SoftRAID Features - SoftRAID Forum

Clone Single Disk from Array?

freelancerdave — Mon, 12 May 2025 23:05:12 +0000

Is it possible to clone a single disk to a new drive? I have four 8TB drives in RAID 0 (yes it's backed up) and one drive is throwing errors but still works. I'd love to clone that single drive to a new drive rather than spend the time cloning 32TB. Is this possible?

Should I still use Softraid for JBOD?

Hanknj1 — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 16:37:11 +0000

I have been using Softraid for many years but stopped using RAID because I found that having several primary drives, each with its own backup drive being backed up daily with Carbon Copy Cloner, works well with me and has since 2014. But, at that time I discussed continuing to use Softraid with Softraid's creator and he thought it was a good idea to continue using Softraid because it so closely monitors the health of each drive in my system. I now have DriveDX overseeing the drives' health, although it doesn't give me the warnings that Softraid does, nor show me each drive's condition in the graphical format that Softraid does.

Also, now I have to replace all ten of the WD Red drives because they were all installed in 2014 and they have well over 20,000 hours on them. Western Digital advised me to replace them simply because of their age. So, since I am copying the data from each old drive to its new replacement I can, at this time, easily not create each drive as a Softraid drive and simply phase Softraid out of the system. But should I? It's worked pretty flawlessly for many years and for nine of them overseeing the Softraid configured drives that in fact are not being used in any RAID configuration. Thanks, in advance, for your input.

Connect disk to a computer that no SoftRAID installed

dtcapsr — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 11:16:20 +0000

Hi,

Currently I own an OWC ThunderBay 4 enclosure and a valid SoftRAID 7.5 license. I've installed SoftRAID & drivers on my Intel MacBook Pro (Ventura) and everything was running fine.

My questions is:

Recently I just got a new M2 Max MacBook Pro (Ventura), and I haven't install SoftRAID yet, but when I connect to my ThunderBay 4, I still CAN read & write it.

This makes me wonder, does it means that once I finished configured my RAID using SoftRAID, the disks will behave like a "normal" disk array, and can be read & write on any computer, even there is no SoftRAID installed? Will it brings any negative consequences?

Thanks

Sanity check for potential use case with 4x ThunderBay 4's in one big RAID 10 volume

TelosMachina — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 16:13:54 +0000

Hi!

Can I get a sanity check on a potential setup I'm considering? I want to make sure I'm understanding any caveats or gotchas, etc.

I have 4 ThunderBay 4's (Thunderbolt 2 versions) and 16x 6TB HDDs. The use case I got them for is no longer needed. My end goal is to have a big storage pool available to my Mac Mini 2018 that I use as a server. I understand the redundancy part of RAID 10 setups but I'm trying to understand how I can maximize performance. Theoretically, RAID 10 should keep scaling up performance with each mirrored pair I add, which is why I'm hoping to add all 4 ThunderBays to the same computer and make one big RAID 10 array. Does that assumption hold in my potential use case of 4 ThunderBay 4's with 16 HDDs on one Mac Mini 2018? Or would anything prevent that? I believe the Mac Mini itself shouldn't be a bottleneck - i7, 6 core, 64GB RAM. It has Thunderbolt 3 and I could plug in the ThunderBays to its 2 independent Thunderbolt channels via Apple's Thunderbolt 3 male to Thunderbolt 2 female adapters and daisy chain the other 2 ThunderBays. I can't imagine even Thunderbolt 2 being a bottleneck, especially if using 2 independent channels. Appreciate any advice on this or if this is a bad idea or if SoftRaid won't work well for that many drives, etc.

Thanks!

Daisy chaining Thunderbay 4 minis

ItsOnlySam — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 21:29:38 +0000

Is it possible to daisy chain 2 thunderbay 4 minis with SoftRaid?

Automated Data Scrubbing (or validation)

danielrdotcom — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 21:01:45 +0000

Heya, coming from the experience of using a Synology NAS, there was a feature I could schedule (say every 3 months) to perform data scrubbing. This (I think) is the same function as a "Validate" for softraid, basically checking that all data is correct across all drives using parity info (for raid 5 and eventually raid 6) to fix any data that is messed up on one of the drives. Any way to schedule this to happen automatically?

Can I certify 2 disks at once using OWC Drive Dock USB-C Dual Drive Bay? (USB 3.1 Gen 2 OWCTCDRVDCK)

envoy510 — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 22:14:46 +0000

Looking at upgrading drives to 20TB and I want to certify. If it takes 2TB/day that's 10 days and serially that's 20 days. If it can do both at the same time, that's a huge time saver.

Thanks.

Larger font option for SoftRAID - user interface design

DeepYogurt — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 14:52:59 +0000

Wish there were a way for setting the size of the font used for the text in the SoftRAID main status window. Many Mac programs have this, and would help people with vision limitations. This is especially true on monitors with large resolutions. It looks like the font size is about 6 point on my 27" monitor that works in 2560x1440 res mode. Ideally would work similar to browser font resize commands Command= and Command-. Yes, I know I could put the monitor into a much less resolution mode and then the small text would get bigger, but I didn't spend a lot of money on a high-resolution monitor to use it in this manner - low resolutions really limit the number of app windows you can have visible at a time, and makes things much less productive on the computer.

Also please make it so that the text can be highlighted and copied - the only thing I can do is take a screen shot at the moment which makes me simply retype the text I'm interested in - takes a lot longer than a simple highlight-copy type effort.

I've taken a screen shot of an example portion of the SoftRAID main window and pasted below - you can't even read it here...well, after posting this image is much larger and not representative now of what the SoftRAID screen looks like, but it's still an image and you can't highlight/copy and individual word or phrase or sentence or several sentences in an image.

1833

Due to the layout of the status window, the text takes a relative small percentage of the available width of the window, so larger text options would not affect the total width very much, but would affect the length of the visible output much more, but with the scroll bars on the window this is easily adjusted to show whatever the user is interested in.

Think this is a pretty minor change for someone familiar with macOS user interface design experience.

Thanks...

-bob

Sending a Mac SoftRAID volume to a third party

engineerx — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 16:19:31 +0000

Hello. I work in video post production, where we often have to send large disk arrays to other companies etc. If I send a RAID5 volume (Sabrent enclosure) to a third party who doesn't have the actual SoftRAID app installed, I understand that the Mac OS has a driver onboard which would still allow them to read / write to it. But what happens if one of the disks fails? Will they be notified at all (beyond perhaps a red light on the array)? If they swap the failed disk would it rebuild?

Exploring the Boundaries of Write Cache on Notebook Computers. It it safe to use?

Alex Bowden — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 13:03:30 +0000

First can I say that I believe that I understand the OWC statement that ...

"The disadvantage of using a cache is that if you lose power between the time a file has been written to your RAID volume and when the file data gets written out from the cache, that file data will be lost. We recommend that you use a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) on your Mac and disks whenever you are using a RAID 4 or RAID 5 volume. If you are not using a UPS, we recommend that you disable the write cache using the SoftRAID preferences."

So, I work on a MacBook Pro on mains power and with a thunderbolt connection to an OWC enclosure containing a RAID 5 array (4 SATA SSDs) to which I, or rather Time Machine, frequently backs up.

The MacBook effectively has a built in UPS that will happily run it for several hours. The OWC enclosure is not running on a UPS.

However, if SoftRAID maintains it's cached write blocks until it has confirmation that the data is on disk, then what data is lost if the enclosure loses power ?

Next time the enclosure is powered and connected to the same notebook, wouldn't / shouldn't SoftRAID simply rewrite any unconfirmed cached writes ?

Any thoughts ??