hoakley February 9, 2020 Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: SSD it

Last week I finally retired my 8 year-old Promise Pegasus RAID system, which has steadfastly stored my Time Machine backups on a succession of hard disks over those years. I’ve sort of replaced it with an SSD RAID, but it’s only sort of as Time Machine has now stopped working. Indeed, what should have been a seamless transition has turned into a bit of a mess: it’s still not really up and running in the way I had intended.

After mulling this over and discussing it here, I decided to move my backups onto an OWC ThunderBay 4 (Thunderbolt 3) containing 2 TB Samsung 860 EVO SSDs. In a bid to fool myself into believing that this wasn’t really going to cost me $/€/£ 1500, I quietly bought the first SSD late last year. Then I ordered the enclosure and another two SSDs, with the fourth due on Monday. I did have one heart-stopping moment just after I’d ordered the enclosure: I downloaded the ThunderBay user guide, only to read there that it was incompatible with Samsung 860 EVO SSDs, but a little investigation showed that had only applied to early versions which had shipped in 2018. The current model seems pretty omnivorous.

I opted to turn three of those SSDs into a single striped array (RAID level 0) using SoftRAID XT, a product which I had already relied on in the past. Once I had the SSDs and enclosure, it was just a few minutes work to install the drives and get ready to shut my old Pegasus down, ready for replacement.

SoftRAID 5.8.1 is stated as being “compatible with macOS Catalina 10.15”, but its support pages warn that “Catalina prevents the SoftRAID driver from being installed or updated when Secure Boot, (System Startup Security) is enabled.” So I knew that once I had installed SoftRAID, I’d have to restart with Secure Boot disabled so that the kernel extensions could be installed correctly. This was starting to become a bit more messy than I had expected, but hey ho.

What I then discovered, the hard way, is that on my iMac Pro running 10.15.3, I can only run with Secure Boot turned off. The moment that I restart with Secure Boot turned on, SoftRAID can’t find the required kernel extensions, tries to install them but can’t, so I have to force quit the app, restart in Recovery Mode, disable Secure Boot, then restart before I can use the app again. In fairness, this is mentioned in the release notes for version 5.8, which are installed alongside the app. Messier again.

Secure Boot isn’t so much of a loss now, perhaps. It’s a feature of T2-equipped Macs which ensures that they start up from a certified copy of macOS, and is separate from the option to boot from an external drive. As such its protection overlaps considerably with that provided by Catalina’s read-only System volume. So, for the moment at least, I can live with just the one.

SoftRAID is a delight to use. Configuring the three SSDs into RAID 0 took little more than the twinkling of an eye, and the app tells me that TRIM is enabled on all my SSDs and provides full access to those drives for SMART monitoring too. Those are valuable bonuses.

softraid01

Despite the delays with Secure Boot, I was making good progress, and was ready to invite Time Machine to make its first full backup to the new drive. As this amounted to a little more than 1.2 TB, I was interested to discover how long it would take with 6 TB of striped SSDs. As I described in yesterday’s article, Time Machine didn’t back up. On at least six different runs, using slightly different tweaks and settings such as whether to include a backup of the System, it has stopped with only 215.90 GB backed up, and refused to go any further.

Unable to make any more progress with Time Machine, I fell back to Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner, a friend from the more recent past than SoftRAID. As you’d expect, Carbon Copy Cloner behaves flawlessly and now backs up my Data and external volumes to the new SSD RAID. Excellent though it is, it’s not what I’d choose as a backup system to replace Time Machine completely, so I’ve been looking at alternatives including Acronis True Image, Arq, and ChronoSync. Of those, Econ’s ChronoSync looks the most promising. It’s a one-time purchase with free updates forever, and gets a lot of details right, even providing extensive release notes. I’ll let you know how I get on with it.

A great deal has changed since I installed my Pegasus RAID. Amazingly its kernel extension has remained compatible with macOS over those years, and still works fine with Secure Boot enabled. But if you were to ask me whether I’d recommend a regular user to try installing this setup on a current model of Mac with Catalina 10.15.3, I’d have to say no. I’m generally happy with Catalina, delighted with the ThunderBay 4 enclosure, and impressed with SoftRAID. But the sad fact is that – for whatever reasons, and I’m here not interested in blamestorming – they don’t work together. Yet. There are even moments when I wish my old Pegasus was still connected.

14Comments

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1

IvanExpert on February 9, 2020 at 9:33 am

As good as SoftRAID is, any reason you can’t put the SSD’s in the Pegasus? Also, just for science, does AppleRAID with Thunderbay work any better with Time Machine?

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  hoakley on February 9, 2020 at 9:42 am
  
  Thank you.
  I don’t think that my old Pegasus supports SSDs at all, and the whole point of spending all this money is to replace a Thunderbolt 1 system which is now ancient and completely unsupported.
  I did think of AppleRAID, but all that I read tells me that has now been essentially unsupported for several years. I’m not even sure whether it’s still available in Catalina. I think I’d sooner revert to the old Pegasus and its hard disks than AppleRAID, given its long history of problems.
  That said, at one stage I did start trying to reformat one of the SSDs using Disk Utility, but that just hung, not even reporting an error, making me suspect that the trip to SoftRAID is one way, and I can’t afford to put a 2 TB SSD at risk of bricking.
  Howard.
  
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3

IvanExpert on February 9, 2020 at 1:57 pm

Based on my (limited) experience with SoftRAID, it’s not one way (you can certainly revert within the software itself, at minimum). Disk Utility failing to initialize a disk makes me suspect a problem with the SSD! Nothing SoftRAID does should affect a disk’s firmware or ability to be erased. You could also try performing an ATA_SECURE_ERASE using Parted Magic (Linux boot USB stick) if it’s possible to have the drive directly on an internal bus (e.g. in an optical disk MacBook Pro). That resets the drive to something like factory state, though don’t try it on an OWC branded SSD — then it can really brick it. Works fine on Samsung, Sandisk, Apple, Crucial, et al.

I hear you about wanting to move from the TB1 Pegasus, though I still like the unit. But yes a striped SSD would likely be bottlenecked in it. But I have no reason to think that it wouldn’t or couldn’t work with SSD’s — it will just send block reads and writes that the SSD should respond to as a hard drive would.

SoftRAID’s developer is also very good about support. It’s a labor of love for him, even if OWC is now its parent.

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4

Ben on February 9, 2020 at 4:49 pm

I use SoftRAID on a G-RAID Thunderbolt 1 (or 2?) unit, as a mirrored set. I’ve had it for about 5 years, and I recently replaced each of the disks in turn, rebuilding each. It works beautifully.
First thing I did when I got my 2018 Mini was turn off Secure Boot.

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5

Barry Sharp on February 9, 2020 at 5:16 pm

1) It seems to me that spending big bucks for SSDs, and then striping them all for Time Machine’s use is a big waste of money. Speed for backing up is not really an important thing for Time Machine (except possibly for the first full backup). Each incremental Time Machine backup, for the most part, are small and any less expensive and larger capacity HDD device is quite sufficient for timely backups.

2) I’ve had SoftRAID (full paid up license) for a number of years. For awhile it did a very good job, but of late it has been a disaster for me. The issues I came across are similar to yours. I found this unacceptable and have since drop my use of SoftRAID. SoftRAID version 6 is long in coming, and do not understand why it’s taking so long. Yes, Catalina and APFS really has caused the likes of SoftRAID, CCC, and SD! big headaches, and SoftRAID is simply taking far too long dealing with the issues.

3) Apple’s Disk Utility’s RAID setup is very straight forward and its software for dealing with RAID has been improved over time. Today, Apple’s RAID-0, RAID-1, a JBOD (concatenation) all compare favorable with SoftRAID’s performance. I’ve tested and find there’s little difference between them today (it used to be several years back that SoftRAID did perform better, but Apple has quietly made their own improvements and today both perform similarly). So from a performance and support position the Apple’s Disk Utility for RAID-0, RAID-1, and JBOD is the sensible approach. Yes, if you need RAID configs beyond what Disk Utility provides you are left with having to use SoftRAID.

4) I agree that SoftRAID’s support was excellent prior to OWC buying them. But I find today this is not as good as it should be.

5) I still use my Thunderbolt 1 Promise Pegasus R4 and with no issues. Only yesterday Promise release firmware updates and they were applicable for my R4. So do not understand your comment about the R4 not being supported any longer. I connect to it from my TB3 Macs using the USB-C to TB2 adapter with no issues whatsoever.

6) My question to you is, what on earth possessed you to buy expensive SSDs for Time Machine backups? I simply cannot understand why anyone would want to do this, and especially striping them also.

7) BTW, if you do have SoftRAID installed and you’re having problems with your Mac, and want to have Apple deal with the problem under AppleCare+, they will very likely ask you to remove the SoftRAID driver code and reproduce the problem. This has happened to me in the past, and the issue was not able to be reproduced…. now that tells a story.

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6

Barry Sharp on February 9, 2020 at 5:32 pm

Please don’y take my previous posting as a criticism. You may have good reasons (not given in your OP) for using SSDs for Time Machine backups. If you frequently find yourself wanting to restore a long-ago file quickly from the Time Machine’s backups that might explain why to me. Also, I would assume frequent full restores using Time Machine backups would also be useful for speeding the restores along.

In addition, I also very much appreciate your postings. :-))

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7

Duncan on February 9, 2020 at 5:59 pm

Regarding using SSDs for backups, it might seem extravagant now (hopefully not-at-all in the near future) but once you try it you’ll never go back. For my own computer I have an internal 1 TB SSD but manage all my media files on a separate hard-disk-based setup. So I really only use about 400GB of the internal 1 TB, for mail and lots of small text/PDF/etc. files.

I have two external 1 TB backup SSDs (again, not for my large media files), one for Time Machine and one as a strict CCC bootable clone disk. (I also have other spinning disks as offline secondary and tertiary TM backups, so really four copies in all, plus the internal SSD.) The big benefit of using SSDs is that Time machine can complete a backup in under a minute, at the pace that I generate new or changed files. Sometimes it completes in only ten seconds. This vast speed-up is liberating because I can force a backup at any time with no perceived penalty. A typical scenario:

I might have to change a password for an account somewhere, and use a long password-manager-generated string that would be difficult to even write on paper. So I change the password online and for a moment the *only* other place it exists in the world is in my password manager (1Password), and if my SSD suddenly failed I could lose that single copy. So instead I immediately force a Time Machine backup which completes quite quickly, and I can breath easier again.

Once SSD prices drop to the level that all of one’s important files can fit on them economically, using them for backups will become mainstream. The only reason spinning hard disks will exist at that point is for large-scale enterprise data storage. I think we’re now at a time where the affordability of SSDs is moving past our personal data needs, and it’s about bloody time.

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8

IvanExpert on February 9, 2020 at 6:35 pm

“I think we’re now at a time where the affordability of SSDs is moving past our personal data needs“

Except, of course, when it comes to internal SSD options on Apple hardware. Those are not priced with the market.

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9

Matthew on February 9, 2020 at 9:24 pm

Howard –
(First off, thank you for your excellent website. Tech+Art =wonderful combo. I’ve become a regular reader. Greatly appreciated.)

I’m about to retire my spinning drives as well, so your article is timely. I’m running a RAID5 with SoftRAID with an older ThunderBay4 with TB2 ports. Was originally planning on upgrading to a newer TB4 w/TB3, or TB4-Mini, populated with Samsung 860’s.

But recently have been leaning towards a QNAP NAS with TB3 (https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tvs-472xt). This would allow me direct-connection for when I need full speed (I’m a professional photographer, and sometimes work with 1~2GB Photoshop files), and for initial backups, but apart from that, I can do everything over WiFi, including my incremental backups.

Curious if you considered a NAS, and if so, why you choose not to go that route?

Also, I’ve been using CCC for years and found it excellent for keeping bootable clones up-to-date. Curious what aspect of CCC didnt work for you and what you could do with ChronoSync (another excellent software) that you couldnt with CCC?

Thanks again – Matthew

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10

hoakley on February 9, 2020 at 9:45 pm

Thank you all who have commented. Rather than respond piecemeal, perhaps I had better summarise the various discussions we’ve had here and where I’m coming from.
I have two main production Macs: my iMac Pro, on which almost everything lives, and which I use for most of my work with this blog and development, and a MacBook Pro 16-inch which is a backup system and the Mac I use for beta releases of macOS.
The MBP currently backs up to an SSD, but that’s mainly for use when writing and developing, e.g. T2M2.
The iMac Pro has had my old Promise Pegasus RAID, which I must have bought around eight years ago. It’s coming up for a change of disks anytime now, so rather than put four new hard drives into it, I thought this was a good opportunity to replace it before it finally dies.
Looking ahead to the next eight years or so, Apple is either going to have to bring Time Machine to use APFS for backups or abandon it altogether. At that time, I really need SSDs for my backups. Currently, the Pegasus has been slower than I’d like. Even without doing much, TM backups to it take 3-5 minutes, when I’d prefer less than 2 minutes. When I upgraded to Catalina, it took well over an hour for the first backup afterwards, which is getting silly.
After a lot of thought and discussion here, I decided that it was daft to buy, say, a replacement Pegasus or ThunderBay 4 with four 2 TB hard drives, when for a bit more I could go straight to SSDs now. The cost of doing this with a Pegasus is significantly higher, so the ThunderBay was the obvious best buy.
I’ve used SoftRAID quite a bit in the past, and am quite happy to go with it rather than AppleRAID, which hasn’t exactly excelled itself, and has a more uncertain future, I suspect. Now that Apple seems to have been providing more help with APFS development, I suspect that SoftRAID 6 is getting closer too.
So, although more expensive than sticking with a RAID hard drive system, I think this combination of hardware has a much brighter future. I’d rather get away from having to replace drives every three years or so, and the trade off for paying more for each storage unit is that they should, with a bit of luck, last another 8+ years, which I wouldn’t risk with hard drives even if they didn’t fail beforehand. I expect these SSDs should see me well into my seventies, which seems good to me!
Several who have commented on the problems I have experienced are convinced that one or all of my SSDs has bad blocks or is otherwise defective. I know my way around the unified log fairly well, and have seen entries which result from such errors: the log isn’t silent when disk read or write fails. However, in this case (on every occasion) there are absolutely no error messages in the log. Nada. All you see are the entries which were marking speedy transfer, every second or so, suddenly drop to every few minutes. It’s just as if Time Machine is throttling the transfers. Because I’ve tried this using different backup options and multiple times to the same RAID, the chances of an identical error occurring at exactly the same point during the backup are almost zero.
Not only that, but similar problems are reported by many Catalina users, typically during the first full backup, and most commonly when backing up to a NAS.
Since I have been unable to complete this first full backup with TM, I’ve been making backups using CCC every 6 hours or so, and using ChronoSync on a more elaborate schedule. I’ll be writing more about these in a future article, but CCC has limited options in backing up and provides no tools to work with incremental backups like these, leaving you with just Finder. ChronoSync has more extensive features, although these still seem limited when it comes to inspecting backups, for instance. I’m also mindful of their performance: despite the much faster media, their backups are no faster than Time Machine, which is disappointing.
I hope this explains why I made the decisions I did, and where I am now.
Thank you for all your comments, which are proving invaluable.
Howard.

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11

Duncan on February 9, 2020 at 11:28 pm

One note about failed monolithic TM backups: We have a separate Mac set up to record and manage security cameras (using the excellent Security Spy software) which generate enormous amounts of video files. (The current setup uses one Thunderbay-4 for storage and a second for TM backup, each with a 15 TB RAID-5 volume.) On a couple of occasions I’ve had to completely erase the Time Machine volume and start from scratch, and the first time I tried it was an estimated 10+ hour operation which I left to run overnight.

Needless to say, Time Machine choked before completion, partly because the continously-generated video files from the cameras were overwhelming the entire operation. A second attempt the next day also failed.

So what I did instead was to break up the backup task into ‘chunks’, by choosing one sub-folder to back up while excluding the rest of the video files. I think it was something like 1 TB for that first chunk, while the other 14 TBs were ‘put on hold’ as it were. That completed successfully so I had a ‘first backup’ to the freshly-erased Time Machine volume.

Then, over the course of the next two days, I removed other large folders from the exclusion list (all done through the System Preferences app / Time Machine tab) one at a time, performed another backup, and kept increasing the backup amount until finally the entire source volume was backed up (ie. nothing left in the exclusion list). After that Time Machine could keep up with the now-smaller incremental backups.

Now that’s a rather manual way to accomplish what computers are supposed to do for us, but it got that problematic task out of the way. I’ve also had to use that approach on someone else’s machine (thankfully with far less data involved) where it was just too much trouble trying to track down the cause of the failure when we needed a backup more urgently. It falls under the ‘crude but effective’ category of problem solving.

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12

gastropod on February 11, 2020 at 2:45 am

I really like Chronosync, mostly due to the (sometimes daunting) flexibility. I had a good experience with their support a long while back and they had a bug fix for me in a couple of days. I’m currently setting up a backup of Google Drive to an external drive for a user, and one of the things I hadn’t noticed before is that you can compress saved versions, so depending on data type, you can save more versions in less space (though more time). I hope they’ll eventually add deduplication and their own encryption so it would be great for cloud backup too.

CCC wouldn’t do the GD backup due to permission issues. It always runs as a privileged process, and GD didn’t permit that. Rather than try to sort it out, it was easier to switch to CS since it gives you a choice about whether it runs as the user or admin. On the other hand, CCC is more straightforward for simple cloning, and is better about continuing on regardless if there are errors such as bad blocks or corrupted file names; those can hang CS.

Retrospect is another good possibility but they changed ownership recently so things could change in the future. There’s a personal desktop version for U$120 (one main non-server computer and attached drives plus 5 additional computers via their clients), and Solo for $50 (one computer plus directly attached drives). There’s definitely a learning curve; it’s even more featureful and flexible than CS. There’s a 45 day free trial. I played around with it and with Arq summer, and I liked Retrospect much better. I’m still tempted to get it, if only to beat any move to forced subscription pricing.

Many thanks for all of your work. The articles are great, as are the utilities, which have saved the day on a number of occasions.

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  hoakley on February 11, 2020 at 7:59 am
  
  Thank you for your valuable insights, and your kind words.
  Retrospect still gives me deeply uncomfortable feelings, but those originate from many years ago, before Time Machine.
  Howard.
  
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14

Pawel on February 20, 2020 at 12:46 am

Two other exciting tools are:
Mac Backup Guru (One-time purchase ~9USD) – https://macdaddy.io/mac-backup-software/
Paragon Backup and Recovery for Mac (free) https://www.paragon-software.com/free/backup-recovery-mac/

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