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Activity Forums Storage & Archiving RAID drives and M1 Macs

  • RAID drives and M1 Macs

    Posted by Adrian Bailey on May 17, 2022 at 1:43 pm

    Hi all

     

    Hoping to get some feedback of people’s experience using large RAID drives on M1 Macs.

     

    We have a LaCie 6big on location for our media offloads and are currently getting 50MB/s (yup fifty!) write speeds on RAID 5.

     

    Lacie acknowledges the issue and says this is all that can be expected, and that Apple needs to fix the problem.

     

    I’ve seen some references to connectivity issues and reduced performance with G-RAIDS too.

     

    Can anyone share any good experiences and speeds with RAID 5 drives on M1 Macs?

     

    Thanks

    Adrian

    Ben Thoume replied 2 years, 4 months ago 5 Members · 6 Replies
  • 6 Replies
  • Neil Sadwelkar

    May 18, 2022 at 5:59 pm

    I have the same issue.

    LaCie 6Big 48TB (40TB in RAID5). On a Intel MBP I get decent 800+ MB/sec R/W

    On an Apple M1 MBP, its 300+ MB/sec read and 50 MB/sec write.

    I’ve connected the LaCie 6Big to an Intel Mac Mini. Connected a TB3- 10GigE adapter to the Intel Mac mini. Then connected another TB3-10GigE adapter to my Apple M1 and, of course connected a GAT6 between both 10GigE adapters. And then shared the LaCie 6Big over 10GigE with the M1 MBP. Now I’m seeing slightly better speeds like 300 MB/sec R/W.

    I read a discussion on this on the Apple dev forum and there one person posted that he installed SoftRAID 6 on the M1 system and used SoftRAID to create a RAID on the LaCie 6Big and now he’s seeing 1000+ MB/sec R/W.

    The discussion is here…

    https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/669095?page=2

    In case you plan on doing this, bear in mind that you may be formatting the LaCie 6Big and all data on it would be lost.

    Neil Sadwelkar

  • Adrian Bailey

    May 26, 2022 at 5:21 pm

    Thanks Neil

    Seems there’s some instability with SoftRaid too, but not as bad as the rest

    I just can’t believe there’s no stable RAID solution that’s usable on M1. Given that it’s a staple on set, either M1s are not going to be present going forward, or RAIDs.

    My guess is the latter …,

  • Eric Santiago

    May 27, 2022 at 1:31 pm

    I inherited an FCPX project on a QNAP TR-004 (16TB).

    The client was complaining that this RAID unit beach balls on her Mac Mini Studio.

    She is convinced her older iMac (not pro) was faster.

    I did a BMD Disk Speed test and on M1 Pro MBP it did 160/180.

    Sad compared to the local drive at 5600/5800.

    I tested my OWC Envoy Pro and that did 2600/2900.

    So no experience with these QNAPs but it does have it set to software control.

    The drive is full so I wasn’t going to start changing the dip switches.
    I have no idea how that works and if it’s something you do on the fly.

    I have faith in the MBP M1s as far as future RAIDs.

    Just give it time I guess.

  • Ben Thoume

    June 6, 2022 at 10:06 am

    I dont understand why it is just Lacie having this issue, I have large RAID 5 drives from Areca, G-tch and Lacie, and it is only the Lacies drives that have ridiculously slow write speeds on my Mac Studio M1, if the other drives are running fine why cant Lacie fix this? The Lacie drives currently have too much data for me to shift across to start formatting etc, hope there is a fix or work around soon that doesnt require me to move everything

  • Doug Metz

    June 9, 2022 at 9:29 pm

    I’m getting amazing throughput on an OWC Thunderbay8. It’s loaded with SSDs, set up as RAID4 using SoftRAID on an M1 Mini (Monterey). No issues with the software, been running it hard for a few months now. I was apprehensive at first, but it’s won me over.

  • Ben Thoume

    July 15, 2022 at 10:17 am

    Lacie have fixed this now with their latest version of the lacie raid manager

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