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Is SoftRAID more "forgiving" when it comes to failing mirrored drives

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(@gjarboni)
Posts: 2
Member
Topic starter
 

Hello,

I used to use a pair of SSD drives in SATA/USB enclosures by Oyen Digital with Apple's RAID 1. I originally tried using an Thunderbolt to SATA adapter (thinking that this would give me TRIM support) but the drives had a tendency to "fail" according to Apple Raid. I'd add the drive back and it would work for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months before failing again. I connected the same HD via USB and it never failed since. I've since migrated the data to another machine using an Apple Raid mirror on two USB SSD drives (Samsung) with no problems.

So my question is: Does anyone know if Apple is super-sensitive to drive failures? Does SoftRAID have some configurable parameters that determine how many failed requests means that it should fail the drive?

And, I'm of course wondering if this was the fault of the Thunderbolt to SATA converter or if it was AppleRaid being hyper sensitive.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Jason M.

 
Posted : 19/09/2018 12:52 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8006
Member Admin
 

First, Apple's driver is from 2009. there is no TRIM support and it is single threaded.

It does not handle fail over very well. There are no diagnostics, so it is hard to say what happened. When there is a disk error with Apple's RAID, it makes one attempt to rebuild and then simply fails. I do not think it causes drives to fail, but will probably show a failure mode when there is an error during a rebuild and not be able to do anything from there.

yes, it could have been your adapter.

Try using SoftRAID Lite for 30 days and see for yourself. We do not have any specific disk management parameters, everything should "just work" and when there are disk errors, SoftRAID does a better job of trying to tell you what happened and is more persistent in rebuilds.

SoftRAID also supports SMART (predictive failure analysis) and TRIM.

 
Posted : 19/09/2018 2:33 pm
(@gjarboni)
Posts: 2
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Topic starter
 

First, Apple's driver is from 2009. there is no TRIM support and it is single threaded.

So RAID drives specifically never get TRIM? I assume their's no trim over USB with any driver.

Otherwise, I didn't do a great job of explaining. The drive in question seemed fine, AppleRaid would disable it and then I'd reenable it, the drives would re-mirror and everything would be fine for a while. I got new drives because the old ones became ridiculously slow after 4-5 years of use (they held Virtual Machine images, so they got used a lot).

Anyway, I already purchased SoftRAID, I just was curious whether it made sense to re-use my Thunderbolt to SATA adapter. We'll see how the drives work with SoftRAID before I decide on that.

Thanks again!

Jason M.

 
Posted : 19/09/2018 2:43 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8006
Member Admin
 

While SoftRAID supports both TRIM and SMART, Apple's RAID driver does not.

Generally USB does not support TRIM. We tried to add TRIM over USB support in our SMART driver, but I don't think it was implemented in the drivers.

Let us know if you have any problems.

 
Posted : 20/09/2018 1:07 pm
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