Every folder on my system is suddenly "Read Only"

Steven Porter · March 28, 2019

Last week, I was suddenly unable to copy video footage from my cameras SSD to my editing drive on a Windows 10 Pro computer. I'm copying BRAW files (URsa Mini Pro raw codec) from a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo docked in a Neewer Voyager Q to an OWC Mercury Electra Pro Dual with 2x HGST 3TB NAS drives in RAID 0. Both drives are connected to the system via USB 3.0.

I can browse media already on the RAID no problem, and everything seems perfectly fine until I try to copy media onto the RAID from any other drive. It starts around 200MB/s for a few seconds then plumits to 5-10MB/s and stops. Often, Explorer will freeze and both drives will be unresponsive. This system has been working for over a year and suddenly developed this issue last week. Small files appear to copy just fine, but the large video files consistently freeze and fail.

Using other methods to transfer the footage like Red Giant Offload are hardly better. It usually works eventually, but stalls of ten and is extremely slow. (Before this issue it would be at least as fast as using Explorer.)

I have tried ensuring that my account (the only account on the system) has full admin privileges and access to the drive, but it says that every folder on every drive on the whole system is read only. No matter how many times or what methods I try to remove the "read only" setting, I just can't seem to restore my permission to save data to any drive, although smaller files (under a few GB) seem to work fine. Timely replies are much appreciated, as I rely on this computer for my business and am stuck using much slower drives to hold me over until this is fixed. Thanks in advance.

3DDude · March 28, 2019

To clarify:

You have a docking (Voyager Q) in which you put the samsung evo of 500GB?

You connect the OWC Mercury which is an 2 bay NAS with a switch on the back to alter the RAID..

Is the data on both drives?
Is it slow on both?

Could you check this:

4 Drive Failure

If one of the drives fails, the corresponding drive LED will turn solid red. If the Mercury Elite Pro Dual was configured

as a RAID 0 or Span, the data on the array is lost and the disk is no longer usable. In a span, only the data stored

on the failed drive is lost, although data recovery software will be required to retrieve the data from the other drive.

If the drives were configured independently, then the data on the drive that did not fail will remain intact.

More info:

https://www.owcdigital.com/assets/products/mercury-elite-pro-dual-thunderbolt/MEP-Dual_TB-USB_Guide.pdf

If your drive died, you are F*d --> because you say you use Raid 0 which means striped which means both drives need to work eh ;).
If you wanted safety -> choose Raid 1 = Mirror. then both disks contain the data.

You best have an backup of the data

Steven Porter · March 28, 2019

3DDude, thanks for clarifying, and yes your description of the drives is correct.

Neither drive is slow on their own (around 500MB/s on the SSD, and 300MB/S on the RAID) but the transfer speed when moving large files from the SSD to the RAID is slow and intermittent. In the past, it has always transferred around 250MB/s and now it only hits 200MB/s for a few seconds before dropping to 5-10. Read speeds are still great, and other operations (like encoding/exporting video) run perfectly.

Both indicators on the OWC RAID are green indicating that the drives are healthy, and there have been no clicking noises etc. associated with drive failure. (And don't worry, I do have at least 2 backups of all important data just in case!)

Steven Porter · March 29, 2019

The problem has been fixed thanks to good ol' trial and error. After moving the drive to a different USB port, it's now copying fast and reliably as it did before. This doesn't really make sense to me, unless the other port or hub is failing, but I have other drives on that same hub that are still working fine which leads me to believe that the hub is ok.

Oddly, all of the folders still say "Read Only" but other than that it seems things are back to normal.