Cannot Resize Volume - with lots of free space

All your drives are different sizes. the smallest drive determines the volume maximum capacity when creating a RAID volume. You can create additional volumes with the remaining capacity, but remember each partition in a volume in RAID is the same size. (some hardware pseudo-RAID like Drobo lets you mix sizes)

Note: we also have a resize bug in SoftRAID at the moment, that you cannot work around in Monterey, you would need to connect your volume to a Big Sur or older macOS and use 6.0.5.

Thank you for your response.

Could you clarify on this: The smallest of my drives is a 6TB, which says it has 2TB remaining. My understanding is that the RAID 5 should be able to increase capacity by 2TB on each drive because the 6TB has that much room remaining. 

Is there something I'm missing in this equation?

@aaronraid 

Let me assume you have 6 8 10 10 TB disks. And you created your volume originally with all 4TB drives. Your volume is 12TB.

Your new maximum volume is 6*3=18TB. (smallest disk times number of drives minus one)

Currently you need 6.0.5 to resize the volume (requiring Big Sur or older, back to High Sierra)

if you have 6.2.1 installed on the system you bring your disks to, you do not need to install the 6.0.5 driver, just run the app, resize ,and quit.

Thank you for your response!

The size of my drives are [6, 8, 8, 12, 12, 18, 18, 18]. Using the equation it should be 6*7=42TB. 

However, SoftRaid 6.2.1 says the Max Size can only be 28TB. Is this also related to the bug not letting 6.2.1 resize the drives? Or is there another problem going on?

Thank you!

@aaronraid 

One of the drives must have another volume on it. Attach a support file and I can check.

Thanks! Just generate a .sr_supt file from SoftRaid and upload it here? (Double checking that won't have personal info uploaded to a public forum.)

@aaronraid 

Yes, the data in a support file is pretty generic.

Great! Here it is!

@aaronraid 

From what I can see you should be able to resize the volume. Do you have a Big Sur or older computer to try it on, with 6.0.5 of SoftRAID? (you can even use 5.8.4 if you have a much older system)

That is good to hear that nothing is broken on my end. 

Sadly, no. My main computers are M1 variants. I do have an old Mac Pro (2012), but when I plugged in the Thunderbay it said thunderbolt devices are not supported and it would not connect the drive.

I guess I'll need to wait for an update for SoftRaid.

Just checking in to see if there is any movement on this bug (not being able to resize volume). @softraid-support

@aaronraid 

Not yet, unfortunately the only option we have is resizing is using 6.0.5 and Big Sur or older systems. We need to get the resize tool working and Xcode (developers toolkit changed) no longer helps us do this.

I am worried that I may have just hit this bug...

Over the past few days I have been replacing and rebuilding 4 x 2Tb drives with 4 x 4Tb drives. One drive at a time I've been swapping out, with the plan being to get all four drives up to 4 Tb then resize my volume up from the previous 6Tb maximum.

I've now completed the drive exchange, and on trying to resize SoftRAID is telling me that 6 Tb is the maximum.

In SoftRAID it shows each drives with `size: 4 TB - available 2 TB`.

Is there going to be any way for me to resize my single volume? Or have I just wasted money on a bunch of new drives?

I am running SoftRAID 6.3, Driver 6.3 on an M1 mac mini running Monterey 12.5.

Help would be greatly appreciated!

I don't have any Macs running Big Sur. My drives are formatted as RAID 5/HFS+.

I do have a Windows PC. Would I have success installing SoftRAID on that PC, resizing with that, then reconnecting it to the mac with Monterey?