(8)
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SoftRAID allows you to create and manage disk arrays under Mac OS X, to increase performance and reliability. SoftRAID's intuitive interface and powerful feature set makes this utility a must have for any Mac OS X Server admin, "Pro" users, Photographers, Digital Video editors and desktop users who wants more reliable backup for his computer.
What's New
Version 4.3:
- SoftRAID 4.3 is fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
- SoftRAID 4.3 adds support for Macintosh Firmware Updates. Users who have started up their Macs using SoftRAID RAID volumes can now apply Firmware Updates to their Macs.
- SoftRAID 4.3 improves the robustness of mirror volumes. With this release, SoftRAID mirror volumes are now much more tolerant of disks which fail right in the middle of a read or write operation.
- SoftRAID 4.3 improves support for SSDs (Solid State Disks) when TRIM is enabled.
- SoftRAID 4.3 command line functions have also been improved. We encourage Administrators to create scripts to alert them to potential issues with their disks before a failure occurs.
- All parts of the SoftRAID product now run as 64-bit code. This means that under Snow Leopard and Lion (Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7), the application will launch faster and be more responsive.
- The mirror rebuild algorithm has been optimized to use less CPU time. The new algorithm uses 50-75% less CPU time than the one used in previous versions of SoftRAID. This change also speeds up all mirror rebuilds. On SSDs, rebuilds can be 10 - 50% faster
- On disks which support larger transfer sizes, SoftRAID will perform mirror rebuilds in larger blocks (up to 4 MB). This results in 10 - 20% faster rebuilds.
- All verify, zero and certify disk operations now use larger blocks (up to 16 MB) on disks that support them. This results in a 10-15% speed increase of these operations.
- SoftRAID can now resume a zero, verify or certify disk operation. If you quit SoftRAID during one of these operations and then relaunch it the next day, SoftRAID will allow you to resume the operation where you left off.
- The SoftRAID driver now supports TRIM commands for all brands of SSDs when running under Lion (Mac OS X 10.7). This can dramatically increase the useful life of SSDs. Unlike most other RAID solutions, SoftRAID even supports TRIM on stripe volumes (RAID 0). Support for TRIM commands can be disabled in the SoftRAID preferences.
- The SoftRAID Monitor has new code for sending out email notifications. The code in previous versions of SoftRAID would fail to send out emails 1-5% of the time. The new code is much more reliable.
- SoftRAID can now detect when an SSD is worn out. This works on most brands of SSDs which are currently shipping except those sold by Apple. This also works on Intel SSDs and SSDs using the SandForce controller which were shipped in the past couple of years. The SoftRAID application now displays the "media life remaining" in
- the expanded disk tile of a SSD. When the SSD indicates that it has less than 10% of its media life remaining, SoftRAID will display a warning dialog. You can also configure SoftRAID so that the SoftRAID Monitor will display a dialog at startup or send you an email notification when your SSD has less than 10% of its media life remaining.
- The compression algorithm used for Tech Support Reports has been changed. Tech Support Reports are now 8 times smaller and can be reliably sent as email attachments.
- The SoftRAID Tool can now display the raw SMART data from a disk. To display the the SMART data from all disks, use the following command: "softraidtool disk all getsmartdata".
- When creating a stripe volume (RAID 0), SoftRAID now supports stripe unit sizes of up to 1 MB on FireWire disks when running under Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) or later.
- The SoftRAID application is now much better at detecting disk hangs. It can detect a disk hang during most SoftRAID operations and will indicate the disk offset where the hang occurred.
Version 4.3:
- SoftRAID 4.3 is fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
- SoftRAID 4.3 adds support for Macintosh Firmware Updates. Users who have started up their Macs using SoftRAID RAID volumes can now apply Firmware Updates to their Macs.
- SoftRAID 4.3 improves the robustness of mirror volumes. With this release, SoftRAID mirror volumes are now much more tolerant of more...
Requirements
PPC / Intel, Mac OS X 10.4 or later
PPC / Intel, Mac OS X 10.4 or later
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SoftRAID User Discussion (Write a Review)
Overall:
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Displaying 1-10 of 25
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SoftRAID allows you to create and manage disk arrays under Mac OS X, to increase performance and reliability. SoftRAID's intuitive interface and powerful feature set makes this utility a must have for any Mac OS X Server admin, "Pro" users, Photographers, Digital Video editors and desktop users who wants more reliable backup for his computer.
Copyright © 2012 MacUpdate LLC
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Xenophon reviewed on 25 Feb 2012
I use SoftRaid with all my personal data (total = 13 2Tb disks in three 5-bay eSATA enclosures) and can't be happier.
I also have MacZFS on another 5-bay enclosure and that too is nice (but can't match the convenience of SoftRaid).
The ZFS-implementation competition appears to be around the corner, which can only be a good thing for us end-users; I'm sure SoftRaid will evolve further!
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Xenophon reviewed on 11 May 2011
Still, I find a couple of things bothersome. First, the licensing policy: only one machine is allowed full functionality (in the past, SoftRaid could be installed liberally to any computers one owns). Second, the lack of some sort of knowledge base in their website. To me, this is a serious problem as storage setups become increasingly complex (FW, eSATA, PCI cards, etc) and some guidance would be very useful to the average home user.
Overall, however, this is good software (version 4.0.5).
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Xenophon reviewed on 11 May 2011
Still, I find a couple of things bothersome. First, the licensing policy: only one machine is allowed full functionality (in the past, SoftRaid could be installed liberally to any computers one owns). Second, the lack of some sort of knowledge base in their website. To me, this is a serious problem as storage setups become increasingly complex (FW, eSATA, PCI cards, etc) and some guidance would be very useful to the average home user.
Overall, however, this is good software (version 4.0.5).
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Xenophon reviewed on 11 May 2011
Still, I find a couple of things bothersome. First, the licensing policy: only one machine is allowed full functionality (in the past, SoftRaid could be installed liberally to any computers one owns). Second, the lack of some sort of knowledge base in their website. To me, this is a serious problem as storage setups become increasingly complex (FW, eSATA, PCI cards, etc) and some guidance would be very useful to the average home user.
Overall, however, this is good software.
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Don't believe me?
Checkout http://z410.tenscomplement.com/ then!!
ZFS puts this software to shame and it's time everyone knew it.
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SoftRAID has saved many of my clients (and my company too) from data loss. I'd rather have tried and true than glitzy fritzy any day.
The SoftRAID team has been exemplary in their support, and very careful about releases being solid. Sorry mate, I'll stick with what works, long trusted track record and all.
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get a clue huh?
How bout doing some homework and realise that Sun was bought out by Oracle prmarily for ZFS!
You have a funny idea of what beta warez means; considering ZFS has been on the scene for almost 10 years now!
But hey, you just keep your data on a RAID'ed FS that knows nothing about silent data corruption... I'm sure you're client will find this perfectly acceptable.
Want anymore clues?
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Regarding SoftRaid: to my mind, it is an excellent Apple RAID replacement, allowing troubleshooting (and recovery). It is good value and support is exemplary (Saturday night you get answers from Mark James). It also appears to be faster than Apple RAID, which I never got to actually trust with my data!
One gripe, however: one can only license a single workstation at a time, which means that migrating a disk to a different Mac is cumbersome. In the past, SoftRAID was so much more liberal: you got unlocked updates by email, and were allowed unlimited installs.
Nice software, 4.5 stars, I think.
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So, yes, ZFS is not just desirable, but necessary for Mac OS X. HFS is terrible. SoftRAID is fine for what it does, but nothing resolves the FS issues we've been facing for a decade here with OS X. It is indeed time for a decent actual FILE SYSTEM for the OS and ZFS fits the bill very well. I run it on FreeBSD and it is an absolute blessing and relief to know that I have no bad blocks through continual background scrubbing. We all deserve that kind of peace of mind.
Having worked with thousands of hard drives, initial silent data corruption through bad blocks / sectors is the real criminal we need to be attacking and ZFS is the only viable solution that has a real implementation for us at the moment, which is an option at all for Mac OS X. So yes, bring it on and bring it fast, but please don't advert vaporware or such at the moment. A script that accomplishes what these folks at tenscomplement.com could be written in a weekend rather easily, particularly lifting work that's already done. Sounds like you're just gauging interest right now. Again, this isn't really the place nor do I believe it's appropriate.
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Don
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Don't know about the vaporware comment, considering:
http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/ has existed for years now
and tenscomplement released a beta program last month, of which (I admit) I am a part of and am really enjoying the experience.
But I can say with a clear conscience that I'm not part of any "marketing" effort, and proof is in my previous posts I've made here about softraid back on 14 Jan 2008 (2nd page of comments).
Suggesting that a "script" can be written over a "weekend" to port ZFS to OSX is offensive and you know it. I'm sure the guys over at maczfs and FreeBSD would not agree with you.
But you are correct about this not being the place for this discussion, so I encourage anyone interested in ZFS on OSX to go to the link above and see for yourselves.
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2) you are wrong about the script for Mac OS X. It CAN be done in a weekend. I have a background in computer science and I could do this in a weekend based on existing BSD licensed projects that are already production ready and I've been using and testing. So no, not offensive at all. You just have to know what you're doing and if you don't, sure you might consider it offensive. Further, I didn't say you'd have a full gui working that meets ui guidelines, but you could have a web based one up in no time flat.
So yes, anyone interested in ZFS go to the root project, not another beta on top of an alpha-beta quality offering from the core team: http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/ -- Again, this is not equal to a RAID, that would be a RAID-Z (I run RAID-Z2 that allows for two drives to fail simultaneously, RAID-Z3 supports 3 drives failing at once). It's great and indeed far better than SoftRAID in many regards, if you want to compare apples to pears because we're still not 100% comparing apples to apples here since SoftRAID allows HFS+ to run on it, where as RAID-Z requires ZFS to be the FS. Anyway, good luck!
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Hopefully it will come out of beta soon and you guys will be able to get your hands on this real gem.
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Rsavignard reviewed on 14 Mar 2011
Most of all, incredible support, with immediate answers : Mark just helped me to recover a disk that I thought dead (din't mount anymore), by sending me a file and a command line, after sending him a report generated by SR : kind of magic..
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Hoondi reviewed on 17 Feb 2011
http://code.google.com/p/maczfs/
Softraid:
Ease of Use: is 2nd to none.
Stability: can't really comment, but I know it can't protect from silent failures.
Features: WAY behind.
Value: Way behind.
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Don Montalvo, TX
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Xenophon, while we don't support the hack intosh, SoftRAID should not have caused the problems with 10.6.2. 10.6, yes. SoftRAID uses the same OS X disktool for all reads/writes, for compatibility. Feel free to try out 4.0 and see if it works for you.
All you RAID 5 guys:
We did develop a RAID engine, which will be ready for multi-core processors. It is what we will work on next. Will take a few months, but the ability is already completed. We have done some simple performance testing and our driver will be much faster than the budget RAID cards, as there will be 4-16 processors running threads.
there is so much in 4.0, and it was a necessary burden before we could do a RAID 5. The predictive disk failure feature alone is a "killer app" as far as I am concerned. Fast Mirror rebuilds, another. (rebuild a TB volume in minutes as only the changes are rebuilt!)
thanks for your support, and always contact us directly if you have a problem.
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Why would anyone want to run RAID5 in software? Simple, because it's cheap and provides you with great reliability, which is the whole point of RAID. I run RAID6 on a couple of 6 disk arrays on a Linux server for home use. Can you imagine how much hardware RAID cards would cost to hook up 12 disks? With the cost of storage, I'd probably be looking at well over 50% of the costs of the disks! My MB has 6 SATA ports (and cost $150), and I have three 2 port PCI-E SATA cards that cost < $20 (with an excellent Silicon Image chipset.)
Modern systems have *plenty* of CPU power to process the parity calculations for RAID5/RAID6. Linux runs through multiple RAID algorithms to determine the fastest for your system. On my 2.53GHz Core2 Quad, it picks the following:
[ 18.380002] raid6: using algorithm sse2x4 (8410 MB/s)
...this also doesn't scale linearly with more threads; here's the single-threaded version of the same that it considered as a candidate:
[ 18.040007] raid6: sse2x1 4962 MB/s
For the sake of argument let's say that SoftRAID is only 25% as efficient. (I'm guessing it's higher than that; this is just to point out that it COULD be that inefficient and still work quite fine.) That's still over 1 GB/sec of parity. And my examples are from more complex RAID6, not RAID5! You'd be hard-pressed to fit 1GB/sec of raw disk throughput in a Mac to be used in a single array...
I also get a *ton* more functionality out of md under Linux than almost any hardware RAID setup, and taking a brief look at SoftRAID, it also seems to offer a bunch more functionality than hardware RAID solutions that you have to manage with proprietary software that may or may not work well on your OS.
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"Software RAID5 would be great because you can't add a RAID card to a Mac mini, iMac MacBook, or (almost all) MacBook Pro's..."
You most certainly *can* find ESATA enclosures that support RAID5. A simple Google search brings up many options:
http://www.google.com/products?q=raid5+enclosure+esata+connection&hl=en&aq=f
Don
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http://www.google.com/products?client=safari&rls=en&q=usb%20raid&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wf
Don
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There is a problem, however: in order to setup a, say, 4-disk FW array as a SoftRAID volume, the enclosure must support JBOD mode, i.e. allow individual disks to appear as such to MacOS.
I bought a pretty decent one (FW 800, 4-disks, RAID1-5) but it doesn't allow individual disks to appear on the desktop and be picked-up by SoftRAID. So, in effect, I was forced to rely on the enclosure's RAID setup.
To me, this is a serious limitation as the only available options are daisy-chaining (USB or FW) drivers, which is not very elegant.
Any ideas out there?
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Don
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Some time ago, I tried to install it on my 10.6.2 Hackintosh, and got kernel panics --- seems that this driver is pretty invasive, as my hack runs beautifuly otherwise.
There is no mention of using SoftRaid on OSx86 machines, and googling does not help (as it returns references to "software RAID implementations" in general, not this actual program.
Any experience out there?
bpaulb rated on 18 May 2011