Users Reported macOS 10.15.4 Problems During File Transfers

If you transfer large files, you may have problems with the latest version of Catalina. This is reported by the user – and the storage specialist SoftRAID.

Earlier macOS also manifested vulnerabilities in the Bluetooth technology which was later covered by Apple after releasing appropriate patches.

Now more issues found in the software, after installing the macOS update released two weeks ago, system crashes when copying certain files. This is reported by users of the software RAID environment SoftRAID. Apple’s in-house file manager Finder is affected. This leads to understandable kernel panics if you want to transfer files that are more than 30 GB in size.

Files from 30 GB

For example, an affected person writes that his system greases regularly when he tries to drag a 1 TB folder from a USB device to his RAID 5. After a few minutes – about five to ten – the kernel panic will appear reliably. This means that the entire computer is “down” and a forced restart is required.

Initially, users assumed that the bug was in SoftRAID itself. However, studies by SoftRAID itself showed that these are badly affected, but by no means only. Even purely Apple-formatted media, therefore, provoke crashes, even if this may take place at a later time. The reason seems to be that the system stops working correctly after a certain amount of I/O threads and triggers a kernel panic.

Other crashes also reported

Apple is aware of the problem, SoftRAID said. At the moment there doesn’t seem to be a workaround, a return to macOS 10.15.3 is generally not recommended also because of the security holes contained therein. Scattered crashes are from users in other contexts under macOS 10.15.4 reported. This includes crash scenarios immediately after the system has woken up (with reboot). There should also be problems with sleeping external hard drives. macOS Catalina had drawn attention to itself from the start with reliability weaknesses, which Apple had tried to fix in several update steps.