MP 7,1 Using 2x Sonnet PCIe x16 setup for RAID-0

[bxs]

Subject: Using 2x Sonnet PCIe x16 setup for RAID-0

A Sonnet PCIe x16 with Samsung 970 EVO Plus blades is awfully fast configured as RAID-0 across 4 blades. Adding a 2nd Sonnet with 4 blades maybe can be even faster with RAID-0 across 8 blades. What is the consensus for doing this ?

 

[joevt]

Subject: Using 2x Sonnet PCIe x16 setup for RAID-0

A Sonnet PCIe x16 with Samsung 970 EVO Plus blades is awfully fast configured as RAID-0 across 4 blades. Adding a 2nd Sonnet with 4 blades maybe can be even faster with RAID-0 across 8 blades. What is the consensus for doing this ?

Should work. The cards will need to be in two x16 slots assigned to different pools or CPU PCIe root ports. A number greater than 16 GB/s will prove it's working. SoftRAID might give better results than Disk Utility. The top number will be around 22 GB/s. Current tests with the MacPro7,1 haven't reached 11 GB/s per slot which is strange. I was able to get 11 GB/s with SoftRAID in a Hackintosh running High Sierra with four Samsung NVMe SSD 960 Pro 1 TB in an Amfeltec four M.2 gen 3 card. Amfeltec has a six M.2 gen 3 card now.

IORegistryExplorer.app will show how the PCIe slots are laid out. It might produce different results if you assign slots to different pools (and restart the computer?). The app can create a save file.
The command ioreg -ilw0 > ioreg.txt will produce a text file.

 

[bxs]

Thanks... 👍

You wrote: SoftRAID might give better results than Disk Utility.
Yes, for RAID setups SoftRAID is worth trying to see how it compares with Disk Utility.

These Samsung blades do have limited caches, so if large data transfers are being done it could be the cache gets overrun and things slow down. See this if you have the time -> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13761/the-samsung-970-evo-plus-ssd-review

 

[bxs]

Thanks... 👍

You wrote: SoftRAID might give better results than Disk Utility.
Yes, for RAID setups SoftRAID is worth trying to see how it compares with Disk Utility.

These Samsung blades do have limited caches, so if large data transfers are being done it could be the cache gets overrun and things slow down. See this if you have the time -> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13761/the-samsung-970-evo-plus-ssd-review

At this time I'm extremely leery of employing SoftRAID.

I do have a fully paid up license for SoftRAID and my recent use of it on my late 2016 15" rMBP13,3 running Catalina 10.15.2 hasn't been promising at all. I'm using the latest SoftRAID version 5.8.1.

SoftRAID hangs every now and then when configuring things, such as setting Email alerts. It does not correctly recognize storage devices that hold a combination of APFS and HFS+. It doesn't even recognize (does not discover nor display) my internal SSD's Catalina boot device.

I have one HDD holding 1) Time Machine backups and 2) APFS Container with multiple Volumes. one of which I use to clone my internal Catalina SSD for safekeeping (it's bootable as well). SoftRAID discovers/recognizes the Time Machine HFS+ and two of the Volumes in the Container, but does not discover/display the clone of the backup of the internal Catalina SSD. See my attached images.

I have little confidence with SoftRAID at this time.

 

[bob_stan]

I have personally found SoftRaid reliable for my use over the past 5 years. However, the current version does not recognize APFS volumes.

 

[bxs]

I have personally found SoftRaid reliable for my use over the past 5 years. However, the current version does not recognize APFS volumes.

Well it seems to, to some extent. See my previous screen shot SoftRAID image attachment above, and see that it displays/discovers "Barry Info" and "Duncan Info", both of which are APFS Volumes within an APFS Container.

The SoftRAID folks at OWC really need to get on with it and release version 6 that deals with Apple's APFS correctly.

I do like SoftRAID for all of its extra features, such as Verify, error checking, SMART status, I/O counters, power on hours, SSD media life remaining, and TRIM support.