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SoftRAID Volumes
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FAQ says with SoftRAID, a RAID volume can have up to 8 disks (RAID 4 or 5) or 16 disks (RAID 1+0) for best reliability.
Why this limitation when hardware RAID can contain many more disks ?
Do you plan to raise number of disks in future versions ?
Regards,
Posted : 10/03/2017 1:06 pm
When we set 16 as the limit, there was no practical way to get more than 16 drives, without likelihood of serious data corruption or bus issues. (Except Fibre channel, which hardly existed on Macs). 16 was more than adequate.
Thunderbolt enables many more devices/drives to work reliably. So we are considering increasing this number, but it is not a simple thing to change.
Also, even with RAID 5, the risks of data loss from drive failure is significant with 16 disks and increases dramatically with 24 or 32 disks in a volume, and is not something we would recommend. Hence, we are evaluating how to enable more disks/volume, without putting user data at risk from multiple drive failures.
(consider if 3% of disks fail in a year, that means in a 16 disk volume, there is a 50% chance of at least one disk failure/year, so the risk of two or more failures starts to become significant. Doubly so with 32 disk volumes!)
If it happens, it will be in a major upgrade, not in a dot update release.
Posted : 10/03/2017 1:43 pm
