Good news — if one disk in your RAID 4 or RAID 5 volume fails, your data is safe and your volume will continue to work normally. Why your data is protected RAID 4 and RAID 5 volumes are designed with redundancy built in. As data is written to the volume, SoftRAID calculates “parity” information […]
Author Archives: Jeff Jorgensen
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.
RAID 4 and RAID 5 are parity-based RAID levels that provide both performance improvement and data protection. They work by distributing your data and calculated parity information across multiple drives, allowing the volume to survive a single drive failure. How it works Data distribution: When you write a file to a RAID 4 or RAID 5 […]
You can verify your RAID 4 or RAID 5 volume is working correctly by using SoftRAID’s Validate function. Important: If you are running RAID 4 or RAID 5 with SSDs or NVMe drives, validating your volume is essential. On macOS Sonoma (14.x) and earlier, a TRIM-related issue can cause incorrect parity data to be written when an SSD […]
In short, no. You can add a disk to replace a failed or removed drive in your RAID 4/5 array, but you cannot expand the total number of disks to increase capacity. SoftRAID only allows disk replacement when a volume shows a disk status of “Missing.” This expansion feature is not currently planned for development. […]
If you have many identical external disks, it is easy to confuse one with another unless you add some sort of label to identify them. SoftRAID allows you to add a label to each disk, which will appear throughout the SoftRAID application — in the disk tile, log entries, and email notifications. By using the […]
Most modern disks only receive limited testing during the manufacturing process. They are tested to confirm they can start and stop reliably and read and write data correctly — but this testing only covers a small sample of sectors, not the entire disk surface. Manufacturers expect that users will discover faulty sectors as they use […]
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 seen this occasionally with early shipments of very high-capacity drives, as well as with refurbished disks. If you are […]
Some SSD controllers use data compression to minimize the amount of data written to flash memory. This reduces wear on the flash and can produce artificially high write speeds in benchmark tests — most benchmarking applications write blocks of zeros, which compress extremely well and do not reflect real-world performance. While hardware compression is less […]