New Mercury Elite Pro Quad - Slow Performance?

After posting I ran into a few more problems. I found that I could not reboot or shutdown this server while the drive was attached. It would hang every time. When the system booted back up, the SoftRAID RAID would not hold it's drive letter and it needed to be assigned every time. Then the connection to the enclosure started dropping when trying to read/write to it, requiring a reboot before it would be usable again, only to hang and disconnect. Eventually the SoftRAID RAID ended up corrupt and unreadable by Windows. The SoftRAID software can see the RAID, but Windows cannot use it.

@rslygh 

I have not seen anyone use ReFS on Windows, so do not know the impact. It should not by itself be slow, however. There is likely something else going on.

And it could speak to your other issue. USB on PC hardware is usually solid. Did you check the cable with a new one, just in case? 
And perhaps you should test the drives one by one, to see if there is an enclosure issue, or a drive issue. I suspect there is a hardware issue.

@softraid-support thanks for the reply. Since the RAID was unreadable, I went ahead and rebuilt it, formatted as NTFS, and moved the device to a different computer (Windows 11 desktop). Read test was around 375MB/s and write was 425MB/s, which is around what I expected. I attempted to format to ReFS again to test that and it didn't even allow me on this system. Deleting the NTFS partition via Disk Management didn't fully delete it, so the only way I could create a usable partition on this computer was via the SoftRAID application.

Now I need to move it back to the original computer and test again, which I can't do until tomorrow. It could be that ReFS is indeed the issue, which I'm leaning towards since I couldn't even change the format to ReFS on the 2nd computer. It could also be some other incompatibility with the USB-C hardware on the first computer too, but being that I have other external devices running at normal speeds on that computer that seems less likely. I'll report findings once I've ran that test.

There is still the issue with the computers not rebooting while the device is connected. This has happened on both computers now, which is a separate problem. Fortunately the device it is currently connected to and has caused to hang during reboot is a test device, but this will be an issue going forward. I have found other reports of this issue from users trying to use SoftRAID, and apparently they're working around the problem by ejecting the drive before the reboot. As long as the drive ejects, that's fine, but if Windows refuses to eject it then you're stuck. I'm hijacking my own thread with a different issue, but for anyone that may have similar issues to what I started with, the speeds and reboot hang do not appear to be related to each other.

@rslygh 

You should open a support case for this issue, so it can get the attention it deserves.

I did open a support case before finding this forum. Unfortunately I had not seen a response to the case until now, having found one in my junk folder.

Still, I'm going to post my further findings and results to anyone who may run across something similar and find this forum post, trying to solve it yourself

I moved the OWC enclosure back to the first server, formatted as NTFS, and had surprisingly good results. Around 900-1000MB/s both read and write, using the same test that had previously reported only 40MB/s for both. I tested a few more times and it was consistent, so I reformatted to ReFS and tried again. Not quite as fast, but close, reporting read in the 900-1000MB/s range and write around 750MB/s.

No idea why I had such trouble to start, but the speeds now are very good. There is still the issue with restarting while the device is active and connected. Unless anyone has an idea about that, I'll wait for a response to it in my support ticket

@rslygh 
I posted out of order, I meant create a case for the hang issue.