New Accelsior 2 TB SSD in 2019 MP: Any advantage formatting with SoftRAID instead of Disk Utilities?

[JoeM]

I hadn't really read the spec on the Accelsior SSD and thought it was merely a 2 TB drive but on reading saw that it's actually 4 NVMe drives bundled together for 2 TB total. So I wound up using SoftRAID to create a striped RAID 0 volume. It's getting about 4500 MB/s write speeds and about 4700 MB/s read speeds.

The software was a bit of a pain to get working properly. After rebuilding the volume, initializing and trying to get the volume to mount by following trouble shooting posts on their website for a while I called OWC tech support and they got it sorted out.

[OWC Larry]

There are definitely advantages to Softraid.... A trade off is that you do have the T2 Caveat that requires you to disable security in order to install the latest SR 5.8.3 (we are working with Apple to eliminate this issue in the near future - at least in terms default driver).

The benefit of softraid is full TRIM enablement which makes a big difference with an SSD blades in array of this performance. Short answer - you will get better RAID 0 performance using Softraid on extended write tasks.

if mainly for read - not going to matter too much.

If want redundancy via RAID 1 - only SR will let you do a 0+1 4 drive array of that kind.. and even if you only mirror sets of 2 drives - SR is nearly twice as fast at reading from a RAID-1 volume (since it striped reads of RAID-1 sets) vs. Apple (which only reads from a single drive in R1). Further - with a RAID-1 set, while Apple OS won't even tell you one of the drives has failed - unless you launch DU and find out there or your 2nd drive fails, you're running without redundancy without warning... Softraid both will warn you when/if a drive has failed + also gives a predictive warning even before failure.

Final bit - you can also do RAID-4 or 5 (RAID 4 actually better with SSDs, RAID 5 better for HD due to performance of drives) which on a 4 blade array gives you both redundancy and the performance benefit over single drives.

SR is included with the Accelsior and it is a good tool - but VERY important you use the latest version. The 5.6.3 driver that ships stock with AppleOS (and usually only allowed 1 update per year, we're working on that) is not ideal with the current 10.15 release. Apple finds bugs, we find bugs - in Apple's bugs or updates or fixes that break prior standards, etc... and need that updated driver). Again, hopefully in the future - by 10.16 - will not need to adjust security or reinstall driver with new OS rev updates too.

Thanks for getting our 4M2 and enjoy that and your new Mac Pro! Some amazing work is being done using those Accelsiors right now for a sequel to a movie that hd ground breaking special effects when it was introduced a good number of years ago. The sequel going to be even more amazing. and that's jut one thing

[JoeM]

Thanks Larry, while I was able to download and get SR 5.8.3 added in Security and Privacy by following a post in the SR forum, I couldn’t get the volume to mount, even after reinitializing, deleting and recreating the volume a few times.
Your guy in tech support was able to walk me through getting a new driver installed and once that was done everything was fine.

[OWC Larry]

T2 is a PIA.

You have to boot up into the security setting mode - turn off T2 security that blocks driver updates and such... and then install softraid. The 5.6.3 driver shipped with Apple OS doesn't work well with the current 10.15.4 release... which I'll note is because of changes Apple did to fix their own bugs. And 10.15 makes it harder than ever to replace an OS provided driver version with an updated driver.

While the T2 is great in stopping people from inadvertently installing malware that would can wreck havoc, it gets in the way of a lot of legitimate things today too.

If people didn't run their Macs in admin model would have a lot less to zero risk of the inadvertent malware installations (which are still far and few between on the Mac platform because you still have to say yes, install, and often put in the user password to 'invite the vampire' in. I understand Apple's direction here... and with 10.16 and 10.17 we'll start to see the solutions needed so that trusted/supported drivers like ours can also have beneficial updates without needing to disable Apple's new security approach.

These headaches with driver only occur on models 2017 and later that have the T2. iMac Pro was the first and then 2018 everything started getting T2.