to the new enclosure and retrieve my files??Will all the files still be there? Because if I can't then that's scaring me. My wife was just planning on purchasing and daisy chaining a couple of thunberbay 8 for her office but this is making her reconsider as well. Hoping I get to also hear from you.

Many Thanks,
Arjay