macOS 13.4 Brings Bug Fix for Some SoftRAID Users

Today, Apple released macOS 13.4 and along with it a long-awaited fix for an issue that some SoftRAID users have been experiencing with RAID 5 volumes. Here are the details.

Apple has changed the CPU used in Mac computers many times in the past 30 years; first from Motorola to Power PC, then from Power PC to Intel, and most recently from Intel to Apple silicon.

Each time, the macOS development team has done incredible work of hiding the fact that macOS software, your applications, and all of your files are running on a completely different type of processor. With each of these changes, not only are the instructions used by the CPUs totally different, but the mechanism used to access main memory has changed as well.

Sometimes, the change in CPU type also introduces bugs. This was the case with the transition to Macs with Apple silicon.

This transition introduced a bug which very occasionally causes a kernel panic when reading or writing files to SoftRAID RAID 5 volumes on Macs with Apple silicon. Reading or writing the same file to the same volume on an Intel Mac never fails.

This bug happens so infrequently that it took our testers more than a year to figure out a way of reproducing it. Most SoftRAID users on Macs with Apple silicon never see this problem.

We determined that this bug was in the code which transfers data to and from disks when accessing files on SoftRAID volumes. We then notified Apple engineers of the bug and helped them investigate it. After many, many months of working with Apple, there is finally a fix which has been introduced with the release of macOS 13.4.

With the release of macOS 13.4 Macs with Apple silicon are as reliable as Intel Macs when accessing SoftRAID RAID 5 volumes. So, if you're a SoftRAID user who depends on a RAID 5 configuration, go ahead and update to the macOS 13.4 for the best experience.

SoftRAID 7.5 was released earlier this year with a host of improvements, including much easier setup. SoftRAID gives you increased power and control over your RAID drives and disks that hardware RAID can’t deliver, and it doesn’t lock you into technology that you can’t upgrade or expand. If you want more information on the latest release of SoftRAID, click here.

We want to thank Apple for their cooperation in getting this bug sorted and, as always, thank you to all our awesome SoftRAID users for your patience.