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I'm wondering if there is a performance hit in using SoftRaid 6 Beta on APFS - I have a PCIe Sonnet card with 4 x Samsung Evo 970+, with RAID 0 (striped) on a 2019 MacPro and have not seen any improvement in speed on SoftRaid over the standard Apple Disk Utility software RAID. Using one of the 16x slots, nothing else hitting I/O, but not seeing the sorts of stats which Sonnet mentioned as possible. Stripe unit size is 64K.
Just wondering what sort of speeds I should be expecting.
With RAID 0, both Apple RAID and SoftRAID will have similar performance. Note that APFS is about 30 % slower than HFS on SSD's and up to 50% slower on HDD's.
Using for instance AJA System test, 5K video, RGBA settings, you will get about 7GB/s on the Sonnet as far as I know.
@softraid-support "Note that APFS is about 30 % slower than HFS on SSD's and up to 50% slower on HDD's."
Is this really true? (I have not tested this personally)...If so, YIKES!
AFPS fragments files like crazy. So yes, it is slower.
@softraid-support Yes that is true, especially for HDDs but I was under the impression that this was not supposed to impact SSDs, but rather a benefit... but a 30% decrease in speed is not insignificant... so that is surprising.
That is what we have seen in some testing on the file system. Users probably won't notice 30%. We are leaving this for others to investigate, we have to get SoftRAID 6 out the door!
@softraid-support any thoughts on by when SoftRaid 6 will be ready or by when Big Sur support for Softraid will be fully available
b42 seems to think that my APFS volume is both: "unmounted" and an "unknown format" - yet is both mounted and working fine as APFS, as created from within b42 itself. Perhaps a bug?
the UI does not fully support APFS yet.
I do not expect 6.0 to be released for quite some time, we will do a public beta for Big Sur.
"quite some time"
6 months? a year?
v6 has been in development for so long that I feel 10.15 may be the last OS I am able to use with my RAID systems.
6.0 b42 works with Big Sur.
There is a lot going on, so it has been distracting efforts on SoftRAID 6.0. We did get a Windows version out, and several small products. But we have started full on development on Big Sur, including ARM development. But the actual final release of 6.0 is going to take a while.
@softraid-support It seems that with the Big Sur release candidate that was pushed today, things are no longer working? I have an Accelsior card in my 2019 Mac Pro, which I've been using fine over the last several macOS betas with SoftRaid 6.0 b42. Today I installed the release candidate, and while SoftRaid can still launch, it no longer mounts the Accelsior 4M2. Anything I can do on my end to get this working?
Try the steps in this document:
https://srforums.wpengine.com/pages/support/5.8_Volumes_Not_Mounting.pdf
Let me know if the security and Full Disk Access resolve it.