Here's why RAID users should upgrade to macOS 15 Sequoia and SoftRAID software to version 8.3

We have been shipping SoftRAID with support for RAID 4, 5 and 1+0 volumes for more than 10 years. During those years, each time a user reported a bug in the SoftRAID driver, we got to work: attempting to reproduce the issue and, if we could, we fixed it. But some bugs are really difficult to reproduce. They may happen for only 1 in a 1,000 users and maybe only every month or two.  Since all the easy-to-reproduce bugs were fixed, these were the bugs which remained.

A year ago, we set out to fix these hard-to-reproduce bugs once and for all.  Even though there are less than 50 users affected by them out of the many tens of thousands of active SoftRAID users, we wanted to ensure that SoftRAID and OWC storage was rock solid for everybody.

We started by accumulating statistics from users who contacted OWC Customer Support department. We limited our investigation to those customers running macOS 14 Sonoma so we could be sure we were not investigating bugs Apple had already fixed. When we determined that the bug was in macOS, we reported it to Apple with tons of documentation. In some cases, we even provided them with specific hardware which reproduced the problem. We also spent months searching for the root cause of bugs in SoftRAID driver. The result of this combined effort is macOS 15 Sequoia and SoftRAID 8.3, both of which are available today.

Throughout this article, I will be talking about kernel panics. The kernel is the hidden part of macOS which allows your hardware, files and applications to work together. Kernel panics occur when some code in the kernel—either Apple system software or a third party driver like SoftRAID—causes the kernel to stop working correctly. The kernel senses this error and then automatically restarts your Mac. Unfortunately, when your Mac restarts, you will lose any work you have not already saved.

What storage issues are fixed in macOS Sequoia?

Fix for DART kernel panic

There have been numerous bugs in the DART code for macOS for Apple silicon (M1, M2, M3, etc.) Macs ever since the first M1 Mac shipped. (DART stands for “Device Address Resolution Table”, the piece of the macOS system software responsible for making parts of your Mac’s RAM accessible to PCI devices.)

While Apple has been fixing these bugs for years, users are still encountering these kernel panics running the latest version of macOS Sonoma. We have been reporting these bugs to Apple for the last three-plus years, providing them with hardware to reproduce the problems and monitoring Apple’s progress. We believe these bugs are finally fixed in macOS Sequoia. Even if you don’t use SoftRAID or OWC storage solutions, this fix is one of the main reasons you want to upgrade your Apple silicon Mac to macOS Sequoia.

Fix for volume unmounting problem

Ever unmount a volume in the Finder and have a dialog appear saying that it can’t be unmounted because it is in use? If you’re like me, you’re usually confused by this as you have no applications open. Why can’t I just unmount the volume? The solutions I usually resort to are either: force unmount the volume in the Finder or restart my Mac and try again.

This problem is caused by Spotlight indexing new or modified files on the volume you are trying to unmount. Spotlight just holds onto the volume, without your knowledge, refusing to let it be unmounted. This problem has been plaguing macOS for many, many years. With macOS Sequoia, this bug is finally fixed.

What’s new in SoftRAID 8.3?

Performance Improvements

SoftRAID 8.3 brings many benefits introduced in the SoftRAID 8 driver to macOS versions 13.2 and earlier. These include notable performance gains when using your RAID volumes, including up to a 4X efficiency increase across the board when performing file transfers with SoftRAID volumes on Intel and Apple Silicon machines. In addition, these changes provide up to a 50% PCIe write speed increase when using RAID 5 on Apple Silicon machines.

Fix for possible data corruption on degraded RAID 4 and 5 volumes on NVMe blades

For SoftRAID RAID 4 or 5 volumes which use NVMe blades, if a blade fails, sometimes the files on the volume can become corrupted. Our hardware tester in Taipei discovered the hint that allowed us to figure out was causing this problem and it is fixed in this latest release of SoftRAID.

This fix has undergone testing involving both Intel and Apple silicon Macs, with many tens of billions of read/write operations and over 3 PetaBytes of data transferred—our rigorous standard for testing changes in the SoftRAID driver.

If you have a RAID 4 or 5 volume, we recommend that you Validate the volume in the SoftRAID application after you start using the 8.3 driver to ensure your volume is fully protected from corrupted files.

Better protection from Thunderbolt cables being disconnected

When the cable connecting the disks for a SoftRAID volume is disconnected, the SoftRAID driver gets unloaded and all the memory it is using gets released. If read or writes to the volume are in progress when the cable is disconnected, these operations must be returned, with an error, before the driver gets unloaded. In previous versions of the SoftRAID driver, the driver was sometimes getting unloaded before the operations returned, resulting in a kernel panic. The new version of the SoftRAID driver protects against this problem by keeping the SoftRAID driver loaded until the last operation has finished.

Better protection from applications which unexpectedly quit

In previous versions of the SoftRAID driver, if a read or write was in progress at the exact moment an application crashed, the SoftRAID driver would receive invalid data from the file system.. The driver would assume there was a fatal flaw in macOS and restart your Mac.

Apple engineers gave us guidance on this specific error condition and, following their dirrection, we changed the driver so this type of invalid data is now ignored, nothing is written to the volume and your Mac is not restarted.

Better support for drives with 4 KB sectors

More than 20 years ago, when the SoftRAID driver was first created, the only drives avaiable had 512 byte sectors. Now there are NVMe blades and 4Kn HDDs, both of which use 4 KB sectors.  

The original SoftRAID driver assumed that all drives supported 512 byte sectors so it used 512 byte reads and writes when accessing volume status information on a drive. When we added support for 4 KB sectors more than 10 years ago, we changed a one-step process to a multistep process which was much more complicated. As a result, volumes became more prone to corruption if a cable to the drives was disconnected at exactly the wrong moment.

This new driver simplifies reads and writes, of volume status information, so they are once again done in a single step, even on drives with 4 KB sectors. This improves protection from volume loss when cables are unexpectedly disconnected.

How to upgrade the SoftRAID driver if you are running macOS 13.3 or later

Starting with macOS Ventura version 13.3, the SoftRAID driver is installed as part of macOS. Today, each version of the SoftRAID driver is tied to a specific version of macOS. If you upgrade to macOS Sequoia, you will instantly start using the SoftRAID 8.3 driver. Like other parts of macOS, if you want new features and bug fixes in the SoftRAID driver, you must upgrade to the latest version of macOS on your Mac.

What if I’m running an older version of macOS?

If you are running macOS Ventura 13.2 or earlier, you can just download the SoftRAID 8.3 application and it will install the new version of the driver the first time you run the application.

If you are running SoftRAID version 6 or 7 on macOS Ventura 13.2 or earlier, you will have to purchase an upgrade to version 8 in order to start using the SoftRAID 8.3 driver. Once you have upgraded to SoftRAID version 8, all future upgrades to SoftRAID are free.

A special note for 2019 Mac Pro users

If you are using a 2019 Mac Pro, your upgrade choice is not quite so clear-cut. For some 2019 Mac Pro storage configurations, we strongly recommend that you upgrade to macOS 15, for others we think your should hold off until a later release of macOS 15.  To find out more, read our article on macOS 15 and the 2019 Mac Pro.

You want to be using the SoftRAID 8.3 driver

Given the numerous fixes in the most recent version of the SoftRAID driver, we strongly recommend that you upgrade your Mac to macOS Sequoia so you are using SoftRAID version 8.3.

For users running macOS Ventura 13.3 and later, you will need to upgrade to macOS 15 to start using this version of the SoftRAID driver.

For users with SoftRAID versions 6 or 7, who are running macOS Ventura 13.2, you can get these latest bug fixes without upgrading your version of macOS. Just upgrade to the SoftRAID 8.3 application and the new driver will be installed the first time you launch SoftRAID.