Dear Support Team, I hope you can help me with a frustrating experience 🙄
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Brand-new Thunderblade V4 with 8TB on a MacBook Pro 13β (M1) running Mac OS X 12.1
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First problem was current SoftRaid 6.2 Version not able to create raid due to error message βunable to create filesystem on this volumeβ which appears to be common by looking at different posts here.
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All security Settings double Checked (3rd Party extensions in recovery mode, Systempanel for drivers, extension and full hard disk access for app)
Then upgraded to Latest Beta 6.2.1 b3 Β (Same Hardware Setup, same security settings)
Raid could be created without issues, Diskspeed 2100MB/2000MB in a Raid 4, even faster when using Raid 0 (both as expected)
Downgraded to 6.2 drivers and application, Raid still works fine but Diskspeed changes to 1800MB/900MB in Raid 4
Diskspeed varies upon Restart frequently between 2100MB/2000MB and 1800MB/900MB without changing Software, Drivers or Hardware Setup
Upgraded to Latest Beta 6.2.1 b3 Β (Same Hardware Setup) with same Diskspeed behavior as described previously
As a final test I upgraded the Mac OS X to 12.2 Beta and repeated ALL of the tests above with the same (frustrating) results.
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Bottom line: I spend about 8 hours and 50+ reboots resulting in that I can only use the SoftRaid Beta Version and having too slow disk speed most of the times. Interesting observation by the way: sometimes (not always) the raid is still available AFTER the complete deinstallation of SoftRaid and the reboot. Seems that are driver artifacts left after deinstallation.Β
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I am a professional Apple tech expert, so I would rule out any human errors in the process ;-)
The driver install, you figured out, so we can skip that. macOS security is pretty rigid and its not always clear to users what is wrong.
What happened when you uninstalled, macOS did not remove the driver in /Library/StagedExtensions, which is what actually loads at startup, not what is in /Library/Extensions. This is a bug since Catalina, and Monterey was supposed to fix this, but it has not fixed it completely.
the way to tell what driver is actually loading is this terminal command:
sudo kextstat -b com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID
Now to your problem with performance.
I do not think we changed anything in the driver from 6.2 to 6.2.1 b3 that would affect performance, so this is an interesting result.
Let me get back to you, it may take a day, I want to run similar tests first, to be sure.
BTW: 6.2.1 is coming relatively soon, it depends on how ambitious we want this update to be, as to how far away the release is. While it would be nice to address several outstanding issues, I think 6.2.1 is not going to have many more changes before release.
@softraid-support Thanks a lot for the fast and detailed feedback :-)Β
Regarding the speed issue - it occurs both on 6.2 and 6.2.1 b3. Sometimes the speed is normal, but 95% of the time itΒ΄s only reduced to the figures I mentioned. So itΒ΄s nothing that would have been related to either of the versions specifically but occurs on BOTH.
In addition - I tried both TB Ports on the MacBook, I tried it with only the Thunderblade attached as well as Thunderblade attached AND a second device on the other TB Port. The Speed Issue is not related to any of these combinations ;-)
The only thing I have NOT tried yet is to recreate the Raid partition or use another Raid Level than 4...
I ran a set of tests to confirm there are no real speed differences between 6.2 and 6.2.1, which is good.
I know the performance issues. They may be related to the M1, I will try to dig up more details on this, but M1 behaves very differently, and we had problems in the original M1 mini getting good numbers.
At least you can know this is a generic problem, not specific to your hardware.
