Migrating Mercury Elite Pro quad from MacPro Intel Mojave to Mac mini M1 Monterey kernel panic

@sebo2000

The incident of this panic seems to be about 10%, maybe less. Monterey has no fix.

Your short term option is wait 5 minutes before connecting the enclosure, this generally works.

But you need to back up, recreate the volume with 64k stripe unit size, to eliminate this issue.

@softraid-support 

Thank you for response, could you clarify few more things:

1. Do I recreate 64k volumes on new Mac Mini M1 with SoftRAID TX 7.0.1 or on my old Intel Mac Pro with SoftRAID 5.8.4  or it doesn’t matter?
2. So even if I recreate unit size 64k I will still need to connect disconnect to avoid kernel panic errors?
3. What OSX supports this without reconnecting it, is there one? BigSur ? Ventura? I’m looking for the most stable.
4. When recreating what would be recommended APFS or HFS?

Thanks a lot!

@sebo2000

1. Do I recreate 64k volumes on new Mac Mini M1 with SoftRAID TX 7.0.1 or on my old Intel Mac Pro with SoftRAID 5.8.4  or it doesn’t matter?

   5.x does not suport 64k Stripe unit size. Warning, if your older computer (I am assuming this because of your question) has 5.x installed, the 64k volume cannot mount. You will have to upgrade SoftRAID on that computer.

2. So even if I recreate unit size 64k I will still need to connect disconnect to avoid kernel panic errors?
   No, it will avoid it.
3. What OSX supports this without reconnecting it, is there one? BigSur ? Ventura? I’m looking for the most stable.
   Its a bug in the ARM chips, so we are waiting for Apple to complete the fix. It will be fixed in a future MacOS version.
4. When recreating what would be recommended APFS or HFS?

   I recommend HFS for HDDs. APFS for SSD's. Time Machine requires APFS volumes. The main issues with APFS are it becomes slow on HDD's over time, and there are absolutely no repair tools if the directory becomes damaged. Fortunately, there are at least two recovery apps that can recover data from APFS, Disk Drill and R-Studio. But for example Disk Warrior, which can repair and optimize (speed up) HFS directories, cannot run on M1, nor even Monterey.

@softraid-support

This is very helpful.

So to summarize:

MY RAID 5 has data only (vide and photos) no Time Machine etc. just data.

To be able to run my OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad (with 4 HDD’s) in both environments sometimes (rarely) on Mac Pro Intel Mojave 12.14.6 with SoftRAID 5.8.4 and mainly on Mac Mini 1 Monterey 12.6.2 SoftRAID 7.0.1

I’m going to go with HFS, I just watched cool video on APFS and will not be loading it on HDD’s, my partitions are 85% full it would slow down even further.

To make this work:

1. 1. I should upgrade SoftRAID XT 5.8.4 on MACPro with Mojave to what version? What version of SoftRaid XT started to support HFS 64k Stripe size, I thought 5.8.4 was supporting 64k on RAID 5. Will 7.0.1 run on my Intel mac Pro Mojave 10.14.6? Should I go for that version or one of the 6.x.x?

@sebo2000

Version 7 of SoftRAID supports the same MacOS systems, so we are not selling 6 any longer, there is no need. Upgrade to SoftRAID 7.

We added 64k Stripe unit size support in 6.1.

Version 5.8.4 did not have 64k Stripe unit size in RAID 5.

Brilliant, I didn’t realize SoftRAID 7 will work on on MACPro with Mojave, that’s even better.

We are making progress, I did install SoftRAID 7 on my Mac Mini M1, deleted old original RAID 5 and created new set under new install: RAID 5 with Unit size 64k formatted as HFS+ (instructions are very well writer during install)

Everything seems to work no crashes, I was able to load 500GB’s for testing and OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad looks stable.

Here is another problem:

I want to run my Mini from external SSD to save internal SSD. That’s is also part of my disaster recovery plan.

I unmounted the new RAID5 and shutdown the enclosure and used newest SuperDuper 3.7.4 to clone to my Samsung 1TB SSD. Clone was successful, everything loads and I’m able to boot from the SSD. When I turn on the OWC enclosure I get message:

“Disk needs to be initialized” I initialize the disk, when I launch SoftRAID disks and RAID show up on the list without any errors, RAID is Unmounted, when I try to mount, it doesn’t mount. I reinstalled entire SoftRAID7, but it still doesn’t mount my drives. SoftRAID has access to entire disk.

Any Idea how to mount RAID5 back on cloned disk? I don’t get any errors everything looks good inside the SoftRAID console, but disk are not available. I’m sure if I delete and recreate RAID 5 it will work fine but that would miss the point of disaster recovery completely.

@sebo2000

On M1, MacOS does not allow any third party drivers to load, whatsoever. We are hoping this will change for SoftRAID in a future Ventura release, but not at this time.

What you can do is alias the home folder contents (do not alias the entire home folder, just the non Library portions), and then you can off load large amounts of data onto the external. (and you have the benefit of having one location for most user data)

Sorry for dumb questions, but I would love to understand this. (I’m not concerned about user data but system files etc.)

With M1 we are loading third party OWC drivers on internal SDD, that’s why we “Reduce Security policy” and “allow user management of kernel ext” it does work because I’m able to have OWC enclosure running while booted to build in SSD.

https://support.apple.com/en-ca/guide/deployment/depa5fb8376f/web

When I’m listing non apple drivers I see SoftRAID driver:

Executing: /usr/bin/kmutil showloaded

No variant specified, falling back to release

Index Refs Address            Size       Wired      Name (Version) UUID <Linked Against>

  235    0 0xfffffe0006ec4000 0x4000     0x4000     com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID (7.0.1) 03EA87D9-D972-3887-8AB6-5A41F793F337 <16 5 4 3>

You are saying this will not work while booted from external SSD for some reason?

Can you clarify what you mean by “MacOS does not allow any third party drivers to load”?

@sebo2000

there is a limitation/policy in MacOS on M1, for security, that no "unbundled" extensions can load on an external. This is to prevent external disks from being a point of attack, is my assumption. Apple Security made many decisions during M1 development, while apparently ignoring user experience.

Apple is moving all extensions to "user land", so they no longer have kernel access. (there will soon be no user installable drivers allowed in /Library/Extensions  at some point) there was a migration path discussed in several developer conferences. Each type of extension needs a different driver kit. When this migration is completed, then every developer will have the ability to install extensions in alternate locations.

That will fix this issue, in theory. So lets wait and see. Some of this may be announced in the developers conference.

@softraid-support

Thanks for clearing this up, I think if enought of people would complain about this, they would need to cave in. Is there any place to send requests/comments to Apple?

Sure by default lock eveything up, as it is right now, but they can and already do allow people to manually overwrite those security settings. After all right now we have ro “reduce security” to make it work with local disk. They could easly add any removable disk to this (this feels like a bug becasue the disks show up and look like it will work but drivers don’t get loaded), or make even more granual selection and define what external disks to add/remove.

 Is there any ETA on this new driver implementation? It feels like beggining of the long jurney, it will proboly not be backwards compatible with Monterey or even Ventura.

Any idea why my RAID5 is slower on M1 than my 14 years old Mac pro with hacked USB 3.1 card? Is it apple handicapping it somehow? Or SoftRAID driver is slowing it down during parity creaton? RAID0 is slightly faster, but RAID5 write is way slower. it is 150MB/s slower during write, this CPU should be flying, itis not even utilized that much so it must be something asle. Are you guys working on more efficient driver?

@sebo2000

I am sure Apple has had feedback from all the audio/video editing companies. What is needed are "driver kits" for each type of driver, which may (if we are all fortunate) be released/announced at this years Developers conference.

If done right, the transition should be seamless, as older OS's will use the old method, new OS's will use the new. What will happen over time, is new products will only use the new driver installation methods, however.

We are seeing good performance on M1. (not the first gen Air, which has some limitations).
Are you using the same hardware for testing? Using a m1 compatible benchmark? That is often a problem, AJA and Black Magic were terrible on m1 until both were updated.

SoftRAID is very efficient, what we are trying is to make the parity calculations faster in a future release.

@softraid-support

Can’t wait for those user drivers, I wish to add something new to my storage but at this time I think I’m going to wait until new solution is built, till then I will have to deal with what I have.

If it comes to speed testing I’m using BlackMagic 3.4.2 on both Mac pro 5.1 and Mac Mini M1

I picked RAID5 with HFS+

RAID 5

HFS – Mac Mini M1 – 325W/550R (325 write is slow, Read is fine but Write could be better)

HFS – MAC PRO – 460W/480R

RAID5 but on APFS Mac Min M1 – 540W/560R (this is acceptable and fast, but APFS for HDD is not the best)

For comparison other tests:

There is no difference in RAID 0

HFS+ - 620W/750R (RAID 0 same speed on both computers M1 and Mac Pro 5.1)

APFS – 735W/730R (Tested only on Mac Mini M1)

RAID 4

HFS Mac Mini  M1 – 320W/590R (again slow Write)

RAID 0 – 250W/250R (I’m not sure why so slow when connected via USB-A on Mac Mini M1, tried 7 different cables, no matter what I do it is always capped to 250, on Mac Pro same cable gives 620W/730R)

Single drive speed 198W/198R

Both Raid 5 and 4 write seems a bit slow hence I asked if there are any issues with driver, I even disabled spotlight to make sure nothing is in the way.

@sebo2000

the USBA is easily explained, as that is a USB 3.0 port and 250 is about all it can do. (from specs: Two USB-A ports (up to 5 Gb/s))

It should do up to almost 400MB/s, but I guess USB overhead.

I prefer AJA for benchmarking, it is more consistent.
we set it to any 5K or higher video, RGBA codec, 16GB or 64GB file size, and enable the Dual DMA engine in Settings.
you can get it by downloading AJA components:  https://www.aja.com/products/io-4k-plus#support

I intend to post some benchmarks in the next month or so on a thread here, users ask for it.