High Sierra 10.13.1 update and Softraid 5.6.3

BTW: Fusion drives are essentially a fancy version of concatenation. There is no redundancy and no striping. The only real benefit is the most frequently accessed data elements are moved to the SSD.

High Sierra converts Apple branded SSD's automatically to APFS when installing High Sierra. the rest are not converted. Fusion drive are not supported by APFS at all yet.

(But you can install High Sierra onto non Apple branded, APFS formatted disks - for clean installs. You cannot directly install onto non standard volumes, such as SoftRAID or Apple RAID volumes at this time.)

Its still a bit confusing.

BTW: Fusion drives are essentially a fancy version of concatenation. There is no redundancy and no striping. The only real benefit is the most frequently accessed data elements are moved to the SSD.

High Sierra converts Apple branded SSD's automatically to APFS when installing High Sierra. the rest are not converted. Fusion drive are not supported by APFS at all yet.

(But you can install High Sierra onto non Apple branded, APFS formatted disks - for clean installs. You cannot directly install onto non standard volumes, such as SoftRAID or Apple RAID volumes at this time.)

Its still a bit confusing.

Also makes it difficult for those of us who have chosen various offerings and need HS for the upgraded Pro Apps like FCPX. If not for those, I'd stay on El Cap until better RAID support is offered. My Macbook Pro is on HS, so I can get to to the Pro Apps there.

As I think I mentioned I had an Enterprise level Sr. Tech tell me it would upgrade from El Cap to HS on a hardware based RAID 0 PCI/e card without issue. Wish I could believe it would be that easy.. :-( He said the install would leave it as non-APFS (since not Apple hardware) and proceed with the upgrade. If I thought it would be 100% safe to try having El Cap backups, I might give it a go. Just don't want to kill the PCI/e based card or disable it from booting because HS is installed and without a path back to El Cap..

We note that Apple is no longer going to support ANY booting from RAID volumes in the future. They do not support it now, and any queries we send are not responded to.

So booting from SoftRAID will soon be not possible, we fear, and as it is, we are not going to be able to actively support (research) booting issues, as we will get no support from Apple on this.

Most hardware RAID should boot from High Sierra, but we have seen instances where that may be problematic also.

OS X appears to be moving towards a consumer focus, with little interest from Apple in servers, or high availability solutions.

We note that Apple is no longer going to support ANY booting from RAID volumes in the future. They do not support it now, and any queries we send are not responded to.

So booting from SoftRAID will soon be not possible, we fear, and as it is, we are not going to be able to actively support (research) booting issues, as we will get no support from Apple on this.

Most hardware RAID should boot from High Sierra, but we have seen instances where that may be problematic also.

OS X appears to be moving towards a consumer focus, with little interest from Apple in servers, or high availability solutions.

Does the new Mac Pro that's coming offer any help? I don't understand this move away from RAID as a boot drive at all (hardware and/or software). :-(

I doubt the new Mac Pro will help at all.

All we know is we have been told Apple is locking down the OS, and only Apple Disk Utility standard volumes will be supported as startup volumes.

System Administrators have been told publicly that their tools for rolling out mass deployments of standardized computers (schools, universities, large corporations, et al) will eventually be prohibited. The future of macOS seems to be locking the OS to hardware. How long this takes is unknown, but it is coming.

There does not seem to be any interest inside Apple in supporting booting from RAID volumes. Neither Disk Utility, nor SoftRAID RAID volumes. Whether booting is something that eventually fails from bugs, or is outright prevented in a future OS release, we do not know.

While SoftRAID 5.6.3 and 10.13.x still supports booting (by cloning volumes), we will probably be unable to fix future startup bugs. Its a shame.

OS X appears to be moving towards a consumer focus, with little interest from Apple in servers, or high availability solutions.

All we know is we have been told Apple is locking down the OS, and only Apple Disk Utility standard volumes will be supported as startup volumes.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts from above. This is something we noticing for quite some time too. Apple doesn’t seem to be interested in Pro Users anymore. They are killing a complete ecosystem and loyal customer base. It’s a shame.