I’ve been using a 32 TB OWC Mercury Pro U.2 Dual SSD array on my image editing laptop for about six months, with SoftRAID to make it striped. It has been sort of flakey; dropping connection between SoftRAID and the disks from time to time, and usually taking a power cycle and a reboot to get everything back on the air. The funny thing is, Windows can see the drives, but SoftRAID can’t.
Last night it dropped out again, but when I power cycled the array and rebooted. Then I brought up SoftRAID.
Hung up on the splash screen.
I tried again:
Now it can see the drives in the Mercury Pro (they’re the Aura drives), but it says I’m not licensed.
I tried to activate the license:
Clicking on the top button results in a hang.
I rebooted.
Splash screen stayed up for a couple of minutes.
While I was waiting, I checked to see if Windows could see the drives. It can.
And, after five more minutes, so can SoftRAID:
But I still have the licensing problem.
I took a look at the Event Viewer:
Several copies of the same nonsensical message about MacDrive 11 Pro, whatever that is.
Is SoftRAID up to date?
Apparently so.
After a few hours, a new problem arose:
The RAID volumes are unmounted, and I can’t seem to mount them. Now I can’t get at my data.
I sent an email to OWC support pointing them at this post. The next day I received this:
Sorry to hear about the blue screen issue you’ve encountered while using OWC Software. Let’s run our OWC Windows Diagnostic program, this should allow me to identify or at least rule out potential causes of the problem.
I replied, sending the diagnostic report and explaining that I don’t have a blue screen issue.
After a couple of days waiting for an answer, I sent a nudge-nudge email. I received the following answer:
We are still working on this issue for you. I am hoping to get some momentum on this early next week.
It being past early in the week, I sent OWC support another tickler message. The tech responded and asked me for a copy of the SoftRAID entries in the error log. I sent it. Then he suggested some devices that make if difficult to inadvertently detach the Thunderbolt 4 cables. I don’t think that’s the issue at all. The device manager, the disk manager, and — most of the time — SoftRAID can see the hardware. This is mainly a licensing issue, I think. I’m using the universal version of SoftRAID, so not being about to see OWC hardware shouldn’t affect the licensing.
Another week has gone by, and I got this email from OPWC support:
Ok. I think we have a course of action.
Download and install the Free version of Revo Uninstaller https://www.revouninstaller.com/.
Use that to uninstall SoftRAID. Make sure yo uscan for left over pieces and uninstall those as well.
Reboot. Then do a clean install with a fresh download of the installer from the link below.
https://softraid.com/download-trial/
Everything in your reports seems to be working fine with no unusual errors what so ever other than the licensing issue. I would even recommend doing a chkdsk on the boot drive after uninstalling just to play it safe.
That’s a long time to wait before getting the standard solution when the tech doesn’t know what is going on: start over from square one.
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