Have tried SoftRAID demo on and off for a couple of years and it doesn’t work for me

I desperately want to use SoftRAID on a RAID 0 made of four m.2 ACHI Samsung SM951S 256GB SSDs in a Amfeltec Squid m.2 Carrier Card .

I’ve had this RAID in my 4.1 (upgraded to 5.1) Mac Pro for about five years and about once a year I download a demo of SoftRAID, install the driver and convert the AppleRAID to a SoftRAID volume. I don’t remember the first version of SoftRAID that I tried, but it was v5 up to v5.8.2. I believe I started trying to use SoftRAID when I was on Mavericks or Yosemite, now I’m on Mojave (and my graphics card is a flashed AMD Radeon R9 280x).

The problems have been the same regardless of OS or SoftRAID version. My computer won’t Restart or Shut Down without a hard restart when the SoftRAID driver is installed. This has been the one constant in every attempt at using the demo version.

The good news is that once the volume has been converted to a SoftRAID volume the write speeds automatically increase dramatically. Here’s a AppleRAID vs SoftRAID speed comparison video that I made last week . However, having to hard shut down my system isn’t acceptable.

Possibly I have an old extension (Kext) that’s conflicting with the SoftRAID driver. Perhaps the PCIe carrier board has some hardware conflict. Maybe it’s the video card. I don’t know. But before I invest in SoftRAID (something I’m very eager to do), I’d really like to solve this issue. I’m going to list every third party extension in a follow up post.

I should mention that whenever I boot into Safe Mode, everything is fine.

I’ve looked over the SoftRAID logs and they don’t tell much. For instance, while using 5.8.1 I upgraded to the 5.8.2 driver and different problems showed up. Under 5.8.2 I wasn’t able to convert the SoftRAID volume back to an AppleRAID volume. SoftRAID just sat there with no messages in the Console app other than it was converting (which it never did). I had to hard shut down after the Finder became unresponsive. I was unable to remove the 5.8.2 SoftRAID driver. Finally I managed to get back to the 5.8.1 driver and during a Safe Boot was able to convert back to AppleRAID and remove SoftRAID.

Now my system restarts and shuts down like normal.

How can I troubleshoot and fix this long-standing issue before I invest in SoftRAID? I know that spending tech support time on a non-customer is not preferable, but consider me a SoftRAID customer once the issue is resolved. Unless there is some bizarre hardware conflict or firmware conflict, it’s just a simple Kext conflict. Hopefully it’s just that simple.

Preferably I’d like to convert the individual m.2 drives to APFS before I re-build the RAID 0 using SoftRAID. Can I do this with 5.8.2 or do I need to wait to SoftRAID v6 before I switch to APFS?

Regards,
Steve Steele