News & Press Releases

SoftRAID LLC announces SoftRAID 4.2: Optimized performance and significantly faster throughout!

December 20, 2011
Mill Valley, CA, USA

SoftRAID LLC announces SoftRAID 4.2: Optimized performance and significantly faster throughout!

SoftRAID 4.2 is the result of months of performance-focused development, with every component of the driver and application benefiting from this effort. All disk operations are faster, and the SoftRAID driver uses fewer CPU cycles to achieve this.

SoftRAID Driver optimization: The SoftRAID driver optimization takes full advantage of the trend towards faster drives and faster buses, such as SSD drives and Thunderbolt®. SoftRAID I/O transfers are larger for nearly all disk-related operations. Reads and writes to both Mirror and Stripe volumes are up to 20% faster. Disk testing, such as Certify Disk, Verify Disk and Validate Volume Operations are also 15% faster.

64-bit app for Lion: The SoftRAID application and its internal components in Lion and Snow Leopard now function completely using 64 bit code. All application operations are noticeably faster as a result. The Email notification code has been totally rewritten and is more robust and responsive.

SSD TRIM + Enhanced SSD/Thunderbolt Support: The SoftRAID 4.2 driver greatly enhances support for SSD operations, including TRIM support for third party SSD drives. SoftRIAD is the only solution for Mac OS X that supports TRIM for RAID volumes. Internal testing with SSD and Thunderbolt shows the SoftRAID driver can achieve over 40,000 I/O’s per second. With the increased availability of SSDs and the introduction of ThunderBolt disks, we wanted SoftRAID to take full advantage of the performance of these incredible new technologies.

SSD Media Wear Indicator: SoftRAID 4.2 includes features to help you determine when an SSD needs to be replaced. This is similar to predicted disk failure feature used for hard disks (with rotating platters) and allows SoftRAID to warn you when a SSD has 10% or less of its life remaining.

Bug Fixes: SoftRAID 4.2 also includes fixes for several bugs found during testing. (See release notes)

Legacy Support: SoftRAID continues to be the only RAID solution that actively supports both PowerPC and Intel Macs running any version of Mac OS X from 10.4 through the upcoming release of Lion, Mac OS X 10.7. "We still have a significant number of customers running older versions of Mac OS X Server on both PowerPC and Intel XServes" said Mark James, VP Sales and Support of SoftRAID, LLC. "We will continue to support these Macs in the future as part of our outstanding customer service."

Summary of New Features in SoftRAID 4.2

• All parts of the SoftRAID product now run as 64-bit code. This means that under Snow Leopard and Lion (Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7), the application will launch faster and be more responsive.

• The mirror rebuild algorithm has been optimized to use less CPU time. The new algorithm uses 50-75% less CPU time than the one used in previous versions of SoftRAID. This change also speeds up all mirror rebuilds. On SSDs, rebuilds can be 10 - 50% faster.

• On disks that support larger transfer sizes, SoftRAID will perform mirror rebuilds in larger blocks (up to 4 MB). This results in 10 - 20% faster rebuilds.

• All verify, zero and certify disk operations now use larger blocks (up to 16 MB) on disks that support them. This results in a 10-15% speed increase of these operations.

• SoftRAID can now resume a zero, verify or certify disk operation. If you quit SoftRAID during one of these operations and then re-launch it the next day, SoftRAID will allow you to resume the operation where you left off.

• The SoftRAID driver now supports TRIM commands for all brands of SSDs when running under Lion (Mac OS X 10.7). This can dramatically increase the useful life of SSDs. SoftRAID is the only RAID driver to support TRIM on stripe volumes (RAID 0). Support for TRIM commands can be disabled in the SoftRAID preferences.

• The SoftRAID Monitor has new code for sending out email notifications. The code in previous versions of SoftRAID would fail to send out emails 1-5% of the time. The new code is much more reliable.

• SoftRAID can now detect when an SSD is worn out. This works on most brands of currently shipping SSDs, except those sold by Apple. Media Wear Detection also works on Intel SSDs and SSDs using the SandForce controller that have been shipped in the past couple of years. The SoftRAID application now displays the “media life remaining” in the expanded disk tile of a SSD. When the SSD indicates that it has less than 10% of its media life remaining, SoftRAID will display a warning dialog. You can also configure SoftRAID so that the SoftRAID Monitor will display a dialog at startup or send you an email notification when your SSD has less than 10% of its media life remaining.

• The compression algorithm used for Tech Support Reports has been changed. Tech Support Reports are now 8 times smaller and can be reliably sent as email attachments.

• The SoftRAID Tool can now display the raw SMART data from a disk. To display the SMART data from all disks, use the following command: “softraidtool disk all getsmartdata”.

• When creating a stripe volume (RAID 0), SoftRAID now supports stripe unit sizes of up to 1 MB on FireWire disks when running under Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) or later.

• The SoftRAID application is now much better at detecting disk hangs. It can detect a disk hang during most SoftRAID operations and will indicate the disk offset where the hang occurred.

SoftRAID version 4.2 includes all of the incredible features first seen in the version 4.0 release that shipped a year ago. Most of these features are not found in any other RAID solution for Mac OS X. These include: Fast Mirror Rebuilds which allow a mirror (RAID 1) volume to be rebuilt in minutes rather than hours, full validation of all data on volumes and disks, certification of disks to ensure that all sectors can read and write data correctly, a complete email notification system to remotely notify you of any disk or volume error, use of SMART data to predict disk failure and a command line interface for all disk and volume functions.

30 Day Trial Version
SoftRAID version 4.2 is available as a fully functional demo version, which allows prospective customers to try SoftRAID for 30 days.

SoftRAID has been shipping for Mac OS X since 2003. In that time, it has been first to market with many key features including: first with full email notification, first to offer full certification of disk, first to validate all disks on a mirror (RAID 1) volume, first to offer bootable RAID volumes on Intel Macs and first with automatic rebuilds. During the past 8 years, SoftRAID has earned a reputation as a rock solid product which comes with great technical support.

SoftRAID 4 is still just $129 for the electronic download version and includes one year of free technical support via email. It can be purchased via the SoftRAID website and via retail outlets worldwide.

Users of SoftRAID 3 can purchase an upgrade to version 4 for $69.

For more information about SoftRAID 4, or for review copies, contact us at sales@softraid.com.

About SoftRAID, LLC.

SoftRAID, LLC is headquartered in Mill Valley, California, and has been developing high quality applications for Mac OS for over 13 years.

SoftRAID and the SoftRAID logo are registered trademarks of SoftRAID, LLC.