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
