External Lacie RAID drives broken in High Sierra

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mabou Author

Level 2

360 points

External Lacie RAID drives broken in High Sierra

Hi all,

I have seen random posts about this topic, thought I'd start a new topic to keep this fresh.

I finally updated my work computer to High Sierra...

Then my Lacie external drives quit mounting.

After more than 8 hours of work and research trying to get my thunderbolt drives to mount, I am giving up. There actually is NO ANSWER at this time to get my "Lacie 2Big Thunderbolt 2" drives to mount. 20 terabytes of files (video, audio, photos) that I can no longer access from my computer.

Lacie says it is an Apple problem, Apple says it is Lacie's problem.

Neither say they are actively working to provide a fix.

Apples best workaround is to copy terabytes of files from one drive to another, then break the RAID and individually update the drives with APFS, then re-stripe as RAID and recopy terabytes of files. Of course, this means that I have to buy another drive with Terabytes of available drive space, and go use someone else computer since my drives won't mount.

Posted on Feb 26, 2018 1:48 PM

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Answer 1

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mabou Author

Level 2

360 points

Mar 1, 2018 3:22 PM in response to mabou

PROBLEM SOLVED... 100%

Hi all,

Wow, what a journey THIS has been, but I finally have resolution and my LaCie drives are finally being recognized by High Sierra via Thunderbolt.

It was a LaCie tech support person that gave me the missing piece of info. She asked "Do you have Techtool Pro 9 installed on your computer? If so, remove it and your drives will work again. This is a known (albeit under-documented) bug with High Sierra and TTP9."

I deleted everything I could find of Techtool Pro 9, rebooted, and BLAM, 3 days of techno-suffering down the tubes (I won't miss it, but I wish I could get that time back).

SO, If you are on High Sierra, and you are not seeing your external Thunderbolt drives (OR, your computer freezes at boot time AND at shutdown if your drives are connected).... TOSS TECHTOOL PRO 9 and all of your problems with dissolve.

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Answer 2

Tesserax

Level 10

148,333 points

Feb 26, 2018 2:04 PM in response to mabou

A disk drive does NOT need to be formatted in APFS to work with macOS High Sierra, regardless if it is a single drive or multiple drives in a RAID configuration. I know this for a fact, as I have a number of Macs (running HS) and external storage devices (including some with RAID) and none of them have been reformatted in APFS ... and I am not having any issues accessing any of them. Unfortunately, I do not use any Lacie products so I cannot confirm your findings with yours.

Your Lacie RAID storage device should not be any different. However, it is critical that Lacie provide updated drivers that allow this device to work with High Sierra and, like all major storage providers, they had the opportunity to do so prior to HS being released to the general public. Obviously something didn't pan out.

I actually surprised that the Apple technician suggested that you reformat the drives for APFS to try to solve this.

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Answer 3

mabou Author

Level 2

360 points

Feb 27, 2018 4:40 AM in response to Tesserax

Thanks Tesserax,

i was planning on updating my post today. Last night I discovered that the Lacie drives will mount and operate (albeit more slowly) via the USB port. So this appears to be a thunderbolt driver issue, not an APFS problem.

FWIW; Apples own early tech docs addressed the fact that HFS external drives might not be readable by High Sierra. There was mention that Apple was working on a fix for the problem, but I don’t see a mention of it in any of the updates since the initial HS rollout.

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Answer 4

Feb 27, 2018 4:54 AM in response to mabou

mabou wrote:

FWIW; Apples own early tech docs addressed the fact that HFS external drives might not be readable by High Sierra. There was mention that Apple was working on a fix for the problem, but I don’t see a mention of it in any of the updates since the initial HS rollout.

Hmmm, I've run High Sierra since the very first developer release that came out last year and I don't remember reading such a document nor have I had any issue reading external HFS+ drives. No LaCie drives however.

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Answer 5

Tesserax

Level 10

148,333 points

Feb 27, 2018 9:39 AM in response to mabou

FWIW; Apples own early tech docs addressed the fact that HFS external drives might not be readable by High Sierra. There was mention that Apple was working on a fix for the problem, but I don’t see a mention of it in any of the updates since the initial HS rollout.

I wasn't aware of this. Could you please provide a link to this document? (... or are you referring to Apple beta-related docs. In that case, please don't provide the link.) Thanks!

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Answer 6

mabou Author

Level 2

360 points

Feb 27, 2018 12:02 PM in response to Tesserax

Hi Tesserax,

I searched and searched (kind of recreating my footsteps from yesterdays research) and couldn't find it. The only thing I found was someones forum reference to Apple Customer support telling him that Apple was working on a fix. Entirely possible that this was all I saw (rather than one of the tech documents I read) and I didn't remember correctly. My head is still spinning from this whole debacle, and I have lost about 15 hours trying to fix this problem.

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Answer 7

mabou Author

Level 2

360 points

Feb 27, 2018 12:13 PM in response to mabou

UPDATE:

It has been a long haul and things are still not right, but I am finding workarounds.

For example, it turns out that I can have ONE drive connected via thunderbolt and it will appear as expected. If I chain a second drive, it will not show up on reboot, and (about 40% of the time) it will cause the first drive to not boot either.

If I connect a second drive via a second thunderbolt port (rather than chaining one drive to another), there is about a 30% chance that the second drive will mount.

If I connect a second drive via USB, both will mount and operate as expected.

NOTE that any time I boot the computer, there is about a 70% chance that one drive will boot as expected. The other 30% causes the computer to hang while trying to populate the desktop. Spinning wheel, no relief from it.

I have NOT tried to do a bunch of copying or work from a mounted drive since this problem appeared. It just feels a bit too much like the Thunderbolt driver needs updating. The connection to the external drives does not feel "healthy".

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Answer 8

Tesserax

Level 10

148,333 points

Feb 27, 2018 12:52 PM in response to mabou

I searched and searched (kind of recreating my footsteps from yesterdays research) and couldn't find it. The only thing I found was someones forum reference to Apple Customer support telling him that Apple was working on a fix.

No problem. Thanks for trying.

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Answer 9

Tesserax

Level 10

148,333 points

Feb 27, 2018 12:56 PM in response to mabou

Hmm, based on your description of the problem, it appears that the Lacie drives draw too much power from the Thunderbolt port, but not the USB one. I would have expected just the opposite. Maybe I just missed it, but which exact model Mac do you have that you are using with these drives?

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Answer 10

mabou Author

Level 2

360 points

Feb 27, 2018 1:13 PM in response to Tesserax

Hi again Tesserax!

Late 2012 iMac.

Bottom line, the thunderbolt drives have worked perfectly through three major OS releases, but died as soon as the reboot into High Sierra happened. For what it is worth, the drives continue to work just fine chained on my 2015 MacBook Pro (not high sierra).

This could easily be a Thunderbolt Driver update required by Lacie (or Apple).

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Answer 11

Tesserax

Level 10

148,333 points

Feb 27, 2018 1:18 PM in response to mabou

This could easily be a Thunderbolt Driver update required by Lacie (or Apple).

Agreed! My bet is that it should be Lacie as Apple doesn't develop drivers for non-Apple hardware, even though they may sell them via the Apple Store. Go figure!

Sorry, I couldn't help you with a solution.

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Answer 12

Tesserax

Level 10

148,333 points

Mar 2, 2018 10:10 AM in response to mabou

Thanks for posting your solution. I'm glad you got it worked out ...

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External Lacie RAID drives broken in High Sierra

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