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

The app does no harm sitting there. You can delete it any time you want. Only one SoftRAID driver can be installed in the system at a time.

My AJA 4GB file write/read results in SoftRAID 6.0 Driver installed in MacOS Catalina 10.15.7(19H15). Similar measurements in Big Sur OS release. With APFS formatted Disks/Volumes RAID4 Array of 2.5TB (all 5x500GB SSD's).

.

Run this command in terminal:

sudo kextstat -b com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID

Lets make sure you have the right driver loading.

Those write speeds are slow.

Looks like it...

Index Refs Address            Size       Wired      Name (Version) UUID <Linked Against>

  126    0 0xffffff7f84b5c000 0x41000    0x41000    com.softraid.driver.SoftRAID (6.0.1b42) 0BB5508B-EACB-3E26-9D2B-F2075E2F2687 <28 6 5 3>

Two other things:

1. The internal drive on the MBP has always been 7x faster in write speed. Read speed is and has been 2x faster. 
2. The same single ended device attached on the same bus has always been an order of magnitude slower (Read & Write) than the RAID array. 

Does this tell you something? If so, what, please be specific.

I just installed the beta from the link posted earlier in this thread. After launching the app I got a notification that there were 32 days left in my 60 day free trial. 🤔 🤔 

Is this the expected behavior?

Will I get a notification when a new beta is available?

Without the app I see that my drives still mount but won’t unmount properly. Trying to unmount a single partition from Disk Utility results in all partitions on the drive unmounting. Never have this issue with unmounting from the lite app.

I was not aware a SoftRAID 6 beta was finally available. I uninstalled SoftRAID and shut down my Thunderbay mini RAID before upgrading to Big Sur. I haven't used the RAID since I bought it because it won't let me format the HDDs as APFS, which is what my Fusion drive and other OWC RAID (with HDDs) are formatted as. I'm hoping something will finally work so I can actually use this RAID. How do I get the beta version for testing? Thanks

We will be doing public beta's until 6.0 is ready, which could take a few months. New betas will be released as we go.

here is the link to the beta: ​​​​​​​SoftRAID 6

You can create APFS volumes. You cannot boot from a SoftRAID volume, Apple has removed this capability permanently.

There will be more betas, the app will notify you.

You should be able to unmount from the desktop. If you created an APFS volume, the beta version of the SoftRAID app cannot unmount it yet, so select it in the Finder and unmount. There is a lot of work to be done on the user interface for APFS.

Depending on your SSD's, I would not expect 1600 reads and only 600 writes. This is an SSD issue. SoftRAID will write at full speed of the hardware if your CPU is modern. I have seen for example some SSD's which after some use, get pretty slow. Do a disk "Certify" on them, and they are fast again. Has to do with TRIM, and other write idiosyncrasies with flash technology. But most 4 drive RAID 4 volumes should be pretty equal read/writes.

@softraid-support Thanks. Need to include a space after sr_beta in your link above. I know Apple doesn't allow booting from SoftRAID volumes. It's on just about every web page for RAIDs sold on MacSales. I only care about the APFS volume capability.

All of which begs the question:  Apple announced Big Sur in June 2020, and what _exactly_ have you laggards been doing since then?  4 ½ months later you only have a _beta_?!  Did you go on vacation and drink **Coronas**?  (Ha.)  What kind of software development house are you?  Why is it that most other mission critical apps have a _real_ version that _works_ when the Big Sur GA is released?  Seriously, all (deserved) sarcasm aside, why the delay in getting a SR GA version?

I just installed the beta version and when launching got an error message. Do I report errors here or someplace else? Thanks

Sorry, I didn't see all the other comments about the URL for the beta. It appears people are submitting some questions about the operation. When I installed the beta on Big Sur 11.0.1, it gave me an error message saying "System Extension Blocked" A program tried to load new system extension(s) signed by "Unidentified - Scan2Mac" that need to be updated by the developer. --Is this from SoftRAID or someone else?

I initialized my disks then set up a RAID 5, APFS with four HDDs. "An error occurred creating the volume "test RAID". SoftRAID was unable to create a file system on this volume. I'm now verifying the (brand new) disks. We'll see if that finds anything.

Your message concerns me. Where did you get SoftRAID from? our direct download?

That is scanner software and not related to SoftRAID whatsoever. What you want to see is OWC, as the identified developer.

You can report errors here and if required, we can move them off forum for faster response times.