SoftRAID 6.0.1 beta feedback

@softraid-support I installed 11.3 Beta 3 a couple of days ago on my Mac Mini M1 using SOFTRAID 6.0.1. b52.

The good news: the OWC driver and my RAID arrays mount fine now.

An issue (either OS X power management related, or due to a problematic blade on my new Accelsior 4M2 NVMe drive):  My new OWC Thunderbay Flex 8 has been very stable, except once after waking the computer the morning following my installation of Beta 3. After letting it run all night, I got a SOFTRAID warning that I had improperly ejected a drive, and another warning telling me to disable the power management sleep of hard drives in OS X. I have a Thunderbay Flex 8 with an 8x SATA Drive RAID 6 array and a 4 TB OWC Accelsior 4M2 NVMe drive installed in the Pcie port on the flex 8. The warning was obviously about the NVMe drive, because the next morning when I booted up my system the RAID 6 array was working fine, while NVMe RAID 0 volume wasn't mounted. I checked it's status in SOFTRAID, where the drive showed “degraded” and “missing disk”.  I contacted the folks at SOFTRAID tech support and got a very fast and helpful reply.  Apparently Accelsior 4M2 NVME drives can very rarely get caught in a strange state whereby one of the blades in the NVMe drive can get hung. The tech recommended I power down my Mac and the Flex 8 for a few mins and reboot. And Viola! that fixed it. It mounted fine upon reboot with zero issues reported in SOFTRAID.  With all sleep options (power management) disabled in OS X, I let the system run all of last night to see if any problems would reoccur. This morning both the NVMe and SATA raid arrays were working fine with zero issues.  Now I've re-enabled "put hard disks to sleep when possible" in "Energy Saver" preferences in OS X settings, as well as unchecked "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when display is off".  Now I'll let the system go to sleep and see if any more problems reoccur with the NVMe drive. It presumably slept for about an hour without issue. But I'll let it sleep for a few hours today to see if it reproduces and if not, I'll see if it reproduces this evening. So far, so good! Fingers crossed!

I was able to install b53 on my M1 Mac mini OK, but when viewing with Softraid app, I get some jumping up/down of my drives/volumes shown in the display. Drives seem to be OK. Just the app having problems. Using Mac OS 11.1.

@justvisiting

The only correction I would make to your statement, is this "hang" with NVMe is possible with all NVme flash, not just he flash drives on the 4m2.

If it happens repeatedly, however, I would replace that blade under warranty. You can either send the card in, or "fix it yourself".

Note: give each blade a SoftRAID "disk label" so you know which one fails/hangs. Else you do not know which one is missing, as the disks are not in any kind of order in their disk numbers.

@pruthe

Yes that is our bug. The fix for this did not make it into b53, we wanted to get this out to add support for SoftRAID 5.x technical support files, so this was a minor update.

Please repost a link to the beta. The various links (or is the same one over and over) in the forums goes to a 404. I need to get this working ASAP. I bought three OWC enclosures and multiple sets of SSDs for them and now the whole thing is useless because of this Big Sur incompatibility. I need the beta immediately.

Also, I hope the posts claiming we have to purchase the upgrade when it is released are erroneous. We just purchased these devices a week ago, mid-March 2021. The included SoftRaid license is supposed to provide us with SoftRaid use, not some broken out-of-date thing we have to pay additionally to upgrade. The notion that we are expected to follow-up with a purchase of some SoftRaid upgrade after already receiving the license in our original purchase price is absurd.

I need that beta link. It should be in a sticky post at the top of the forum so it is always available. New versions of the beta should be maintained with updated links provided in a sticky post at all times.

Thanks.

the same link works as always:

http://www.softraid.com/sr_beta

@softraid-support

Thanks. That worked. Everything I've been directed to prior to your response was https://www.softraid.com/sr_beta which is broken.

Cheers!

I will investigate this, as it is not a link I ever posted. wordpress could have changed the URL, perhaps.

FYI: Running  53; Put my iMac in sleep mode overnight; at some point at night Raid got disconnected on it's own.  Restart fixed.

Is there a ver 54 coming soon? As the Beta is the only version holding my system together right now.

Yes a final beta is coming, I believe today, along with other news.

That is a hardware or macOS sleep issue, unfortunately.

After installing the latest 6.0.1 release (non-beta, right?), I am getting the following error when first starting SoftRAID...after starting it again, it starts normally.
What could cause this?

Also, subjectively speaking, it hasn't been that long since I upgraded to the full version of SoftRAID at $99...what's the cut-off date for free upgrades to this version, and/or is there a discounted price for recent upgraders?

Hope you're all having a peaceful Easter weekend!

@tillkrueger

Does this repeat 100%?

then let me know and do not do anything until I can get back to you. thanks!

I will answer the update question later.

@softraid-support

It happened the last two times I rebooted, but let me reboot again (I hate rebooting, sigh) to confirm and get back to you shortly.

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Just followed the "Purchase SoftRAID" link from the app's menu and found that the official upgrade price is $49.