SoftRAID validates a mirror volume by reading every sector from each of the disks in the volume, and comparing them to ensure they all have the correct data—ie the mirrored data is identical to the data it’s mirroring. If a mismatch is found, SoftRAID will update all blocks on the volume’s disks with the correct […]
Author Archives: Jeff Jorgensen
SoftRAID volume safeguards protect you from accidentally destroying a volume which contains files that you need. When you enable the safeguard on a volume, SoftRAID prevents you from doing anything to the volume’s disks which would destroy the volume. For example, you cannot initialize or certify a disk if any of the volumes on that […]
When you select the optimization setting for a volume in SoftRAID, you are telling the SoftRAID driver what you will be primarily using that volume for. This allows the driver to fine tune its behavior—like the volume rebuild rate, and when status information is written to the disk—so that the driver will not interfere with […]
Fast Mirror Rebuilds happen so quickly that users often wonder whether all their mirror volumes contain the same data. If your 2 terabyte volume rebuilds in 10 – 20 minutes, you might think that some parts of the volume weren’t rebuilt correctly. We added the volume validate function to SoftRAID for just this purpose. When […]
If you are creating a stripe volume for editing uncompressed digital video footage, there are several things you can do to maximize its performance. If the volume uses disks with rotating media (and not SSDs), you should create the volume with only the first 30% of each disk. You can do this by initializing each […]
You can make any SoftRAID volume read-only as long as it does not contain files which another application is using. You can do this by selecting “Make Read-Only” under the Volume menu in the SoftRAID application. Once a volume has been made read-only, the SoftRAID driver will prevent any application from from writing to the […]
Both RAID 4 and RAID 5 volumes give you very high performance while still protecting your volume from disk failure. They are a great choice if you need high performance for writing large files or for reading files of any size, ie for video editing, animation studios, digital photography, prepress and graphic arts. With RAID […]
Because of the way that RAID 4 and RAID 5 work—by creating parity data, which can be used to rebuild your data, and storing that parity data separately from the data it encodes—one of your RAID 4 or RAID 5 disks can completely stop working and your data is safe. Read more about how parity […]
With SoftRAID, a RAID volume can have up to 16 disks. For increased reliability, we recommend that you have up to 8 disks in your RAID 4 or RAID 5 volume. If you are using more than 8 disks, we recommend you use RAID 1+0 for increased reliability.
You can find a full explanation of how RAID 4 and RAID 5 volumes work on our RAID levels page.