[Sticky] Running Big Sur (beta) on Intel Macs

Thank you very much for getting back to me so quickly and that link now works.

I've unmounted my RAID installed the beta version and launched it and i can see the partitions and drives within the soft raid app but its no longer coming up on my desktop with or without any soft raid app running....I have EVERYTHING on my Raid so I'm somewhat concerned....I'm terrified to touch anything in case my drives get wiped...please can someone advise ASAP...wish i hadn't touched it!...now cannot work and got photo shoot tomorrow ...major bummer....do i revalidate the RAID as a whole on the right hand side column?...is that why its no longer mounting?...aplogies for my ignorance but i cannot afford to make a mistake as all my work this year is on the RAID.

Many Thanks

Alex

Panic over!...RAID mounted after restart!....crikey...hate that feeling...dang this Digital world! ;o)

Sounds like you need a backup plan, however!

hi there

I've recently purchased a Thunderbay 4 (thunderbolt 4) and I'm trying to get setup on my Intel iMac 2019 with Big Sur.

I've got the BETA version running and the GUI can see my new drive OK (after a couple of reboots etc!). 

I've now got a new shiny drive to initialise.  Upon right clicking and selecting this option from the GUI I get an error "The disk is currently being used by another application."   There's nothing else I can see that's open and trying to use the disk?

Any guidance would be appreciated!

Good work folks!  Installed the beta on a 3 drive mirror using a Thunderbay 4 enclosure. Works just fine. Converted a built in icon to icns format and now have good image on the desktop. replaced the blank.   

👍 👍 👍 

@softraid-support Sounds good. Is the beta version ready for production use or should I wait for the final version to be released? I'd like to finally use my Thunderbay mini as a Time Machine backup so I won't be unmounting it or worrying that much about seeing the desktop icon. I just need it to work with APFS and Time Machine, which, depending on your answer, I will start testing today.

Thanks

The actual SoftRAID driver is production quality. You can create an APFS volume with the application, but full support is not there. You should not run into any bugs with normal use of the volume.

@softraid-support Started testing Time Machine on my RAID 5 configuration. I checked the box to use both my existing TM disk and the new one. Once I set it up, Time Machine generated a desktop icon for the RAID disk.

Thanks for the feedback. I am still investigating the root cause of the icon bug. It has to do with a security action in the OS, but I have not found a workaround for it yet.

this is an HFS volume? Is there only volume on the disk? If you manually unmount it first does it work then?

If it were APFS the 6.0 beta cannot unmount it from inside the app, which causes the same error message.

Also, if you restart, unmount the volume, can you initialize it then?

I have no success to use my softRAID OWC Thunderbay 4 mini on my MacMini with Big Sure: It will be every time "inactivated". I installed it again and again. I do all the steps from your papers "Volumes Not Mounting After SoftRAID Update" and instructions for T2 chip mac. Every time the tame result.

If I put my OWC Thunderbay 4 mini on my MBP with Big Sure w/o any softRAID- driver, the RAID will be shown on the desc and the file can opened in finder.

What ist wrong? Pls. help me.

@softraid-support My icon initially was blank and then after a couple of restarts it magically reappeared. <shrug>

@softraid-support I've tried mounting/unmounting manually / restarting etc. 

it's a brand new disk.  I tried to initialise it before I formatted it.  No luck,  and then I did a single volume HFS format with the disk utility and tried to initialise again (no luck again).

Note that the APP does unmount the drive,  waits a few seconds,  then tells me it can't initialise.

Does SoftRaid 6.0 beta (latest version) support Catalina 10.15.7 without any known major issues? I need to create APFS volumes. Thanks

Yes. The problems are in the user interface, where we do not fully support APFS yet. But you can create an APFS volume and it will work fine. When you want to unmount it, you need to use the desktop to unmount. There are no issues with the volume itself.