Author Archives: Jeff Jorgensen

Has your Mac OS warned you that a volume was not ejected properly even when you know it’s still attached? Have you been warned by the SoftRAID Monitor that there is a problem with your Mac? If so, you may have encountered a problem which affects disks attached via the Thunderbolt bus. This problem causes […]

exFAT not recommended for long term usage. What is exFAT? Windows 95 introduced a new file named FAT32. FAT32 is still in common usage today, especially for thumb drives and portable media. FAT32 has several limitations such as 2TB maximum volume size, and a 4GB maximum file size. exFAT is a replacement for the FAT32, […]

Customers have reported several MacOS Applications that made modifications to MacOS that block the SoftRAID application from launching. This is a partial list, the Applications listed below are ones we have tested ourselves and are confirmed to cause this issue. They appear to modify MacOS in various ways, and either make a change to MacOS […]

​MacOS APFS volumes have a special feature where you can create additional volumes that share the same space on your disk but are independent. This new bootable volume may take up as little as 30GB of space on your disk. ​This makes it useful for setting up a volume to “manage” your main system. However, […]

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. We recommend using APFS whenever you are creating a volume which only uses SSDs as this allows you to take advantage of these great […]

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 […]

It is tempting to ignore disk errors when they occur. Your Mac seems to be working fine and yet SoftRAID keeps telling you that one of your disks has an error. You should take all disk errors seriously. Often a disk which has been reliable will have one or two errors a few months before […]

Most modern disks only receive limited testing when they are manufactured. They are tested to ensure that they can start and stop reliably and that they can read and write to some small fraction of the sectors on them. You should not trust your valuable work on these disks until you know that all of […]

Time Machine supports encrypted volumes on any SoftRAID APFS volume. One cavaet, is RAID 4/5 on HDD (rotating media) are currently very slow when encrypted, so we highly recommend you NOT encrypt RAID 4/5 volumes on HDDs. All other RAID types work fine. Whe you launch Time Machine, it iwill prompt you to encrypt your […]