[Sticky] Important notes regarding Big Sur and SoftRAID

There will be a free upgrade period. I do not know what it will be, but it will probably not be announced until we are closer to shipping.

I have made my opinion known, so lets see how it goes. Complain if a decision is made you do not like, lets not complain in advance.

@softraid-support OK that really sucks as it was part of the point of CCC and using SoftRaid together.  CCC does seem to allow APFS replicator to replicate the boot disk to an APFS volume of SoftRaid but fails at the very last step in the process which must be actually making it bootable.  What a cluster this whole APFS and BigSur and security on steroids this is.  Would be nice if they would allow users these securities as options for those of us who aren't so paranoid.  It's like what happens when nobody has enough common sense to do an honest cost-benefit analysis on anything.

@dfortney

There will be multiple updates. SoftRAID will notify you automatically.

@softraid-support cheers

@softraid-support

So after a lot of trial and error with all your suggestions and some from other sites. I decided to just wipe the drive and reinstall Catalina.  After reinstalling, my OWC Thunderbay reinstalled and mounted without issue.  I'll wait to get the official word from you that SoftRaid works with Big Sur.  Also, I'm debating about switching to a M1 Mac mini at that time, will SoftRaid work with that as well?

Thank you again for all your time and effort.  It means great deal to me.

@jmapalad

It appears that a small percentage, maybe 1% of Big Sur users, have the issue you had. I do not yet have the cause figured out.

As to the M1, we should have something soon. Its frustrating, but it is day by day, until we reolve the issue. it was working fine on the prototype, but the final release of the M1 and Big Sur, something is not allowing the driver to load. The M1 driver works fine, once it loads. ;-)

I just would like to point out that the user frustration here ("Big Sur upgrade fiasco") is that Softraid made the decision to supply inadequate resources to enable support for an operating system upgrade that was available to developers in JUNE and was released to the public 28 DAYS ago.  It doesn't help frustration levels when support has been stating for 2 weeks it will be "any day now".  This is not complaining in advance, this is complaining about a decision that has been made for the past 5 months.

Good software takes time. The M1 is an issue because what we got for a prototype is different than what was shipped. It doesn't work as before. We are working on the M1.

We are going to have a beta for Big Sur for a while, as the user interface needs a major facelift, which are are going to give it, plus support for RAID 6, and other features.

the driver is solid, it is actually bundled with Big Sur (a limited version)

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Thank you for the reply.  I understand this is highly complex I/O level stuff that is important and, if not developed correctly, would be disastrous.  I assume that the bundled driver is NOT compatible with M1 chips or does it work as with Intel chips?

@dfortney absolutely agree with your statement.

Posted by: @softraid-support

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Spice level: 🔥

Totally satisfied with this level of support for a niche product, thank you for your work!!

The SoftRAID driver worked with prototype hardware. Not with the release. That is why there is a delay. I was sure it is something straightforward, but maybe it is not. I am not in engineering, so do not understand the level of difficulty involved in this, only the time it takes to get it done.

Thanks for the updates on the development.

Is the Dev team waiting on Apple to release their next Mac OS 11 update, or are they still working with Apple on that infamous driver to make the drive mount on M1 (or am I out to lunch?)?

Its actually in our hands now. Progress. But I don't think M1 support will be in the b43 beta.

alright, so is there anyway for me to mount my Thunderbay 4 raid5 (thunderbolt3) without Softraid?