The drives are good models, no problem there.

Can you live with it until Apple fixes/gives us a fix for the RAID 5 issue?

@scottgillies 

Hmmm. Should not have been, it probably depends on the drives. Attach a SoftRAID support file, I can see if I have access to your drives.

On the other hand, since 80% of activity on volumes are reads, it should work out well enough.

Well, obviously I don't mind increased read speed... but not at the expense of write speed. Tried more tests after a reboot and copying the data back to the RAID. See attached screengrabs and the SoftRAID support file. Note that the Blackmagic test shows higher throughput. But the AJA test still shows a reduced write performance.

Hmmm. Should not have been, it probably depends on the drives. Attach a SoftRAID support file, I can see if I have access to your drives.

On the other hand, since 80% of activity on volumes are reads, it should work out well enough.

I decided to spend the (arduous) amount of time backing up the contents of my RAID5 (all 10TB of it) to external bare drives in order to reformat my Thunderbay 4 as RAID4 as you have recommended in this forum so I wouldn't have to keep pulling drives and rebuilding the RAID just to get it to mount. You indicated in previous posts that there should be no impact on performance.

After doing this, the write speeds have dropped by 27%. The read speeds increased by 11%. This is hardly "no impact". See attached AJA speed tests.

Thoughts?

We are waiting "impatiently" for this to get resolved. Hopefully soon. Sorry for all users who need to do this, but we are in a holding mode for a short while longer.

Also, I updated to Monterey 12.1 and this had no effect on the crash (others had posted that this fixed the issue for them?)

Waiting (patiently) for a proper fix to this significantly impactful issue.

I tried again and cannot seem to successfully attach a .txt file to a forum message. This is a pure text file saved out of BBEdit. It won't let me attach a standard .PNG Screen Shot either.

You can attach .txt files. Note that text edit often saves txt as txt.rtf or something. Maybe that was it.

This is the same panic we have been working on. I am hoping a resolution comes soon, we have a reproducing computer inside Apple engineering, so progress should be forthcoming.

I have not seen (to my knowledge) a "clean" install of Monterey with this panic on M1, but it is certainly possible and easily something that occurred or was installed after purchase. We do not know the trigger yet.

Does your system crash if you remove one drive at startup? Can you insert that drive after a few minutes and it rebuilds with out crashing?

Got a new MacBook Pro that obviously came preinstalled with Monterey. I have a Thunderbay 4 enclosure with 4X10GB formatted as HFS+ RAID5. It was working swimmingly for several weeks. I did a reboot (to complete clearing the system font cache) and the machine crashed after every attempted reboot (with a short flash of a magenta screen). Eventually the Mac disabled the SoftRAID extension, which allowed me to reboot but did not allow the drive to mount.

I assume this is the same kernel panic issue that is happening with other users – I've read the threads. I'm, attaching the Apple Crash Report and the SoftRAID Tech Support Info document just to confirm.

Any suggestions aside from what I've read about? Copying a massive amount of data to a spare drive (which I don't have) to restripe as RAID4 is not an option. I've already tried SoftRAID beta driver 6.2.1 b3 and that did not help. The whole "clean system install" is not a reliable option – this machine was less than three weeks out from a clean install (no system migration assistant used). Not thrilled about doing another clean install (no small task) only to have the crashes show up again in a couple of weeks.

 EDIT: I cannot seem to attach the Apple crash report. I get a forum error "Filetype Not allowed" for either a .rtf, .txt or .zip file. I'll paste the first bit of the crash report here: