Mac mini M1 - Not able to mount LaCie 5Big Thunderbolt storage

I’d like to suggest that we stop discussing how mutually insulted we feel and, instead, move to the more important question.... Has anybody on this thread received any information about the extent of LaCie’s progress on this issue ? Are they looking at getting code into 11.3 to address the ability to load extensions or sorting out API calls that will remedy this ?

I have a similar, though not identical situation, with my OWC ThunderBlade and SoftRaid .... it won’t load either - so at this juncture I have all my RAID’s on my MacPro on Majoave ...... I’d like to get a time estimate on when this will be resolved.

What do you do for a living? You did not read this title of this thread, “Mac Mini M1 - Not able to mount LaCie 5Big Thunderbolt Storage”. Try reading the thread before you make misinformed statements. Also try to have some facts/data to back your statements. The fact that you say “The OP owns LaCie” already tells me you are misinformed and lacking the ability to use Google or do any proper research.

Hi Hendrik - just checking - you said you installed ".307" - but the '3's a typo-right ??? - did you mean ".207" ???. But if you did install a .307 then, man, I'm not installing THAT - your BlackMagic 36MB/sec is even worse than my 55 ! Sorry, I need an emoji here ...

I did raise some of these issues with "The Constant Geekery Podcast" (Britain - several hundred subscribers).... and they discussed the whole issue of RAID performance on the M1's for about 10 minutes today (Apr 12). That was my first effort at exposing this to a wider audience....I may chime in on a few other YouTube channels and see if we can learn more about what people are seeing out there; and what people are doing with effectively moth-balled 5Big, 6Big and 12Big RAID systems.

And, LaCie sent me a followup on my case this morning - I will reply to that and with a letter to my "case contact" outlining my views as to how dismal this is, that more transparency is needed from LaCie as well as a thorough public acknowledgement of the problem accompanied with a commitment to followup and fix it.

6 or 7 year old industrial hardware ought not to be considered obsolete....that it works on Intel but not on Apple Silicon should be a red flag; hopefully it is fixable with a software or firmware update.

So, on my side I'm going to be working to try and spread the word more and hopefully that will provide some incentive to LaCie to work with Apple to resolve it.

jc

g'morning, Hendrik

Yesterday I wrote a formal letter to my case contact at LaCie requesting it be forwarded to their management. It included a technical case update as well as strategic positioning; a request for more transparency on the issue; a commitment to fix it and direct contact to me from their senior technical support management.

My situation was also featured on "The Constant Geekery Podcast" out of Britain, yesterday. It was discussed; This podcast has only about 1000 subscribers and it's worth noting that there wasn't much feedback from them - despite they're being people keenly interested in new technology, review, etc.

And I reviewed as much as I could, posts on the Internet regarding this issue with LaCie. There was a small flurry of activity early on - but most of the posts have been dormant since December. In any event, the audience is pretty small.

Which leads me to conclude there isn't much interest in this topic and the number of people affected now is relatively small. Maybe it will grow this year as M1's or their successors become the dominant strain of Macs. Nonetheless, LaCie is aware of it and the likely implications.

For even this thread ... right now ... is it just you and me ?

While we could work on mounting a wider awareness campaign, I am thinking it won't amount to much. If we did, my approach would be to contact 9-5 as you suggest and other YouTube channels (I have several in mind) ..... I can certainly adapt my narrative to a few paragraphs. As a question, I'd be asking for some speed reporting feedback since the connectivity issue is resolved (see my SoftRaid comment at the end, however...)

However, for now I'd like to see how far I get with LaCie - a sugar as compared to a vinegar approach. There are some Apple implications - but my experience with both the LaCie and SoftRaid issues is that it IS up to the 3rd parties to fix the problem with their software, working in conjunction with Apple to ensure the right driver API's are exposed on MacOS to make this work. All these players, in the end, have a vested interest in making this work. I own lots of LaCie products, my 5Big is the most expensive, though....and if I have to look elsewhere to fix this and LaCie hasn't come to the table, then the implications of THAT are pretty clear. Anybody else with LaCie RAID storage is eventually going to experience this - although as I've said, the problem is not well known.

I'd like to wait a week and judge LaCie's response.

My 5Big is attached to my MM M1 - it's 5 drives (5 x 4TB, ea) forming one RAID 5 group - and it's working for now so I can use the 5BIG as a backup - at least this is faster than re-attaching it to my Intel Mac and accessing it as NAS - that did provide sustained writes/reads of about 100MB/sec .... but backing up small files just killed the speed - so all-in-all I'm more practical with it being crippled, but locally attached for now.

As for the SoftRaid issue - with my OWC ThunderBlade RAID.....SoftRaid needs Big Sur 11.3 (which is in public beta release 7) and I am on 11.2.3 ..... I have been assured that the latest SoftRaid works on the public beta and so when 11.3 is finally released that should resolve the ThunderBlade issue. I did have it working for a short while on BS 11.1 but I moved to 11.2 as quickly as I could to mitigate the Bluetooth connection issues with my magic mouse. In 11.2 Apple, according to SoftRaid, actually accidentally removed the piece of enabling MacOs code needed for the driver - so it never worked in 11, fixed in 11.1, broken again in 11.2 and is apparently working in 11.3.....so I do have confidence in that.

My confidence in LaCie is lower - but their risk from the community at large is much bigger and I am hoping that, in conjunction with our continuing to update them will move them to resolve this.

jc 10am Toronto, April 13

Some progress !

I spoke w/LaCie Tech Support this morning - and they have acknowledged that my eMail from Monday is on my case file. I said I was disappointed that they had not had the courtesy to reach back out to me to indicate they had it and when they would be in touch...so I insisted that a TS Manager call me today. However, nothing in the last 2 hours. So, I will keep you posted on that and in your discussion you could also indicate how un-responsive LaCie has been, as a partner, over the last 5+ months - and especially in light of our trying to escalate it with them through normal courses.

jc

That's funny ... same thing happened to me with the Survey link ! So I also mentioned that in my letter to them. Also, when you call the 1-888 etc number for support, it directs you to live.seagate.com where you can "live chat" - but that, too, does not exist. They have some really serious issues with service and support.

Is there a way you and I can take this 'off line' temporarily with private messages ?

jc

Hey ... hope the stars were awesome tonight.

I got some feedback from LaCie late on my day, today. We are scheduled to speak on the phone on Thursday about 4pm Toronto time - so we will have a discussion and see how that goes.

The gist of their eMail back to me today was that the .207 release was 'interim' and they were looking for field input - and with that can hopefully improve the performance; and learn if this is a one-off problem or a more wide-spread problem ! I would have thought some lab testing in this matter would have been pretty self-evident and they wouldn't have needed field input to detect that it was running at about one-eighth of its capable speed.

However, I have/and will commit to work with them to best advantage to test whatever; and provide any useful data I can.

But, if we can chat 'offline', that might also be beneficial.

In any event, I will report back with Thursday's conversation.

jc

g'morning Hendrik,

Tuesday - Apr 27 - 1pm Toronto time.

I upgraded this morning to BS 11.3 on my MacMini. The good news is that I now have a fully operational OWC ThunderBlade (1TB, 4x256 ssd) running with Softraid 6.03 on the M1 at roughly 1400/1400 ... which is about what I'd expect - using SoftRaid 6.03. So, that is resolved.

I did a LaCie 5BIG test before and after the OS Update, just in case Apple had mysteriously patched something in BS 11.3 that affected the kernel level IO - but sadly it performed the same after - showing the kind of numbers we have all been seeing all along.

Referring to the handshake issue at the hardware level, it is interesting to note that SoftRaid is now running acceptably. I do have some very early screen shots showing 1800/1600 on my blade when I got it 2+ years ago on my 2017 15" MacBookPro - (which is/was a native TB-3 machine) and the speed has degraded a bit since then but I suspect that may have something to do with the SSD's in the ThunderBlade - and I've had much discussion with OWC on this. I did finally completely rebuild this in the fall on my Intel machine when the speed had dropped to the 300's and refreshing it and re-populating it has brought it back to the 1400's I am running now on both my Intel and M1. On the M1, it is running on a Thunderbolt3 chain and the other device on the chain is a LaCie 10TB single-drive 7200rpm disk.

My point is that THEY (OWC) have made this work - so if there is some sort of handshake or timing issue, then they have been able to circumvent it; or there is no handshake issue and it's just a programming issue in the LaCie driver (which is what I really suspect). I've never experienced a speed problem with the LaCie 10TB on the M1 - and it's not raid so it has no need for the LaCie raid software.

I'll be writing back to my contact on my case at LaCie later today and will fill them in. This is their response to me last week.

"Hello Jim Camelford,

Thank you for your email response and for sharing that video.

First of all, I apologize for the delay in answering. The video was already shared with the Subject Matter Expert team, alongside a few Apple forums where people shared their issues, and they will look deeper into it. I thank you for taking the time for making that video, helping fix the performance issue faster for all the customers.

Now we have to wait for the next upgrades in the software, that will improve compatibility and thus, the performance."

I will be pointing out the above and asking for a progress report and will let you know.

On the issue of you having to create a partition and do a fresh load of BS-what a waste of your time. We know the problem is real.

Do you have a case open with LaCie ?

jc

Good evening, everybody.

I am writing this on April 28th, About 930pm Toronto time

I have sent some eMails to my contact at LaCie and I have not received responses - so nothing to report on that.

Tonight, however I decided I would try a little experiment-at least it was kind of fun.

I wanted to investigate the issue of whether the Thunderbolt "3 to 2" adapter out of the M1 was causing an issue or if it had to do with some of the handshaking in the hardware, as was previously mentioned.

On my M1 MM I have an Apple-Branded 3-2 adapter running out of the back of the M1 to a Thunderbolt 2 chain comprising my LaCie 5Big (configured as a RAID 5, 20TB ie 5x4=20 with 16TB user space), chained to an OWC "Toaster Dock" that can host 2 bare-bones SATA drives and from that to my DELL U3011 secondary monitor using a mini-display port cable to run that monitor at 2560x1600.

The monitor works perfectly.

And, as you know, the speeds we are getting on the 5Big are in the vicinity of 55/260MBS give-or-take (I've seen BlackMagics with worse...)

So, for fun, I put two fairly old 1TB Baracuda drives into the Toaster Dock - they were independently configured as HFS+ and I tested their speeds using BlackMagic (3GB Stress) - both running at 113/119 MBS write-read....which is what I would reasonably expect.

Then I used Disk Utility to group these into a 2-Disk RAID 0 and re-ran BlackMagic. As expected, performance increased, but only slightly, to write-151 / read-138 MBS. I have to admit I was a bit surprised that in all the tests the write speed was slightly better than the read speed. Speeds didn't nearly double, as I had hoped, but did increase.

So, now I have a "cheap and cheerful" RAID 0 running with Apple RAID on 2 quite ancient 1TB hard drives. And it is writing at least twice as fast as my LaCie 5Big RAID5. Not sure I'd put anything really critical on this, though !!!! And, remember, it's only 2 drives so the benefit of striped reads hasn't really kicked in on this test case to beat the 5BIG's 270.

Then I brought OWC's SoftRaid 6.03 into the picture. I let it take over the drives and re-booted the Mac. Speeds were virtually identical - about 1 MB/sec apart - so not significant.

So.....here's my point......I think the bus and handshaking are running superficially okay. That's about the speed I would expect from these drives - so I do not believe this is an inherent error in the hardware.

I re-tested my 5BIG right after this and once again got numbers in the 55 / 250 MBS range.

So, if my 'cheap and cheerful' RAID 0 setup using an OWC Toaster Dock can best my 5-disk, Lacie 5BIG RAID-5 then I surmise it is a fixable software problem in LaCie's drivers due to bad coding. At least that's what I hope; and not some never-to-be-addressed in Apple's hardware bus.

I'd love to see more BlackMagic tests from people posted to this thread, as well as some impact statements from people impacted by this situation that has dragged on now for more than 5+ months with very little comment or commitment from LaCie/Seagate.

My impact statement is that this has ruined my investment in this 5Big hardware, and I will need to look elsewhere.

With that we can continue to pressure LaCie to fix this.

With that being said, today I began to investigate purchasing a new RAID - this has to get fixed. I can't work with 55/270. At this point my shortlist did NOT include LaCie.

What about you ?