Hi there,
Currently I have a 3 disk Raid 5 running on a Mac Pro using the most recent version of Softraid Pro 5. I am planning on adding a Windows 10 partition to the same machine and just wanted to check on the expected behaviour of my Mac formatted Raid 5.
I am not too fussed about it not being accessible in Windows 10, but I definitely want to make sure the integrity of the raid won’t suffer before proceeding.
I am pretty sure you cannot make this work.
Windows requires a special boot partition map. "Boot Camp" emulates this, so a Mac can boot into Windows. Because of recent macOS changes, SoftRAID itself is no longer a bootable driver, so you cannot startup on a SoftRAID volume. You cannot either make a Boot Camp partition on a SoftRAID volume.
Your only/best option is either:
Use VMware/Parallels, etc to create a Windows partition and run the VM machine for windows.
Get an external drive for Windows starting up.
In the near future, SoftRAID will support RAID 5 for Windows, we do not currently support this, but are working on it. Then you can have Windows and Mac access the same RAID 5 volume.
@softraid-support I should have clarified - the raid5 is only used for archiving purposes. Both the OSX and Windows drives are entirely seperate to it. I’m just unsure what to expect will happen with the Raid5 when booting into Windows.
Until we release SoftRAID for Windows with RAID 5 support, it cannot mount.
its possible Windows might crash, without installing either SoftRAID or MacDrive, however. As long as you do not format drives, etc, in Windows, it will just be disks that do not mount