[Sticky] Feature Discussion suggestions

@thecodingart 

All I can say is it is in the list of features to add. Yes, the intent is to be able to add the 2nd parity drive. That should be very doable.

@pavel You could try setting up file sharing from a Mac attached to the RAID and then access that on her iPad... I know it's not the same as local direct storage, but depending on the kind of work she want's to do it may be 100% usable.

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 :)

@hoota 

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

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.

@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.

@softraid-support

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

Any updates?

thanks 

@woxford 

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

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.

@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.