Those of you who’ve been following my experiences with the Dell 7865 will remember that a disk array failed while I was installing another array. The array that failed was an OCW 4M2 Thunderbolt 3 box with 4 Corsair 8 TB M.2 modules, striped under Windows 11 into a 30 TB array. The symptoms were
- No drive seen in the file manager.
- All 4 Corsair drives seen in the device manager, and flagged as working properly.
- Disk administrator shows the volume as failed.
I pulled the array off of the Dell workstation and plugged it into a Lenovo P16 laptop.
Pretty much the same thing.
Disk administrator wouldn’t let me do anything with the array or the individual drives.
I ordered another 4M2 from OWC. When it came, I pulled the Corsair M.2 modules from the first 4M2 and installed them in the new one. I plugged the array into the Lenovo laptop, and the array was still marked as failed. But the disk administrator would let me break the array into individual drives. I did that, and formatted them.
Then I fired up SoftRAID.
It saw the drives. I told it to make them into a striped array, but it wasn’t having any.
I went back to disk administrator and deleted the volumes I had jus made. Now SoftRAID was happy.
It took about 10 minutes to do a quick format.
And proclaimed itself done.
We’ll see if I have better luck with the new OWC hardware and with SoftRAID handling the striping rather than Windows.
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