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I've had a new Mercury Elite Pro Quad running for a few days. I purchased it without drives and installed 4x 24TB IronWolf Pros for it, set up in RAID0. It's connected via USB-C to a USB3.1 PCIE card, on a physical server running Windows Server 2025. It has been running very slow compared to what I expected: 40-45MB/s read and write. In comparison, I have a 5 year old, 12TB G-RAID 2 disk enclosure connected to the same PCI card, and it tested just over 450MB/s for both read and write. Both drives are set to performance, not the default quick-removal option.
After creating the RAID with SoftRAID, I did reformat the drive from within Windows from NTFS to ReFS. It's meant to be used as a local repository for Veeam, which is why I want to use ReFS. I'm now in the process of clearing the drive so I can recreate the RAID, leaving it NTFS format to test again in case ReFS is the problem. However, has anyone had similar problems, or have any suggestions? Or has anyone else used ReFS with SoftRAID without issue? I did reach out to support earlier this morning, but thought I'd try the forum too in case anyone else has had a similar experience. Thanks
Posted : 16/04/2026 10:05 am
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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.
Posted : 17/04/2026 10:23 am
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.
Posted : 18/04/2026 10:17 am
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@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.
Posted : 20/04/2026 7:26 am
