Permissions not being respected on External Drive connected to M2 Pro Mac Mini?

I agree, you can not override logging in with permissions, but you can change permissions for files, folders or disks to determine which users can view and alter files on the computer and even block access to them. I have checked a pre-Ventura OS and indeed permissions worked perfectly. In the example I provided above no user apart from an administrator should have had access to Thunderbay.

As a follow up to my last reply, I stopped sharing the folder (drive) and this stopped access to other users. Not ideal as I would like to share folders/files within this volume... Hopefully there will be a fix for this at some stage.

What I have described is accessing the Mac Mini and external drive over the network ie not logging into the Mac directly.

If I set up permissions so that a user can not access a volume would it matter if they accessed over the network or logged into the Mac Mini directly, surely the permissions should be respected either way? I am the only user with admin rights.

The permissions on the external (get info) reflect those on the system preferences ie other users should not have access to the external drive (and permissions were applied to enclosed items). I went through all these steps with the Apple engineer and we both ran out of ideas thus why escalated. This is likely a Ventura issue (I have also reported to OWC just in case it is a SoftRAID issue)... I suspect this issue is present on other systems but may not be immediately apparent...

Just as an additional note, when I set up my new system it came with 13.1 and I installed 13.2. I also had the file sharing issue others were reporting, ie unable to connect to the Mac Mini from other computers. I erased the Mac Mini, restored to factory settings, and reinstalled Ventura 13.2 and this seemed to resolve that particular issue.

That's the issue, when they login they can access the external drive (Thunderbay) and see all the folders and files, despite permissions.

Users logging in with a Standard account (not Sharing Only) from machines on a local network. Permissions respected on internal drive but not on the attached external drive (RAID)...