Good luck! I am highly confident it will work fine with RAID 4.

i will transfer my data and delete my volume,

when i finish i will check and tell you if it's working with raid 4 or not.

Cautious. Yes you must delete a volume (wiping out all data) before you can create a new volume.

I have one 9 TB and 12 TB data inside, 

if i delete the raid 5 does it erase my data?

Does it mean that i have to format it?

You cannot "convert" different RAID levels.

Delete the RAID 5 volume, and create a new RAID 4 volume.

Hi,

I just install softraid 6.2.1 b3 on my macbook air m1 with my two owc 4 bay and it working normal,

But How to change already raid 5 to RAID 4, i cannot and (Convert Volume) is grey i cannot choose it.

Help me Please.

There should not be issues in your scenario, so I can look into what you have and test for issues, but if you get more info, feel free to share.

Flash drives should use APFS. I have not seen any special issues with APFS, outside of a known bug in encryption we are waiting for a fix for.

On the M1 driver, there is a trick, perhaps you missed, to enable third party developers:

Did you do this?
https://support.apple.com/en-lk/guide/mac-help/mchl768f7291/mac
Select reduced security and enable this:
Select the “Allow user management of kernel extensions from identified developers” checkbox to allow installation of software that uses legacy kernel extensions.

Lastly, on the i5, send a support file. I am curious if you have the correct version of the SoftRAID driver loading. You definitely should have had the option to "Allow", or 6.2 driver will not be loading.

1. I didn't 'allow' OWC as developer on either the i5 nor the M1 mini. Was never offered an opportunity, but on the i5 all worked and on the M1, nyet.

2. The drives in the 4M2 are all Aura Pro 2TB drives (except for 1 1TB Aura Pro; Apple (as you know) doesn't allow booting from a RAID, so the 2TB drives are for capacity, the the 1 TB for booting. I feel safer with a replaceable external boot drive.... I had no experience with M2s, so I thought single stop shopping was best.

3. With all the changes, I'm afraid I no longer have an M1 SoftRAID log, so I can't send it. The RAID failure was sufficient to crash the machine; it wasn't just a stall and a degraded RAID.

I realize this info is really fuzzy - please look at it as just - perhaps it's helpful background info: perhaps there's a problem here, and it's just a breadcrumb more to help you discover what. I do find it vaguely surprising that a block-level driver knows anything about the file system - I'd have thought that SoftRaid was completely indifferent to the file system on the RAID, but then I'm full of theory and no actual info :-(

To be clear, I'm not asking for help to fix the apparent problem, just providing you (fuzzy) info. For the moment, I'm completely avoiding SoftRaid on the M1. It might be fine with HFS+ disks, but APFS seems the natural one for SSDs. I guess I'll be keeping a couple of Intel Mini's around for a while... I'm not planning on reverting from separate drives to a RAID for the immediate future.

It's possible of course that the problem is the enclosure, and/or the M2 drives, and/or the cable, and/or the M1, and/or the stupid owner. If further problems develop, I'll keep you informed (with logs where possible)

Thanks again

-- P

When you installed 12.1, did you specifically "Allow" OWC as an identified developer? there was no driver change in 12.1, so it will work the same as 12.0. This is the most likely issue.

2. I do not understand this, can you be more detailed: The mounted RAID failed (drive not responding etc) after not very much time at all.
If you mean a disk hung, capture a SoftRAID tech support file and I can take a look.

What drives are in the 4M2? I do a lot of testing, but mostly with either the Phison P12 blades, or some older Samsung blades (Brand new Samsungs often have macOS compatibility issues, until Samsung updates the firmware.)

Can you describe the M1 issues? Are there panics? Are you getting disk ejected messages?

thanks

I'm tagging on the end of this subject because I'm having Big Problems with my Mac mini M1.

Long story short -

1. Monterey 12.01 seems to support SoftRaid 6.2 w driver 6.2, but 12.1 won't. The RAID (a 4M2 enclosure directly connected to the M1) won't mount. It never mounted, regardless. But it mounted and worked under 12.01. Oh, the blessings of external boot drives.

2. The mounted RAID failed (drive not responding etc) after not very much time at all.

3. a 6-core i5 2018 Mac mini using 12.1 seems to be stably driving two thunder bay Mini enclosures. One is RAID 0+1, with 4 2TB spinning drives. The other is a RAID 5 with four 2TB spinning drives. This is used for backup from the M1. The RAIDS are both HFS+

4. I destroyed the 4M2 RAID, reorganized it as one 1 TB boot rive plus 3 separate drives, one for ordinary work, one for music and one for photographs. I repopulated these partly from the M1's internal drive and partly from the i5 file server over the network, using Carbon Copy Cloner.

5. I have taught CCC to back up stuff onto a separate SATA flash drive attached to the M1 and from there over the network to folders on the RAID 1+0. On the i5, CCC backs up the RAID 1 + 0 to the RAID 5. This works fine.

Conclusions:

- Monterey 12.1 and Mac mini M1 and SoftRaid 6.2 have a basic compatibility problem

- SoftRAID 6.2 has a problem (even on 12.01 and earlier) driving the 4M2 - where the drives are APFS-formatted. I don't know whether it's an APFS problem, or an M2 flash problem, or an enclosure problem - but the 4M2 enclosure used as a RAID has 'always' had problems and has always been APFS-formatted. 

- the M1 is much much happier driving the 4M2 as separate drives and with SoftRAID's driver uninstalled, so 12.1 is using the drives in a native manner. A few terabytes have been flung around and all the drives in the enclosure remain present and responsive. So that points at SoftRAID as a probable problem.

You should be able to experiment and replicate the situation :-)

Hope this all helps.

-- Pete