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Creating Volumes
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Topic starter
I have 2x ThunderBays 4 Mini with 4 8TB Samsung SSD 870 QVO each.
Both ThunderBays are connected to each other directly, and one of them is connected to a MacOS Ventura 13.5. All cables are the ThunderBolt cables supplied by OWC.
I upgraded to SoftRAID Pro 7.6 in order to be able to create a volume across the two enclosures, yet it fails with
SoftRAID Application: The volume create command for volume x failed with an error (error number = 128).
SoftRAID Driver: The SoftRAID volume "x" is missing more than one disk. It does not have enough of its disks to mount.
I suspect the issue is the 7.5 driver, which does not load correctly due to validation failure:
SoftRAID: Version: 7.5 Last Modified: 11.07.23, 10:56 Bundle ID: com.apple.driver.SoftRAID Notarised: Unknown Loaded: No Get Info String: SoftRAID version 7.5, Copyright © 2002-23 Other World Computing, Inc. All rights reserved. Obtained from: Not Signed Location: /System/Library/Extensions/SoftRAID.kext Kext Version: 7.5 Loadable: No Validity Errors: Validation Failures: Kext has a CFBundleExecutable property but the executable can't be found: SoftRAID Signature Validation Errors: Not Signed Dependencies: Incomplete Signed by: Not Signed
"Uninstall All SoftRAID components" and restarting will not remove the SoftRAID.kext. Reinstalling will ask for password to install helper tool but will not ask for further permissions regarding the driver.
SoftRAID 7.6 is enabled in "Full Disk Access" in macOS "Privacy & Security" settings.
How can I remove/reinstall the driver correctly or force validation of the kext?
Posted : 15/09/2023 8:46 pm
This is not a driver issue. Ventura always loads the 7.5 driver. This seems like a Full Disk Access issue. You state you added the SoftRAID Application to Full Disk Access?
You were able to initialize the disks with SoftRAID? So the disks are "clean"?
I suspect you cannot create even a non RAID volume, correct?
Posted : 15/09/2023 9:47 pm
Topic starter
> This is not a driver issue. Ventura always loads the 7.5 driver.
My concern was not the difference between the version numbers (7.6 app vs 7.5 driver), but the "Loadable: no" and "Executable was not found" part.
> This seems like a Full Disk Access issue. You state you added the SoftRAID Application to Full Disk Access?
Yes, correct.
> I suspect you cannot create even a non RAID volume, correct?
Indeed, I cannot create a single-disk non RAID volume on the disks in the new enclosure. I noticed that those drives show "size 8TB - available 8TB" but after attempting to create a new volume some read "size 8 TB - available 12.3 (no unit)" (see attached pic).
Connecting the second enclosure directly to the mac (no daisy chaining) and switching out cables did not make a difference.
Posted : 16/09/2023 5:58 am
Topic starter
I was able to create a volume after connecting both enclosures directly to the mac (no daisy chaining), restarting and re-initializing all the disks. Will I risk data loss by attempting to daisy chain them again later?
Posted : 16/09/2023 6:13 am
Topic starter
Speed is ~1GB/s write and ~2.5GBs write, but drops to 300MB/s and 500MB/s once I enable APFS encryption. This is worse than the performance in my previous one enclosure setup (500MB/s + 800 MB/s), although that might have used HFS+ encryption which is not available in macOS anymore.
What is the best way to get encryption and high speeds with two enclosures under macOS 13?
Posted : 16/09/2023 6:32 am
Topic starter
Two ThunderBay 4 Mini enclosures, 4x Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB in each, RAID4:
APFS (no encryption)
APFS (encrypted)
Switching RAID4 to RAID5 makes no difference.
Posted : 16/09/2023 6:53 am
Topic starter
RAID10 performs better, but is not an option for me:
Posted : 16/09/2023 7:00 am
If you rearange the enclosures, no issue. I do not understand the problem you were encountering. Its weird. Where a drive is, how how the enclosure is connected makes no difference to creating a volume. If you try to RAID across enclosures, with XT, yes you get an alert saying you need Pro to do this, but it won't say "error creating volume. Wish I understood this, it makes no sense to me.
Encryption performance is always an issue. Encryption will naturally get faster as ARM processors get faster, I have not yet run tests on the M2.
What mac are you using?
Posted : 16/09/2023 5:37 pm
Topic starter
Just to clarify, the drop from 2656 MB/s to 512 MB/s in read speeds is expected when using APFS encryption with two SSD only enclosures? I thought performance issues with encryption were limited to HDDs not SSDs? Is there anything I can do to add some form of encryption without (or less) performance penalty?
What does "Error 128" mean? Also what causes the error that after volume creation the available size changes from "8 TB" to "12.3" (without any unit) - this does seem weird.
I am using a MacBook Pro 2021 with M1 Max.
This post was modified 3 years ago by BurningMan
Posted : 17/09/2023 3:10 am
Topic starter
According to this, the performance impact should be much less when using APFS encryption, ranging from a few percent up to 20%. A performance drop of 80% as observed in this SoftRAID configuration suggests that this is primarily a SoftRAID issue, not an Apple one.
Benchmark numbers from the link above in GB/s (read/write), plain vs encrypted:
Connected directly
- A – plain APFS 2.8 / 2.2; encrypted 2.7 / 1.8
- B – plain APFS 3.0 / 2.1; encrypted 2.9 / 2.0
- C – plain APFS 2.8 / 2.8; encrypted 2.8 / 2.8
Via a TB4 hub
- A – plain APFS 2.7 / 1.5; encrypted 2.7 / 1.2
- B – plain APFS 2.9 / 1.5; encrypted 2.9 / 1.4
- C – plain APFS 2.8 / 2.8; encrypted 2.8 / 2.8
Posted : 17/09/2023 3:30 am
If you compare RAID 0, with Apple RAID vs SoftRAID, what are you seeing? that is the only "true" test.
RAID requires parity calculations, as does encryption.
Without doing similar tests, I cannot speculate on your tests and I have not had time. Maybe end of next week.
Posted : 17/09/2023 7:37 am
