Reformatting R8 for AFPS

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  • Last Post 27 June 2025
Chris Close posted this 26 June 2025

Dear Brains, I have just migrated my system from iMac-2015 to Mac Mini M4. (Sequoia) It caused a number of issues some of which are sorted. However the files I store on the Pegasus 2 R8 now have a mixture of read write permissions under such listings as 'System', 'Wheel', 'Everyone' and more often than not a spinning wheel that reads 'Fetching'. Sometimes it also reads 'Admin 2 (Me)' which is not a user that exists. These are mainy image files.

Some images I can open and save seamlessly but others I cannot save. Soem I tried saving to my Desktop but when I dragged them to the files in the R8 and deleted them from the desktop they also deleted from the R8. Apple advise reformatting to AFPS which as far as I can tell will erase everything (all 26Tb of it) The work is backed up to external drives but it also seems usings Apple's Disk Utility means a Raid 5 set up with AFPS is not viable. (It was set up as a stripe with redundancy disk which I believe to be Raid 5) as well as a partition for Time Machine which is now no longer needed. 

I use Lightroom to catalogue my work and have subdivided the R8 disks into sections 1A - 9A which I make basic mirrored back ups of on disks 1B - 9B via a hard drive enclosure using Chronosync.

Does anyone have suggetsions as to the best way to reformat the R8 disks to make them work with the Mac Mini? I was hoping not to erase them but cannot see another way.

I was thinking Softraid may be the way to go instead of Apple Disk Utility as I may be able to preserve the Raid 5 set up with AFPS or perhaps I just have to go for Raid 0 and rely on my mirrored back ups if there is an issue.

Thank You

Chris

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R P posted this 26 June 2025

Hi Chris,

The Pegasus is block storage, it knows nothing of files or filesystems. It's not clear what happened, but there is a non-free program that can fix most HFS+ filesystem issues named Disk Warrior.

APFS is not recommended for spinning disks, as the filesystem fills it will become extremely slow and even if you remove most of the files it will not regain it's former speed.

The Pegasus ships with a RAID5 and HFS+ filesystem. But it will work fine regardless of the RAID level used. RAID0 is not suggested, if 1 disk dies you lose all the data. RAID5 is recommended. The RAID level is not visible to the Mac as it only sees one disk (unless you make multuiple RAIDs).

Chris Close posted this 27 June 2025

Thank you R P for that clarity. I would never have realised how the Pegasus system works, in terms of formatting and RAID. It is a relief in many ways as I had anticipated scrubbing everything and having to reload the files. My set up was one partition for my images and one partition for Time Machine which I am overwriting for my new computer so no multiple RAIDs. I also had no idea that AFPS is not ideal for spinning disks. Upgrading my computer system is proving to be much costlier (potentially) than I had hoped.

I have found myself going into various external  disks and folders and changing file permissions but it is laborious. I thought I could maybe select a single back up disk and reset the permissions for everything on the disk but not so.

I do have Disk Warrier from a while ago so may get the latest version and run that. It always had a good reputation.

The migration, although it is relatively simple to do, does seem to have messed up a lot of file permissions. I never really use Apple Music except within Final Cut Pro but even that had catalogued my music in very strange ways that caused issues and several hours of time.

I very much appreciate you took the time to reply and help me out. Hopefully I am now going in the right direction.

Chris

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