Mac only – Legacy reference for users starting up from a SoftRAID volume Note: This FAQ applies to SoftRAID 5.x only. Since macOS Big Sur (11.0), SoftRAID volumes are no longer bootable. What is happening When you start up a Mac from a SoftRAID or AppleRAID volume, the early part of the startup process loads […]
Author Archives: Jeff Jorgensen
Mac only The SoftRAID driver writes this entry to the system log whenever some other process tries to write to a SoftRAID volume which the process does not have permission to write to. The SoftRAID driver considers this an illegal operation, writing to a volume which is only opened for reading, and returns the an […]
We recommend that mirror volumes use 3 disks. Here’s why each disk matters. Disks 1 and 2: Your always-on mirror pair The first two disks form a traditional mirror — if one disk fails while you are working, the second immediately takes over, and you can continue without interruption. These two disks should be connected […]
SoftRAID validates a mirror volume by reading every sector from each disk in the volume and comparing them to ensure all disks contain identical data. If a mismatch is found, SoftRAID will correct all affected blocks on the volume’s disks so the mirrored data is consistent across all disks. The SoftRAID application displays a count […]
Volume Safeguard protects you from accidentally destroying a volume that contains important data. When Safeguard is enabled on a volume, SoftRAID prevents any action that could destroy that volume or its data. For example, you cannot initialize or certify a disk if any volume on that disk has Safeguard enabled. SoftRAID will also prevent you […]
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 – such as the volume rebuild rate (Server is fastest, Workstation 50%, and Digital Audio/Video and Photoshop settings pause rebuilds whenever […]
Fast Mirror Rebuilds are so efficient that users often wonder whether their mirror volumes were completely rebuilt. When a 2TB volume rebuilds in just 10-20 minutes, it’s natural to question whether all the data was properly synchronized. Fast Mirror rebuilds work with all SoftRAID redundant volumes, including RAID 1 (Mirrors), RAID 4, RAID 5, RAID […]
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 no files on the volume are currently in use by another application. To make a volume read-only: Open the SoftRAID application Select the volume tile Select Volume menu → Make Read-Only Once a volume is set to read-only, the SoftRAID driver will prevent any application from […]
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 […]