Never knew about this problem installing 10.13 onto a RAID set. Mac mini 2012 RAID 1 here and 10.13.1 can't install. Seems like RAID isn't supported as a boot volume and that Mac Pro's Apple hardware RAID 5 drive isn't supported at all in 10.13. Both are problems. Would love to hear if there are updates too
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My experience trying to install High Sierra on Mac Pro with Hardware RAID
- Thread starter jer2eydevil88
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I was able to get the system to boot without RAID. I had to pull the RAID drives and reformat them from a usb cradle hooked to my laptop. After that they got detected properly. At least it’s booting for me.
The Apple Enterprise Support representative that I was corresponding with went radio silent on me.
I’ve gone into the Apple Store and complained in person.
If you care about RAID stay far from High Sierra.
Apple really doesn’t care about pro users at all anymore.
IMHO using RAIDS is NOT NECESSARY what distinguishes Pros from normal consumer users (I belong to the second cathegory).
RAIDS might be important for some people but I would not say that people without RAIDS cannot be considered IT Pros.
As I see it the main differences are first knowledge and then making a living in a great measure using computers.
I do not believe that Apple ignores Pros but unfortunately they make their money on other devices than professional computers for professional users.
On the other side without that situation we would probably not have an existing Apple in 2017 to complain about...
RAIDS might be important for some people but I would not say that people without RAIDS cannot be considered IT Pros.
As I see it the main differences are first knowledge and then making a living in a great measure using computers.
I do not believe that Apple ignores Pros but unfortunately they make their money on other devices than professional computers for professional users.
On the other side without that situation we would probably not have an existing Apple in 2017 to complain about...
The Mac Pro (trash can edition) is circa 2013 hardware still being sold in 2017 without discounts. Apple has basically abandoned professionals. RAID is not the only professional aspect of their ecosystem being ignored.
While upgrading my Mac Mini Server/RAID-0, I encountered the High Sierra installer message: "You may not install to this volume because it is part of a AppleRAID.". As well, a OWC Guardian Maximus/2x 4TB/RAID-1 is attached providing a bootable backup for the RAID-0. High Sierra is successfully running on RAID-0, my process:
Notes:
1. RAID-0 is the Mac Mini/serverOS
2. RAID-1 is the Maximus/serverOS-copy (daily backup)
3. CCC - Carbon Copy Cloner
Steps:
1. Disk Utility: Erase RAID-1 (daily backup)
2. CCC: RAID-0 > RAID-1
3. Disk Utility: RAID-1/+serverOS2 partition
4. CCC: RAID-0 > RAID-1/serverOS2 (second backup, if serverOS/10.13 is not bootable)
5. High Sierra Installer: RAID-1/serverOS-copy/10.13 (verify bootable)
6. Disk Utility: Erase RAID-0/serverOS/10.12.6
7. CCC: RAID-5 > RAID-0/serverOS/10.13
8. Boot: RAID-0/serverOS/10.13 (success)
Summary:
1. 10.13 installer will not install to Apple Software RAID, purposely?
2. 10.13 runs on HFS+/Apple Software RAID (install to non RAID, copy to RAID)
3. No 10.13 3rd party hardware RAID issues
4. Second backup is not necessary (Steps 3 and 4)
5. CCC/erase before copy:
Notes:
1. RAID-0 is the Mac Mini/serverOS
2. RAID-1 is the Maximus/serverOS-copy (daily backup)
3. CCC - Carbon Copy Cloner
Steps:
1. Disk Utility: Erase RAID-1 (daily backup)
2. CCC: RAID-0 > RAID-1
3. Disk Utility: RAID-1/+serverOS2 partition
4. CCC: RAID-0 > RAID-1/serverOS2 (second backup, if serverOS/10.13 is not bootable)
5. High Sierra Installer: RAID-1/serverOS-copy/10.13 (verify bootable)
6. Disk Utility: Erase RAID-0/serverOS/10.12.6
7. CCC: RAID-5 > RAID-0/serverOS/10.13
8. Boot: RAID-0/serverOS/10.13 (success)
Summary:
1. 10.13 installer will not install to Apple Software RAID, purposely?
2. 10.13 runs on HFS+/Apple Software RAID (install to non RAID, copy to RAID)
3. No 10.13 3rd party hardware RAID issues
4. Second backup is not necessary (Steps 3 and 4)
5. CCC/erase before copy:
a. 10.12.6 serverOS: 88 GB
b. 10.12.6 serverOS-copy: 167 GB
c. 10.13 serverOS: 22 GB
b. 10.12.6 serverOS-copy: 167 GB
c. 10.13 serverOS: 22 GB
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Damn. I wonder what the intention of the installer's limitation is. It's true that I had to CCC to get 10.8 to go on my mini's RAID 1, but updates afterwards went fine. I was running 10.9 until this year when I removed one of the disks from the RAID 1 set and created another RAID 1 set with it (and a temp USB drive just to trick disk utility into doing it) to put 10.12 on that new set. Copied files over and the removed the 10.9 set and readded the disk to the 10.12 set. So 10.12 accepted the install onto a RAID 1, but somehow not this.
I'd rather wait for something to change to allow me to upgrade in place.. I could follow a vague rejig of your steps and remove a disk from the set to clone and upgrade on a single disk and then clone back and rejoin the set... Maybe that will work well enough.. My poor disks though. Had to replace one already from failure and all this RAID rebuilding doesn't fill me with hope my original apple drive can survive more of it.. The Apple disk is the Upper bay which is harder to replace...
Apple has reproduced that any hard drives attached while the RAID Card is installed will not show up in High Sierra. They are not telling me if they are going to fix the issue.
In general. Whenever the RAID Card is installed the disks attached via SATA/SAS will not show up as usable volumes within High Sierra.
Huh. Can you show me what your system is showing you in System Profiler? In particular, in PCIE, SAS, SATA/SATA Express, and Storage.
This hasn't matched my experience at all. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I got bought my RAID card and set it up form 10.13, or if it has to do with RAID5 in particular.
EDIT: I just tested quite a few things. I am able to see and install onto Apple Pro Raid arrays formatted both in JHFS+ and APFS. I also was able to right click my HFS+ Raid volume and convert it in place.
So I've converted my RAID here to APFS and set it as my boot drive. Pretty happy with the performance increase and noise decrease as compared to a spinning drive in the DVD bay.
This hasn't matched my experience at all. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I got bought my RAID card and set it up form 10.13, or if it has to do with RAID5 in particular.
EDIT: I just tested quite a few things. I am able to see and install onto Apple Pro Raid arrays formatted both in JHFS+ and APFS. I also was able to right click my HFS+ Raid volume and convert it in place.
So I've converted my RAID here to APFS and set it as my boot drive. Pretty happy with the performance increase and noise decrease as compared to a spinning drive in the DVD bay.
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As someone who has been dealing with Apple Enterprise Support since the days of the Xserve, Xserve RAID and when companies actually relied upon Xsan for their storage needs...they aren't great. You need to hound them and call them back. I mean like 3 to 4 times a day. Make a repeating calendar event for a month to call them every damn day. You're not going to get an answer unless you annoy them. Otherwise like you experienced they will just go radio silent.
I know you have a Apple hardware RAID card but have you thought about taking the card out and using the same 4 SSD's with SoftRAID? It does RAID 5 (though I would do RAID 0+1 for your setup) and it is compatible with High Sierra.
https://www.softraid.com
Thanks for the tip!
I wish I could dedicate the time to holding Apple accountable but I frankly have 25+ hours into this already and that's worth more than the computer to me.
I'm not a big fan of software raid unless it's ZFS (or at least another copy on write file system). Obviously APFS is not that solution. Thanks for the help!
I wish I could dedicate the time to holding Apple accountable but I frankly have 25+ hours into this already and that's worth more than the computer to me.
I'm not a big fan of software raid unless it's ZFS (or at least another copy on write file system). Obviously APFS is not that solution. Thanks for the help!
Many thanks for this jer2eydevil88, it's an eye-opener for sure.
I currently have a Mac Pro RAID 5 card in a 2010 Mac Pro and it's running Yosemite without issue.
I do need to update to High Sierra though so this is invaluable info.
However I changed my set-up a while ago where the Mac Pro no longer boots from the RAID, but from a PCIe-based SSD and I just use the RAID card setup as storage on the network.
I don't know whether that will help you if you updated the boot SSD to High Sierra and whether High Sierra would see the RAID.
(Would be really helpful to me if anyone thinks that 'theoretically' it would work).
I currently have a Mac Pro RAID 5 card in a 2010 Mac Pro and it's running Yosemite without issue.
I do need to update to High Sierra though so this is invaluable info.
However I changed my set-up a while ago where the Mac Pro no longer boots from the RAID, but from a PCIe-based SSD and I just use the RAID card setup as storage on the network.
I don't know whether that will help you if you updated the boot SSD to High Sierra and whether High Sierra would see the RAID.
(Would be really helpful to me if anyone thinks that 'theoretically' it would work).
My tests demonstrated that if it’s an Apple OEM RAID card then the RAID Assistant Utility will show it but it will not be a usable volume from within Finder.
Basically, it’ll be useless to you.
I recently added a 2010 apple raid card to one of my flashed 2009 mac pros to play around with it.
I had 3 drives connected.
Using the 10.13.3 full installer, all 3 drives showed up in disk utility and were listed as 'raid media'.
I was able to format them all separately and install high sierra on the first one.
After install was finished, I used the raid utility to create a 2 disk mirror with the second disks.
This worked fine and the drive showed up in disk utility, on the desktop, and was usable.
The problem I ran into was if the raid card was busy, formatting, or during a backup, the finder would freeze every 20 seconds or so. I experimented with the first boot drive being a seagate 1tb sshd disk drive, or a samsung 850evo 500gb ssd drive, and formatted as HFS or APFS.
APFS causes finder freezes every time, on the disk or the ssd, but did work.
SSD formatted as HFS caused freezes but not as much.
Disk formatted as HFS seemed ok.
Booting with any disk off the raid card, caused a much longer grey screen after the chime before it would boot, or I would get the option-boot menu. My guess is this was caused by slow initialization for the raid card.
I finally put the 850evo on a owc accelsior s pcie card (using 16x slot above video card), and installed to that using APFS.
Speed was what I expected, 490 to 520MB/s read and write, and no freezes at all.
The 2 disk mirror raid still works fine using two old 640GB apple disks formatted as HFS, and during backup there are no freezes, the raid card seems to work perfectly.
The boot time grey screen delay is also completely gone.
I had 3 drives connected.
Using the 10.13.3 full installer, all 3 drives showed up in disk utility and were listed as 'raid media'.
I was able to format them all separately and install high sierra on the first one.
After install was finished, I used the raid utility to create a 2 disk mirror with the second disks.
This worked fine and the drive showed up in disk utility, on the desktop, and was usable.
The problem I ran into was if the raid card was busy, formatting, or during a backup, the finder would freeze every 20 seconds or so. I experimented with the first boot drive being a seagate 1tb sshd disk drive, or a samsung 850evo 500gb ssd drive, and formatted as HFS or APFS.
APFS causes finder freezes every time, on the disk or the ssd, but did work.
SSD formatted as HFS caused freezes but not as much.
Disk formatted as HFS seemed ok.
Booting with any disk off the raid card, caused a much longer grey screen after the chime before it would boot, or I would get the option-boot menu. My guess is this was caused by slow initialization for the raid card.
I finally put the 850evo on a owc accelsior s pcie card (using 16x slot above video card), and installed to that using APFS.
Speed was what I expected, 490 to 520MB/s read and write, and no freezes at all.
The 2 disk mirror raid still works fine using two old 640GB apple disks formatted as HFS, and during backup there are no freezes, the raid card seems to work perfectly.
The boot time grey screen delay is also completely gone.
Thanks for the reply - let's hope Apple sort this in an update, or my MacPro stays on ElCap or Sierra forever, which isn't the best solution.
macOS High Sierra 11.3.4 installs (with patcher) on xServe with AppleRAID and boots from it.
EDIT: RAID was setup with earlier macOS and High Sierra's Disk Utility shows only one disk. If you want to see individual disks open RAID Utility from /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications
The installer failed to update the previous macOS Sierra installation due to file system error and Disk Utility was unable to fix it. Clean install worked.
EDIT2: AppleRAID used:
Firmware Version: E-1.3.2.0
Hardware Revision: 2.0.0
Driver Version: 403
Expansion ROM Version: 0018
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