exFAT not recommended for long term usage. What is exFAT? Windows 95 introduced a file system called FAT32, which is still in common use today — especially on thumb drives and portable media. FAT32 has significant limitations, including a 2TB maximum volume size and a 4GB maximum file size. exFAT was created as a replacement […]
Author Archives: Jeff Jorgensen
Why This Happens The SoftRAID Monitor is a background application that must launch at startup. The Monitor acts as the communication bridge between the SoftRAID application, the driver, and your disks. If the SoftRAID Monitor fails to load at startup, the SoftRAID application cannot communicate with the driver or access your disks. This causes the […]
You may need a second macOS installation to run disk utilities, manage SoftRAID volumes, or troubleshoot your main system. APFS containers allow you to create additional bootable volumes that dynamically share space on your disk rather than requiring fixed partition sizes. A management volume typically requires 30-50GB. Unlike older partition methods, this only uses the […]
APFS is Apple’s first new file system in over 30 years. It offers a host of features not found in HFS+, including native encryption, copy-on-write, snapshots, and greatly improved volume stability. Use APFS for SSD-Only Volumes We recommend using APFS whenever you are creating a volume that uses only SSDs. This allows you to take […]
We recommend replacing older disk drives even if they have not yet failed. As disks age, the chance of failure increases significantly. It is always better to replace a disk proactively than to wait for it to fail and face an emergency restoration from backup. SSDs and Flash Media Most SSDs contain wear indicators that […]
It is tempting to ignore disk errors when they occur. Your Mac may seem to be working fine, and yet SoftRAID keeps reporting that one of your disks has an error. You should take all disk errors seriously. A disk that has been completely reliable can show one or two errors in the months before […]
Disk drives only receive limited testing when they are manufactured, not a comprehensive testing of the entire disk surface. Manufacturers expect that users will discover faulty drives as they use them. Drives are tested to ensure that they can start and stop reliably and that they can read and write to a small sample of sectors. […]
Yes, Time Machine supports encrypted backups on SoftRAID APFS volumes. Important setup requirement: When creating your Time Machine volume, select APFS as the file system. macOS does not support converting HFS+ volumes to APFS, so if you initially created an HFS+ volume, you must delete it and recreate it as APFS before using it for […]
SoftRAID 7 and SoftRAID 6 SoftRAID XT is designed to work only with OWC storage solutions and volumes in a single enclosure. SoftRAID Pro and Lite work with OWC storage solutions as well as third-party solutions and will enable users to store data across enclosures. ThunderBay Flex 8 ThunderBay 8 ThunderBay 6 ThunderBay 4 ThunderBay […]
During the 30-day trial period, all SoftRAID Premium features are available — there are no restrictions. The SoftRAID application will display “Trial Period – XX Days Remaining” as a reminder, but this does not limit what you can do. This is a great time to set up your volumes, test your configuration, and make sure […]