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

OK to update to Big Sur 14.3 with the beta 6 software?

mike

Question... With 5.x I always had to disable Prefs -> Energy Saver -> Put hard disks to sleep when possible due to it being a T3 external SSD which for some reason it caused issues with SoftRaid.  Wondering if that was ever fixed so that I can have it put the disks to sleep now or not reliably?  I submitted a number of support requests about this previously for reference.  Allowing it to put the disks to sleep would randomly cause a rash of SoftRaid error dialogs about disks no longer available and requiring reboot to recover.

The problem with disk locking is this is a serious macOS bug. It primarily affects RAID, as there are more disks per volume and if they get changed, catastrophic data corruption could occur. The alert from SoftRAID PREVENTS corruption by forcing you to restart.

When a disk is connect to the mac, it is assigned a bsd (disk) number. This number is permanent until the disk is removed, or the machine restarted. The bug is during sleep, macOS occasionally will renumber some disks. It is being looked at within Apple, but probably not with the highest priority. The SoftRAID driver cannot renumber the disk to "fix" the problem. Only a restart can fix it.

We even see it over thunderbolt, when users have USB devices connected. They should not be related.

Fortunately this event is pretty rare, but the users who get the disk renumber alert (locked volume warning), seem to get it with some frequency. Its not clear what is triggering this.

@mikeojohnson

You may have mis-typed the numbers. Yes it is good to update as far as SoftRAID is concerned, with beta 43. 11.1 has been released and it has fixed several bugs already.

If it was one disk in an enclosure (like the Mercury Elite Pro Quad), then it could be the enclosure. IF it was a standalone disk, it could be the disk, or the cable or connection. USB rarely does the disconnect thing, but I have seen it. Its mostly a Thunderbolt issue.

Hello

I am running SoftRaid 6.0.1 b43 on macOS Big Sur 11.1 (Intel) - I formatted a disc to APFS, it worked for a day then I had some data corruption issue trying to make bootable Carbon Copy Cloner backup, now I can't format/ mount the volume neither with SoftRaid nor with Disk Utility. Please assist. Thanks

@softraid-support not rare for me happens a few times a week, also soft raid drives seem to cause kernel panics

panic(cpu 2 caller 0xffffff8012f56d9d): "biodone already"@/AppleInternal/BuildRoot/Library/Caches/com.apple.xbs/Sources/xnu/xnu-6153.141.2.2/bsd/vfs/vfs_bio.c:4177
Backtrace (CPU 2), Frame : Return Address
0xffffff8844033b50 : 0xffffff8012d1868d
0xffffff8844033ba0 : 0xffffff8012e52ab5
0xffffff8844033be0 : 0xffffff8012e4463e
0xffffff8844033c30 : 0xffffff8012cbea40
0xffffff8844033c50 : 0xffffff8012d17d57
0xffffff8844033d50 : 0xffffff8012d18147
0xffffff8844033da0 : 0xffffff80134bf2bc
0xffffff8844033e10 : 0xffffff8012f56d9d
0xffffff8844033e60 : 0xffffff7f9924d3af
0xffffff8844033ec0 : 0xffffff7f9924bab4
0xffffff8844033ee0 : 0xffffff801342ad4d
0xffffff8844033f30 : 0xffffff801342961e
0xffffff8844033f70 : 0xffffff8013428c16
0xffffff8844033fa0 : 0xffffff8012cbe13e
Kernel Extensions in backtrace:
com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID(5.8.4)[D7D1A553-AAAE-33DD-8344-D23C859380A5]@0xffffff7f9922f000->0xffffff7f9926afff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily(2.1)[CB3CB8CA-881A-37F3-A96B-8063CAF0476D]@0xffffff7f93665000

@softraid-support not at all I mainly had the issue with all USB C Drobos and sold them since and switched to OWC Thunderbolt 3 which has reduced frequency but not solved it. Strangely never happened with my Promise Raid so would say has something to do with your Drivers?

@steve223

If you plug the Promise behind the Thunderbay, and I suspect it will happen. (if the Thunderbolt bus is resetting)

Interesting it was happening with USB, which should not be ejecting, USB has other issues, but disk ejects are not really one.

For a test, swap the Promise cable with your Thunderbolt cable and see if the eject follows the cable or stays with the enclosure.

Beta 6 is not yet compatible with APFS volumes - only for RAID 0/1

Beta 6 launches in a demo mode. Says I have 44 days remaining.

I have a license for SoftRAID XT with my OWC drive - can this be applied??

You can create APFS volumes. The user interface does not work correctly and cannot unmount them, but they work just fine.

Yes just use the beta. It replaces ALL versions of SoftRAID. Don't try to enter your serial, beta versions do not use serial numbers.

@softraid-support Ah, so the full version, when released next year, will allow serial number input as normal??

Installed Beta and upgraded to Big Sur yesterday - my 2 ThunderBlade v4 drives (both HFS+ in RAID 0) running perfectly, as is the software ;)

Since switching to the beta (b42, b43) and Big Sur (11.0, 11.1), I get a single I/O error warning immediately on boot after shutdown or after restart.  I do not get I/O errors while using my devices over days or weeks of uptime- only right at boot.  I did not get this error in Catalina prior to upgrade, and when I still had a Catalina volume to boot from I did not get the error upon boot after choosing to boot from the Catalina volume.

Mac Pro 6,1.

OWC 4M2 with OWC Mercury M.2 R2 SSD.

Did you clear the IO counter, so this is a new error every time, or it is SoftRAID reporting the prior error?