Feature Discussion suggestions - New Features/Suggestions

RE: Feature Discussion suggestions

SoftRAID Support — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 17:23:00 +0000

@bry2k

RAID 6 is still on the road map, I assure you.

RE: Feature Discussion suggestions

bry2k — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 12:54:34 +0000

Haven't checked this thread in a long time. What a bummer reading these old replies. Sounds like the SoftRAID team has pretty much abandoned the promise of RAID6 support and has now resorted to trying to rationalize their failure to produce the feature by explaining to us why it's not needed? That's pretty crazy. RAID host adapters are scarce on Apple's new architecture, and we were hoping SoftRAID would fill the RAID6 niche years ago. Obviously that is unlikely to ever happen at this point. But I do find it quite insulting that the SoftRAID team says there is "no demand". As another said above, it's not a lack of demand - it's a lack of hope, after asking about it (politely) over and over and over again and getting fed nothing but platitudes about how it is just around the corner. What might you perceive as "demand"? If we are more "demanding", you only brush us off and offer more excuses as to why it cannot be done at this time. So we gave up asking about it, and you take that to mean there is no demand. How absurd! :(

RE: Feature Discussion suggestions

SoftRAID Support — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 13:14:09 +0000

@woxford

Hear you on both fronts. The 8 bay enclosure are a more compelling reason for RAID 6, for sure.

the bigger problem is not RAID 5 vs 6 (the frequency of a dual failure when a user replaces his first failure promptly and replaces all drives before they get too old) is higher than 50,000 to one/year based on our data. So it is pretty rare.

the actual issue is HFS and APFS volume directories getting damaged. HFS there is Disk Warrior, which is pretty dependable, but APFS has no ability to repair external volumes with damaged directories. 95% of all RAID complaint and issues are not the RAID, but MacOS directories.

RE: Feature Discussion suggestions

woxford — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 12:59:58 +0000

One possible reason for this "lack of demand" is that maybe we've just given up hope... and your continued pushing of RAID 10 as the better "safest" alternative. But there are 2 major downsides to the "simple" RAID 10 strategy:

1) RAID 10 arrays are inefficient. Yes, I have an independent backup of all of my data, but that is NOT the purpose of the duplicate disks in a RAID 10 array. If I have a single disk failure in a RAID 10 array, the recovery process is VERY slow (for me, it can take many days to rebuild a single 32TB volume). And having an independent backup (which is not ALSO a RAID 10 array, by the way; that would cost me even more disks and enclosures) can also cost me even more days for recovery because that backup is not on-site.

2) RAID 10 arrays are "fragile" in that they can get out of sync easily, also then forcing a complete rebuild. This kind of fragility is not so much because of disk failures, but because of flaky USB C connections. Yes, yes, I use your "Cling On" product on my drives... but it is useless if the problem is on the other end of the cable. Having had to wait a LONG TIME for a total rebuild of more than one RAID 10 array due to my not finding and fixing a flaky USB connection until it was too late and the array getting "out of sync", I am now in the process of migrating all of my arrays over to RAID 5. But without a 5-disk enclosure (and you killed your 6-disk enclosure for some reason), I have been forced to use multiple enclosures, which multiples the likelihood of a flaky USB connection by a factor of at least 2.

So why RAID 6 ? It's a matter of the (much, much lower) probability of failure vs the very real pain of having to do a full array restore.

RE: Feature Discussion suggestions

SoftRAID Support — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 08:44:24 +0000

@woxford

It is still in the queue. We are not actually seeing a lot of user demand for this. (yet)

RE: Feature Discussion suggestions

woxford — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 17:16:33 +0000

@softraid-support

Still waiting on any progress on RAID-6... For quite some time, now!

Any updates?

thanks

RE: Feature Discussion suggestions

SoftRAID Support — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 19:53:21 +0000

@zsoldier

We do not have email notification yet in SoftRAID 7.
however, there is a command line: softraidtool status
you can use this with a python and chron script to notify you any time the output changes from "No problems found with any SoftRAID disks or volumes." to send you an alert.
You can even use something like ChatGPT to help write the script.

RE: Feature Discussion suggestions

Zsoldier — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 16:00:28 +0000

Is there any feature to get remote notifications from SOFTRAID? SNMP, SMTP, or otherwise? I run my Thunderbay Flex 8 on a Mac Mini as a server so I don't look at the desktop GUI all that often.

RE: Feature Discussion suggestions

SoftRAID Support — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 22:38:06 +0000

@hoota

We did some tests with a comparable fusion setup and did not see any performance gain. M1 may enable us to revisit that.

RE: Feature Discussion suggestions

hoota — Sat, 10 Dec 2022 21:37:29 +0000

I know it's probably outside the scope of what you want to wrestle with given the range of hardware your tasked with supporting, but it would be AMAZING if SoftRAID could take a tab from some of the storage software solutions on Windows and allow users to create things like storage pools, where a Faster SSD would serve as cache for a larger, but slower array of HDDs, kind of like how Fusion Drive worked, only better (e.g. stable, more options about how things are configured, block sizes for the cache, manual over-provisioning, maybe a tuner for sequential speed vs IOPS, option to co-locate or exclusively store certain files on one kind of storage or the other). A fella can dream :)