MP 7,1 Pros & Cons using Apple’s Disk Utility vs. SoftRAID for Managing RAID sets ?

[bxs]

Subject: Pros & Cons using Apple’s Disk Utility vs. SoftRAID for Managing RAID sets ?

I’ve been using Apple’s Disk Utility (DU) for ages and purchased a SoftRAID full license in Dec 2015 to handle RAID sets beyond what DU offered. The prospect of configuring RAID-5 using SoftRAID appealed to me for protecting against a single drive failure. DU did not provide for this.

Today, I’m wrestling with the use of DU vs. SoftRAID for configuring RAID-0 for our MP7,1’s internal/external units; in particular our Sonnet PCIe card with its 4x Samsung SSD/Flash blades.

In some articles I’ve read there’s mention that SoftRAID offers as much as 85% better RAID-0 performance than for DU’s RAID-0. I’m unclear what the basis is for this claimed 85%.

With this unclear issue of which is best, DU or SoftRAID, I’ve spent a limited amount of time to see just what the differences are configuring RAID-0 on a set of 4x 5TB 2.5” Seagate BarraCuda 5400 RPM spinning disks in an OWC Thunderbolt 2 mini 4 enclosure (TB4m).

The 5TB disks were freshly erased and formatted as HFS+. I ran the tests under Catalina 10.15.3 (Build 19D49f) on my late 2016 15" rMBP13,3. The TB4m was directly attached to the MBP using Apple's USB-C-to-TB2 adapter.

After configuring these 4x BarraCuda drives as RAID-0 using both DU and SoftRAID I used AJA, BlackMagic Disk Test and the Terminal command dd to establish some data rates for each.

In each case I set the RAID-0 transfer block size to 128Kb.

Using AJA and BlackMagic I found little difference between using DU and SoftRAID. The AJA data rates came out to be around 518 MB/s for writes and a bit less at 490 MB/s for reads, using 1GB file sizes. The BlackMagic rates for writes were quite bad but the reads were close to what AJA displayed (does BlackMagic avoid using the kernel file buffer cache?). No matter, the take-away was there was little difference between using DU vs. SoftRAID.

I ran a serious of dd writes & reads using different transfer block sizes from 512 bytes up to 262144 bytes, and for file sizes ranging from 10.5 MB up to 5.37 GB and the best write rate was some 583 MB/s and for reads the best was 510 MB/s. This was done such that the kernel File buffer cache was being cleared using ’sudo purge’ between runs to avoid reading from the RAM file cache.

So the dd command was showing slightly better write & read rates compared to AJA & BlackMagic.

This limited testing showed me there was little performance difference using DU or SoftRAID for RAID-0.

I guess I will use the same testing procedure for the Sonnet/Samsung RAID-0 comparison and I suspect there will little variance using the Apple’s DU vs. using SoftRAID.

Attached: AJA, BlackMagic and Terminal dd command displays/outputs for using Apple’s DU for RAID-0.

 

[djc6]

I have two RAID-1 volumes in my OWC ThunderBay 4 (thunderbolt 2 edititon). I've been using Disk Utility for years, but the health monitoring is non existant.

I was thinking of switching to SoftRAID just to get monitoring to know when a drive has failed - thoughts on this?

 

[bxs]

I have two RAID-1 volumes in my OWC ThunderBay 4 (thunderbolt 2 edititon). I've been using Disk Utility for years, but the health monitoring is non existant.

I was thinking of switching to SoftRAID just to get monitoring to know when a drive has failed - thoughts on this?

My suggestion would be for you to employ DriveDx to monitor disk health.

 

[Krevnik]

Honestly, if you are doing RAID 0 or RAID 1, it doesn't really matter too much. It matters if you want RAID 10.

You can kinda get DU to build you a RAID 10, but I tried that once, and will not try it again. In my case, when I did lose a drive a couple months after building a 4 drive RAID 10 in DU. It took the whole RAID volume with it. macOS simply refused to bring up the second layer RAID because of the degraded state of one of the mirrors making up the RAID 0 layer, and simply entered a state of confusion where it didn't even recognize that the RAID 0 layer existed anymore. It meant losing a couple days work going back to my backup, rather than being able to do one last incremental backup and saving it all.

I've used SoftRAID-backed RAID 5 and RAID 10 for long-ish term use (2 years before I went to a dedicated NAS) without problems, and the performance was very good for a software RAID 5. I've lost drives when using SoftRAID as well, and was always able to update the backup before rebuilding the array with the replacement drive.

 

[profdraper]

I have two RAID-1 volumes in my OWC ThunderBay 4 (thunderbolt 2 edititon). I've been using Disk Utility for years, but the health monitoring is non existant.

I was thinking of switching to SoftRAID just to get monitoring to know when a drive has failed - thoughts on this?

SoftRAID has proven useless at SMART monitoring, in this case, an OWC Thunderbay 6 with 5x2TB Sumsung SSDs configured as RAID 4. This was the subject of some discussion with SoftRAID tech support, the upshot being that they admitted their SMART monitoring was ill-equipped for SSDs (rather, for HHDs or seemed to be so claimed).

The particular issue was that one of the RAID SSDs (a 2TB Samsung 850 PRO) was continuously showing SMART errors via TechToolPro and DriveDX, indicating a range of errors and that the drive should be replaced urgently. In SoftRAID by comparison, the drive showed nothing, no errors, 'all good'.

So, I replaced the disk (and easy to do with SoftRAID) and now is all as it should be. I'm still a fan of SoftRAID for its many other features and overall performance, but for SMART monitoring, obviously this is not to be trusted. Instead, also use a 3rd party app like DriveDX or TechToolPro, the latter of which of course offers many more protection and diagnostic features than Drive DX's single focus.

 

[cofdog]

I believe the claimed 85% better performance is for RAID 1 (Mirror) vice RAID 0 (Stripe). SoftRAID RAID 1 Read performance is 2x whereas Write performance is same. SoftRAID reads in parallel from all volumes, but DU does not implement this feature. DU reads and writes a mirrored pair at about the same performance as a single disk. BTW, same applies for RAID 1+0, SoftRAID is about 2x read vs. DU.

 

[AnnonKneeMoosee]

My suggestion would be for you to employ DriveDx to monitor disk health.

DriveDx is a must for any serious computer user. Without it, you're flying blind on the status of your storage. DriveDx will monitor all your drives, letting you know if any are showing signs of failure. Of course no software can be 100% accurate in such matters, but DriveDx gives you as much help as is realistically possible.

 

[Henry 3 Dogg]

Honestly, if you are doing RAID 0 or RAID 1, it doesn't really matter too much. It matters if you want RAID 10.

You can kinda get DU to build you a RAID 10, but I tried that once, and will not try it again. In my case, when I did lose a drive a couple months after building a 4 drive RAID 10 in DU. It took the whole RAID volume with it. macOS simply refused to bring up the second layer RAID because of the degraded state of one of the mirrors making up the RAID 0 layer, and simply entered a state of confusion where it didn't even recognize that the RAID 0 layer existed anymore. It meant losing a couple days work going back to my backup, rather than being able to do one last incremental backup and saving it all.

I've used SoftRAID-backed RAID 5 and RAID 10 for long-ish term use (2 years before I went to a dedicated NAS) without problems, and the performance was very good for a software RAID 5. I've lost drives when using SoftRAID as well, and was always able to update the backup before rebuilding the array with the replacement drive.

I've done this and not had a problem and I always test raids by removing a live disk and recovering, before I trust then with data. ( Most PC raid cards I ever tried failed on that test )

so two questions

1) did you use the command line based

> diskutil appleRAID repairMirror RAIDSetDeviceName|RAIDSetUUID MountPoint|DiskIdentifier|DeviceNode

command ? That has always fixed it for me.

2) are you sure you didn't create a mirror of two striped pairs rather than a striped pair of two mirrors.

Both will work, but I'm not sure that repairMirror command will (or would) work on the mirror of two striped pairs .

 

[Henry 3 Dogg]

I have two RAID-1 volumes in my OWC ThunderBay 4 (thunderbolt 2 edititon). I've been using Disk Utility for years, but the health monitoring is non existant.

I was thinking of switching to SoftRAID just to get monitoring to know when a drive has failed - thoughts on this?

I have 3 OWC Thunderbay 4 Minis (the thunderbolt 3 edition) and the supplied SoftRAID 5 for an extra £100.

Version 5 of SoftRAID, which I used on Big Sur, only worked with hfs disks and was very flakey.

But Version 6 came along with Monterey to fix all my problems for another £100.

And yes, it finally worked for APFS but even if I unmount all external disks and wait, before I unplug a drive, it still gives me warnings about corruption which may or may not be spurious. If I want to safely unplug I have to shut down, unplug and then reboot. Ugh. There have been lots of updates, but none fixed it.

And now having updated to Ventura, SoftRaid 6 won't run and it's another £100 for an update to SoftRAID 7 which isn't even available yet.

I was searching for comparisons of SoftRAID and Apple Disk Utility RAID 10 because I'm seriously thinking of ditching SoftRAID

Oh, and health monitoring. I was going to take another look on SoftRAID 6 because I don't remember it being anything special. But hey. I can't take a look until they bring Version 7 out (no announced date) and I pay them another £100.

 

[WayneStewart]

SoftRaid 7 is available now

 

[Tommi14]

I haven't found an answer to the question below yet. Could one of you be able to help?

Let's say, there is a two-disk RAID 1 set managed by Disk Utility in Mac A running macOS Y. If Mac A dies, will it be possible to put the disks into Mac B running macOS Z and continue using the RAID set there? Or will one of the disks alone be readable in Mac B?

 

[tsialex]

I haven't found an answer to the question below yet. Could one of you be able to help?

Let's say, there is a two-disk RAID 1 set managed by Disk Utility in Mac A running macOS Y. If Mac A dies, will it be possible to put the disks into Mac B running macOS Z and continue using the RAID set there? Or will one of the disks alone be readable in Mac B?

If the second Mac is running an equal or newer version of macOS than the originally used to create the Apple RAID array (0/1/5, don't matter), you can move it from one Mac to the other without any issues.

Won't work if you created the array with Monterey APFS and then you try to read it on a Mac with High Sierra.

 

[krakman]

Calling all Soft Raid users.......

I want to use an old 5.1 Mac as an archive device. I already have one gathering dust and I don't want to spend any more money on a NAS device.

I plan to use 6x 12TB hard drives for data storage and a SSD via PCIe card as the boot drive.

The computer will be connected to my network but will be turned off most of the day. It will only be turned on to back up my data and then it will be turned off again.

I already own a netgear NAS and its performance is dismal, the file system search is slow, hence the idea of using the MP as the archival device.

 

[Tommi14]

If the second Mac is running an equal or newer version of macOS than the originally used to create the Apple RAID array (0/1/5, don't matter), you can move it from one Mac to the other without any issues.

Won't work if you created the array with Monterey APFS and then you try to read it on a Mac with High Sierra.

Thanks @tsialex ! 👍

 

[Krevnik]

I've done this and not had a problem and I always test raids by removing a live disk and recovering, before I trust then with data. ( Most PC raid cards I ever tried failed on that test )

so two questions

1) did you use the command line based

> diskutil appleRAID repairMirror RAIDSetDeviceName|RAIDSetUUID MountPoint|DiskIdentifier|DeviceNode

command ? That has always fixed it for me.

2) are you sure you didn't create a mirror of two striped pairs rather than a striped pair of two mirrors.

Both will work, but I'm not sure that repairMirror command will (or would) work on the mirror of two striped pairs .

Keep in mind you are asking questions of a 2-year-old post. I have to assume I meant what I said when I wrote it. It isn't impossible that things have improved as well, such that my experience is no longer the case.

However, the key bit when I wrote that, which I still stand by is that it isn't a RAID type Apple really supports. It used to be, but then Apple re-wrote their RAID software and removed it as an option. You can go through steps to create one, but it should be considered at your own risk, and I personally wouldn't trust data to it. These days I just put the storage on a NAS, since I don't need bulk storage to be directly attached, bulk storage is archival for me.

 

[thoomp]

Hey everyone,

Curious per your thoughts per upgrading to OWC’s SoftRAID XT v7 here in late 2022 - and if it is worth the $80 to upgrade now - even if I don’t immediately use the software and license. Here’s the scoop.

As a FCPX editor who’s finally getting back into video editing (moving up from 1080p to 4K), I recently jumped on an amazing deal on a "used-but-like-new" Mac Studio base model. As I figured it was time to upgrade from my trusty and maxed-out classic Mac Pro tower, I wanted some solution for all of my hard drives — without resorting to a fanless 3.5” hard drive dock.

So, I bought a "used-but-like-new" OWC Thunderbay 8, which was advertised as coming with a license to SoftRAID XT, which seemed like a fantastic deal. The owner was very kind, but he wasn't a Mac guy and knew little about the unit — especially as it was originally installed for him for his PC by an outside consultant.

Anyhow, I found out that the included license with the OWC Thunderbay 8 was for SoftRAID XT v5 (works only with OWC’s enclosures). Well, v5 is useless to me on Ventura. I also made the mistake thinking that the original owner bought it back in April...but it was actually April of the year beforehand. This means, no free upgrade to v7. There were no Black Friday sales on the software available. The best that OWC's support team is willing to offer is an $80 upgrade to v7 (XT) over the standard $90-something upgrade price from v5. Again, the XT version only works with OWC enclosures, from what I understand — which limits things a bit as well. Apparently, OWC is also generally super-strict about licensing and charges hefty fees for each major version upgrade.

As an aside, I spent a few hours playing around with Apple’s Disk Utility in Ventura, as I used to use that for software RAIDs years ago. However, I was shocked to see that DU showed MULTIPLE degraded drives in various test configurations — so I am certainly not going to trust DU for any sort of RAID stuff. In turn, SoftRAID seems like the only other solid solution should either I need/want it.

So now, I’m having some second thoughts per using the Thunderbay 8 for RAIDs at all — which is clearly what it was intended for. As of right now, I’m just using the Thunderbay 8 as one large 8-bay (cooled) drive enclosure/dock (I removed the front door and swapped out the HORRIBLE and loud fan with a Noctua) and using it as one big offline backup unit — hot-swapping drives as needed, and using Chronosync for incremental backups (with drives literally pulled offline). (FYI - The Thunderbay 8 does NOT allow the drives to spin down, and even when ejected via Finder - the drives make a repetitive and annoying drive access sound, as generated by the unit.)

Put it this way; I’m coming from a hardware-based RAID-0 circa 2016 solution for my FCPX edits, but apparently the new way to do stuff these days for insane editing speeds is to edit off of M.2 media via Thunderbolt 4 and just back everything up to “spinning rust.” I’m guessing that if you need to edit HUGE files in real-time, a Thunderbay 8 RAID 5 is the way to go. However, as of now - my editing space per a given project is about 1TB. So, on Black Friday, I got an M.2 stick and Thunderbolt 4-compatible enclosure, and hope to do some editing that way.

Sorry if it’s a bit long-winded; again I’m curious to your thoughts if I should just snag the pricey license now or just punt. Also, any other thoughts from you Thunderbay users, let me know. Cheers and thanks.

 

[evbartl]

did you figure out whether to use softraid or not? I’m in the same position

 

[Ledgem]

did you figure out whether to use softraid or not? I’m in the same position

I'm also sort of wondering this, which is how I found this thread. But my question is whether a Thunderbay is even worth getting.

Softraid or Disk Utility: I'd get Softraid. Disk Utility can make RAID volumes, but in my experience (admittedly from close to ten years ago at this point), they're fairly unstable and your ability to do anything more than wipe the volume and set it up again is pretty limited. Softraid seems to have more RAID volume options and presumably gives you a bit more options if there's a problem besides "erase and recreate."

Every few years I look at the Thunderbays as a possible solution for what I might need in the future, and Softraid is what keeps holding me back. I previously used a Drobo DAS and now have a Synology NAS. Both worked similarly in that you could mix and match drives of different capacities; you could also perform slow upgrades over time, possibly buying a larger-capacity drive on sale, replacing your lowest-capacity drive with it, and gaining more capacity in the process. Softraid can't do this. Instead, it will create a RAID as if all of the drives are the same as the drive with the least capacity. If you want to increase the overall capacity of the RAID, even if you've eventually replaced all of the drives to be the same larger capacity, you'll need to move your data off, wipe the old RAID, and create a new one with the larger size.

Some years ago I went onto their forum to verify that. I recently rechecked their forums and see that many other people are surprised by this behavior, and that the developer (or who ever maintains their forums) seems to be giving roughly the same responses: that they don't control the hardware (weird thing to say, since they Thunderbay and Softraid are both under OWC - maybe they mean the operating system?) and that it's messy to do that with arrays and data. It's frustrating, though; Synology may build their own NAS boxes, but you can take the drives out and still access your data from a Linux system, so long as all drives from the array are connected. Maybe the limitation is macOS and its file system options?

 

[evbartl]

Yeah, I think that about sums it up. I think thats the downside of these thunderbays.

I've had one for 7 years and another for 5 without any issues. Maybe I'm lucky, but I got a new one just because I wanted the faster thunderbolt speeds, and frankly I didn't want to have learn anything new, like a NAS.

I've got everything backed up more than one place, so I don't care if they die. Any my upgrade path will likely be a NAS, and I'll keep this one for backup.

 

[Johnny Jackhammer]

did you figure out whether to use softraid or not? I’m in the same position

It's still very early days, but I have moved from softRAID to appleRAID using diskutil commands.

Apple updates any changes to the underlying RAID software for free and with every update. I doubt much changes now that APFS is the standard for TimeMachine, and even external spinning HDDs.

There are some disadvantages:

1. No HUD for when the RAID is no longer functioning properly ( I disconnected one of the two enclosures I have my RAID 1+0 running on and the only indication that it wasn't running as a striped mirror was the speed decrease and checking the array using diskutil appleRAID commands in terminal - I suppose I could put together a little shell script and run that with crontab)
2. You have to install a separate SMART utility
3. no GUI

RANT approaching...

I decided I didn't want to pre-pay $120 a year for potential software upgrades and "support" which I have rarely used. I also don't like the fact that it takes 24-72 hours to get a response on softRAID support forums.

I remember the days of "Shareware"... buy me a coffee/beer, etc. Now we are supposed to pre-pay people a monthly stipend to support their existence - with no guarantee of any value for that money. It's not just softRAID it's the entire technology ecosystem from Adobe, Amazon Prime, and Apple's One subscription, to a COSTCO membership.

Michelangelo made a single commission for the sistine chapel. He wasn't paid a stipend every year to maintain it. We are incentivizing this system when we patronize every component of the tech industry by paying rental fees towards future usability and stability. Everything is now "cutting edge".

 

[1stCameLC]

Yea, subscription everywhere definitely isn't my cup of tea either.

I'm thinking of getting a OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual RAID enclosure but I'm not sure if I should use the enclosure RAID-1 or Independend Mode and AppleRAID.

I like the idea to be able to move the disks to a different enclosure if need be and read them if the OWC enclosure dies. I'm just wondering how reliable the AppleRAID would be if both disks are represented to macOS through a single USB or eSATA connection.

There's probably some kind of SATA interposer/switch in there and from what I've read those can be flaky when one of the drives start failing, like cause the working drive to drop as well while the failing drive is causing errors on the SATA connection.

Maybe Thunderbolt is better as there's more bandwidth and more independent lanes like in a SAS connection to a backplane. I might be wrong though on both points. But Thunderbolt costs more and I don't need the extra performance. Only one way to find out I guess.

 

[profdraper]

It's still very early days, but I have moved from softRAID to appleRAID using diskutil commands.

Apple updates any changes to the underlying RAID software for free and with every update. I doubt much changes now that APFS is the standard for TimeMachine, and even external spinning HDDs.

There are some disadvantages:

1. No HUD for when the RAID is no longer functioning properly ( I disconnected one of the two enclosures I have my RAID 1+0 running on and the only indication that it wasn't running as a striped mirror was the speed decrease and checking the array using diskutil appleRAID commands in terminal - I suppose I could put together a little shell script and run that with crontab)
2. You have to install a separate SMART utility
3. no GUI

RANT approaching...

I decided I didn't want to pre-pay $120 a year for potential software upgrades and "support" which I have rarely used. I also don't like the fact that it takes 24-72 hours to get a response on softRAID support forums.

I remember the days of "Shareware"... buy me a coffee/beer, etc. Now we are supposed to pre-pay people a monthly stipend to support their existence - with no guarantee of any value for that money. It's not just softRAID it's the entire technology ecosystem from Adobe, Amazon Prime, and Apple's One subscription, to a COSTCO membership.

Michelangelo made a single commission for the sistine chapel. He wasn't paid a stipend every year to maintain it. We are incentivizing this system when we patronize every component of the tech industry by paying rental fees towards future usability and stability. Everything is now "cutting edge".

Very surprised that you could go backwards. I can only assume that all of the softraid data would need to be backed up then copied back to the Appleraid? Time consuming and annoying, one of the main ‘gotchas’ if deciding to use softraid.

 

[mattspace]

This sort of stuff is why I was looking at TB DAS RAID options, where the device did the management, rather than software on the Mac, but I couldn't find any options that didn't seem to have scare-language about needing to run macOS in a reduced security mode for their drivers.

Promise seem to have modern drivers that don't require this, but you can only get their arrays pre-populated.

 

[ZombiePhysicist]

I wonder if there aren’t some hardware raid cards that you can perhaps even configure under windows, but then present the raid to macOS as a simple singular hard drive.

I had one of these many years back with my 5,1, and it gave you the ability to configure the hardware raid via web page on windows, but booting into macOS, it just looked like a normal drive.

Bootable 4TB SSD on classic Mac Pro

I just set up the Addonics Quad mSATA PCIe SSD card with 4 Samsung 840 EVO mSATA SSDs. It works great and is bootable. http://www.addonics.com/products/ad4mspx2.php http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-mSATA-0-85-Inch-MZ-MTE500BW/dp/B00HWHVOQS/ref=sr_1_2?s=electronics By default it works...

forums.macrumors.com

Maybe someone makes a more modern and faster version of the card in that link?

 

[Johnny Jackhammer]

Very surprised that you could go backwards. I can only assume that all of the softraid data would need to be backed up then copied back to the Appleraid? Time consuming and annoying, one of the main ‘gotchas’ if deciding to use softraid.

I wasn't describing the steps I took I was giving a summary of a change I made.