The SoftRAID driver always creates the correct parity information for each block when writing to the volume. The parity information gets written out at the same time that your files are written so it should always be correct. There are problems with specific Macs which can result in this parity information not being written out […]
Author Archives: Jeff Jorgensen
In short, the answer is ‘no’. While you can add a disk to a RAID 5 array to replace a missing, failed, or otherwise removed member disk – you cannot add to the total number of disks included in your SoftRAID array. This is a feature under investigation for a future release. Increasing the number […]
If you have many identical external disks, it is often easy to confuse one with another unless you add some sort of label to the outside of the disk. SoftRAID allows you to add the a label to each SoftRAID disk, a label which will appear in the SoftRAID user interface, log entries and email […]
Most modern disks only get limited testing during the manufacturing process. They get tested to ensure that they can read and write data correctly, spin at the correct speed and can start and stop. They are not tested to ensure that every sector can read and write correctly. You can perform this advanced level of […]
If you have ever had to recover a file that you’ve accidentally erased, you know that it’s much easier to locate the files you need if all the unused space on the disk is filled with zeros. Even if you’ve never done this yourself, and have sent a failed disk to a data recovery service, […]
If some of the disks you are certifying are getting errors, there are two possible explanations: You have an unreliable batch of disks. Some manufacturers ship new hard drive technology before it is truly reliable. We have found this to be the case with early shipments of 6 and 8 TB disks. We have also […]
Some of the controllers used on SSDs (Solid State Disks) use data compression to minimize the amount of data they have to write to flash memory. This allows them to minimize the wear on the flash memory and to attain much higher write performance when tested using benchmarking applications. (Most benchmark applications write blocks of […]
We recommend that you replace older disk drives even if they have not failed. As disks age, the chance that they will fail increases. It is always better to replace a disk before it fails than to wait for it to fail and have to restore data from a backup or replace a disk on […]
Every time you start up the SoftRAID application, it gets the SMART status* of every disk which support SMART. In addition, the SoftRAID Monitor gets the SMART status every time you restart your Mac and every 24 hours after that. Each time SoftRAID gets the SMART status of a disk, it checks to see if […]
SoftRAID uses SMART to ask a disk how many hours it has been used. Disks which support SMART are on Thunderbolt, SATA, SAS and Fibre Channel buses. Disks which don’t support SMART will say “SMART status: test unavailable” in the expanded part of the disk tile in the SoftRAID application main window. For disks which […]