Promise Pegasus32 R6 issue: copy/move operations to the drive takes forever and macOS freezes -> macOS Ventura related?

[TheRiddler1982]

Hi all,

I am currently running the latest macOS Ventura Beta (no. 5) on an MacBookPro M1 Max. For backup purposes I am using an Pegasus32 R6 external hardware RAID Thunderbolt 3 box with several APFS encrypted disks. Since macOS Monterey with Apple Silicon on board, the PROMISE device is not recognised out of the box by macOS, so I first used the kext-based driver with disabled third party protection and later switched to the driver kit with runs in user mode.

Until Beta 3 I had no issues with the device and disk access. Since Beta 4 and 5 I have noticed a very disturbing behaviour with the drives. Any write operation to any drive on that device just freezes. The Finder activity window just shows "preparing to copy" or "preparing to move" but it doesn't move or copy anything at all. Once I started such file operation, any other access to any disk on the device just freezes as well. The whole operation system is super laggy. The only solution to restore it, is to hard unplug the device by unplugging the AC power cable. After that, macOS works fine again.

This issue is only related to PROMISE related devices. I have two of them. By using any other external disk (e.g. USB 3.1 also APFS encrypted) everything works as it should.

Can anybody else of you running macOS Ventura with PROMISE devices confirm such behaviour? I can provide a YouTube video of the phenomenon if needed. Just say the word.

Thanks!

 

[TheRiddler1982]

Ok, I was totally misguided.

The issue is not related to my Promise devices. It is APFS related, I hate APFS!!!

Both of my Promise devices are "nearly" full, i.e. both have 24 TByte RAID6 storage and only about 200-300 GByte of storage left. Each device has several APFS volumes defined.

As usual APFS shows no consistent free storage figure across all volumes. Also, the storage available may not be the right figure as well. So, actually, I do not know how much space I have left.

What I did: I deleted large files and after that, I was able to move files (quite small, i.e. 12 GBytes) to the drive.

For some reason, APFS was blocking the transfer, maybe to handle snapshots, move raw data, I do not know.

So: lessons learnt: I keep at least 1 TByte storage free.