Events

SoftRAID 3 Press Releases

Archives

SoftRAID 2.1 Press Release

Mendocino, CA -- Today SoftRAID LLC, a new Mendocino CA based corporation announces the purchase from EMC Software (Formerly Conley Corporation) of the Macintosh industry's leading software RAID package, SoftRAID.

"We made this purchase because SoftRAID has an incredible track record of stability and performance." Tens of thousands of users attest to SoftRAID's superiority. We believe we can build on this solid base." said Mark James, President of SoftRAID, LLC. "SoftRAID or Apple's RAID has been bundled with every Apple WorkGroup Server ever built. We have a full development effort underway led by Tim Standing, whom I have worked with since Jasmine Technologies, way back in 1987. We're very excited about taking SoftRAID in the direction we know users want: higher performance, more features and rock solid reliability."

Tim Standing, Vice President of Engineering at SoftRAID, LLC, intends to build a talented team of Mac focused software engineers in Mendocino, CA. Tim Standing, who is one of the leading Mac OS SCSI experts, has an extensive background in assembly language hardware I/O, low-level SCSI hardware, Ethernet, PCI, Fibre Channel, and other related I/O technologies. "Mendocino is an incredible place to live, and there are several great ex-Apple Macintosh programmers who live here and want the opportunity to work on the Mac OS again. We expect SoftRAID, LLC to totally advance the state-of-the-art in high-end Mac OS I/O, and we will support Mac OS X with SoftRAID as soon as possible.", emphasized Mr. Standing.

Prior to the formation of SoftRAID LLC, Mark James was the OEM manager for SoftRAID with Conley, the original developers of SoftRAID. "Conley did a great job by focusing on stability and compatibility," says James, "and our objective with the new company is to bring the Conley customer base along with us as we develop SoftRAID. Our customers know RAID from the user's perspective and we'll be listening to their requests very carefully. We also intend to extend our relationships with Apple, Hammer Storage, Pathlight and Initio Corporation and will reach out to other potential technology partners."

SoftRAID LLC will be announcing further product developments in the near future. Says James "We have the very best software RAID product on the market and we're determined to put even more distance between ourselves and the competition. While we cannot announce our product directions today, expect to see major announcements by early next year."

SoftRAID 2.1 was released for Apple WorkGroup Servers in September, and as a standalone retail product this week. (version 2.1.2). SoftRAID costs $149. It is available electronically off the SoftRAID web site (http://www.SoftRAID.com) and is delivered electronically. Upgrades from SoftRAID 1.X versions (1.5 and 1.2) cost $99. Apple's RAID users who received SoftRAID with their WorkGroup Server can also upgrade for the $99 price.

An updater from 2.0 or later to the latest version will be posted around November 15th.

SoftRAID is available in English, French, German and Kanji.

Background on SoftRAID:
SoftRAID is the fastest Disk Driver for Mac OS. SoftRAID's driver is up to 4 times faster than other drivers for small I/O's, especially the type of I/O that a Server or Database application requires. While large I/O is hardware limited, and SoftRAID cannot speed that up further, the performance gains from our small I/O acceleration is immediately visible and measurable. MacBench shows an immediate improvement of between 7% and 25% on MacBench's Disk Mix, depending on the users Mac OS disk cache setting. SoftRAID created RAID volumes will show an even further performance boost, up to 70%.

SoftRAID has a superior user interface, supporting drag and drop volume creation, with instant feedback with visual links to disks and volumes so a user can see at a glance the configuration of their hardware and volumes.

SoftRAID allows users to take existing standard HFS volumes, and convert them to a Striped volume or Mirrored volume in the background, without reformatting. SoftRAID can also "take over" existing standard, striped and mirrored volumes from popular RAID packages such as FWB RAID Toolkit, Adaptec Remus and Charismac Anubis RAID software.

SoftRAID also includes driver acceleration, including read acceleration, write acceleration, and PhotoShop specific acceleration. SoftRAID also supports Tagged Command Queuing, for those SCSI cards which take advantage of this feature. TCG allows for faster small I/O performance, which is of special benefit to File Servers. PhotoShop acceleration, (for PhotoShop 3 or 4), can accelerate PhotoShop disk intensive functions by up to 30% (for example: open, save, rotations, Gaussian blurs).

SoftRAID is extremely flexible and well designed. Standard, Striped volumes and Mirrored volumes can be mixed on the same system, in any combination, with any brands of SCSI card. SoftRAID is unique in checking at startup whether a Mirrored volume is potentially out of sync, and notifying the user of that fact, so they can either rebuild the volume, or ignore it, clearing the warning flag. Mirror Rebuilds are done in the background, so the users work flow is not interrupted.

SoftRAID is a 100% native PPC driver for SCSI disks, and supports virtually any SCSI-2 disk drive. SoftRAID requires a PCI based Macintosh with System 8.0 or later, and supports NuBus based Mac models that have SCSI manager 4.3 available up to System 8.0. (SoftRAID no longer supports NuBus machines for newer (8.1 and forward) versions of Mac OS.)

SoftRAID 2.0 is compatible with 8.5, however there is one problem which is seen only when creating NEW volumes. The user will get an error preventing him from creating a new volume. Booting from a non 8.5 disk will allow the volume to be created, which will then work fine with 8.5. An updater from SoftRAID 2.0 to 2.1 is free and will be posted on the SoftRAID web site around November 15th.

Support for SoftRAID is done via E-mail by sending a message to support@softraid.com. (Paid telephone support is available, but our electronic E-mail support is considered excellent!) Sales queries should be addressed to sales@softraid.com.

Return to the top