MP 7,1 Mac Pro 2019 7,1 and Big Sur - Feedback

[flowrider]

Also have the Vega, keen to know if there are any speed improvements. I have to be honest I've gone from the W5700x to the Vega, and not overly notices any performance in GPU. Not sure it's worthy of so much song and dance....

Not Surprised:

Radeon RX 5700 XT, macOS Catalina, and iMac Pro

real world speed test results for performance minded Macintosh users

barefeats.com

Lou

 

[LeonPro]

Here's a ranking of GPUs using Metal:

Metal Benchmarks - Geekbench

And here's a real-world video editing application test of both cards. You can see how the Vega II pulls away.

If you use Vega II for gaming, Excel, and web surfing. Then it's not the best use of this card.

 

[profdraper]

I'm sorry I can't let this slip… why are you using RAID 4? It's somewhat exotic, offers you no benefit over RAID 5 (RAID 5 spreads the parity over each disk). RAID 4 requires a dedicated parity disk, so your whole array is limited by the speed of the parity disk. RAID 4 should only be used if your dedicated parity disk is much faster than your striping drives. Because the Accelsior offers 4 identical drives in the array, it isn't useful here.

Is your Accelsior array storing your media long term, or is it your scratch disk while editing? I personally wouldn't be worrying about disk fault tolerance for a local scratch disk. You should have a separate backup approach anyways. RAID is NOT a backup. RAID 0 will stripe across all drives and give you the performance of 4x.

You can also make RAID 10 with macOS Disk Utility, if you're worried about disk fault tolerance, but you give up 50%, not the 25% of RAID4/5

SoftRAID recommend RAID 4 for SSDs & RAID 5 for HDDs, see https://www.softraid.com/raid/raid_uses/. They also advise that read /write speed is unaffected in the RAID 4 parity disk setup, see https://www.softraid.com/raid/which-raid/. Whichever, I've been using 5x2TB 2.5" Samsung EVOs in a RAID 4 in a Thunderbay 6 chassis for a year or so now; all works as it should.

 

[profdraper]

I find this difficult to believe & have worked with OWC on beta testing etc. In any case: 1) write to OWC for a SoftRAID 6 beta and/or download from http://www.softraid.com/sr_beta. As far as I can tell, this is functioning perfectly well on Big Sur 11.01 and looks exactly the same as v5.xx on Catalina; drivers install install as they should. 2) I also use SoftRAID lite on Windows and this reads & writes (HFS+) RAID 0 & 1 cross-platform. Soon a 'full' SoftRAID (RAID 4, 5 etc) will be released for Windows and I suspect this will coincide with the SoftRAID 6 release for both windows & macos.

See also this press release from OWC:

SoftRAID - Compatibility Notes

Check the latest updates and compatibility with SoftRAID and major OS releases.

www.softraid.com

You would need SoftRaid6, which has been delayed for at least 2 years (maybe 3+). Stopped using or recommending their products completely.

Another update: https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/68501-softraid-big-sur-m1-macs/
In sum: beta 6 available for everyone to download; the SoftRAID driver component for Intel macs is final.

 

[LeonPro]

I believe the reason why OWC has recommended RAID 4 for SSDs over RAID 5 is due to the fact that RAID 4 takes up more space due to the dedicated parity drive (and with SSDs being more expensive, the amount of available space over HDDs will be less from the get go).

RAID 4 definitely works, but is seldom used these days. If you check around, enterprise RAID solutions - they don't even mention RAID 4 as a solution.

Here's from a media company:

The best RAID for performance and redundancy

RAIDs are created with two goals: increased performance & data redundancy. There are various distinct RAID setups, each with advantages and disadvantages.

www.promax.com

"So which RAID is best?
For a balance of redundancy, disk drive usage and performance RAID 5 or RAID 50 are great options. They provide redundancy, allow for the largest range of disk usage and give you data protection that you can rely on."

and as to why RAID 4 is probably offered due to drive size to cost consideration:

What Is SSD RAID? How RAID Can Improve SSD Performance

Implementing RAID for your SSD will help its performance, but is it worth it? See if SSD RAID is the right move for you.

www.enterprisestorageforum.com

"The biggest limitation of SSD RAID arrays (again, aside from the SSD RAID controller speed limit) is the cost. SSDs are more expensive per Gigabyte than HDDs, and using an SSD RAID configuration that offers 50% storage efficiency such as a two SSD RAID 0 array or a four SSD RAID 10 array effectively doubles these costs. "

Personally, I'd go with RAID 0 and then back that up to another SSD RAID set without further taxing that backup to always continually write.

 

[Jupeman]

I have apps crashing fairly routinely (Final Cut Pro, Affinity Publisher) due to graphic kernel panics. This all started with Big Sur. Radeon 580X...

Me, too. 580x I have all kinds of video artifact issues, from dynamic wallpapers becoming all green to photos in Photos not displaying and looking green to video in FCP X just being blanked. There is definitely something awry with Big Sur and drivers for 580X. No problems with Catalina prior.