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I was one of the people who battled the issue where certain 4M2 SSD mounted in the Mac Pro were preventing the new 2023 M2 Mac Pro from booting.
That issue appears to be behind us now but now that I'm using this machine more, I'm noticing that my external 3.5" drives that are in a Thunderbay 8 are REALLY slow to show files and navigate in the Mac Finder, or if I'm using any app and try to access files on any of my 8 3.5" drives in the Thunderbay 8.
I don't need these files often because they are my old/archived projects and any working projects are on my internal SSD, but it is very annoying and concerning how slow access to the files in the Thunderbay 8 is now. With my 2019 Mac Pro, there was never an issue. I could easily navigate to these files without anything getting hung up.
I don't have these drives set up as RAID, they are just 8 individual 6TB and 8TB drives in my Thunderbay 8.
Are there any setting in the SoftRAID app that would be causing these drives to be extra slow to load and navigate files? They are 3.5" HDD and not SSD so I know they're not as fast as SSD, but something is causing a MAJOR lag when I try to navigate files. More than one would reasonably expect.
Posted : 13/08/2023 8:44 pm
Its nothing to do with SoftRAID. Its either the file system or perhaps if the SSDs were powered off for a while, its the SSD.
I am assuming these are HDD's , then.
this would be directory issues. One quick way to check is "verify disk" and look at Activity Monitor. I expect the disk tab will show about 200MB/s. that means the disk is OK.
then take one of the drives and either run Disk warrior on it if you have it (to rebuild the directory), or do a backup, erase/restore. See if that restores performance back to normal.
SoftRAID is a pass through driver, it has effectively no impact on performance on non-RAID volumes. You can also prove this by using "convert" to convert to Apple format, (assuming these are HFS volumes) and there will be no change in this behavior.
Posted : 13/08/2023 10:11 pm
Topic starter
Thanks for the reply. These are all HDDs. The OWC 4M2 SSD in my Mac Pro is fine, it's just that all the disks in my Thunderbay 8 are now slow to be accessed. I was hoping it was as SoftRAID setting because it happens to all 8 drives and I don't really want to have to redo them all.
Would the block size or any settings in SoftRAID app help prevent the slow navigation to files on these drives? Again, they were totally fine on the 2019 Intel Mac Pro, but as soon as I started using them with my M2 Mac Pro, that's when I noticed this slowness.
This post was modified 3 years ago by Justin Perkins
Posted : 14/08/2023 6:53 am
SoftRAID is not the cause. Since these are HDD non RAID volumes, try erasing just one and copying back.
Thunderbolt does not have any issues where it can go slow, unlike USB, its all or nothing. And for multiple drives to get slow, is weird. All I can guess is the file systems on the drives. Not much else makes any sense.
Posted : 14/08/2023 10:10 am
Topic starter
@softraid-support I didn't think SoftRAID could have an influence in this case but after buying a 10 Thousand Dollar Mac Pro that couldn't boot up with a basic SSD in the PCIe slot, now I take nothing for granted.
Thanks for the tip about "Convert to APFS". I did that for all 8 HDDs that are in my Thunderbay 8 and now the files appear to be accessible instantly via Mac Finder, and the handful of audio apps I've tried. It only took 10 minutes to do all 8 drives.
I was worried I'd have to get new drives, or at least erase and re-format them and do a lot of file transferring and also risk goofing up my Backblaze archive of these and have to re-upload over 30TB of data. So far the "Convert to APFS" quick fix seems to do the job.
Posted : 14/08/2023 2:54 pm
One note of caution, is HDD's get progressively slower as you use them (in APFS format), as files quickly become extremely fragmented.
Imagine a 10MB file, that rather than reading it in one go (or a handful of fragments, if the file had thousands of fragments scattered around. Its how APFS works, and while APFS has many advantages, on HDD's file fragmentation is a serious downside.
Posted : 14/08/2023 4:18 pm
Topic starter
Thanks for that tip as well. As for now, these HDDs are just for my finished project archives so overall, speed is not a factor which is why I'm still using HDDs and not SSD like I do for my active projects. It was just getting to the point where with HFS+, it was taking SUPER LONG to get to any files so I can't imagine it'll get much worse than that.
Maybe by then I'll have refreshed my archives on to SSDs in a Thunerbay 4 Mini with SSDs or something that won't have a compromise.
Posted : 14/08/2023 6:09 pm
HFS and APFS on new volumes have the same performance. APFS will degrade performance faster than HFS will. On HFS volumes, there is also Disk Warrior, which can optimize volume performance. there is no equivalent product for APFS at this time.
Posted : 15/08/2023 1:37 am
