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SoftRAID 3 Features and Specifications

Below is an extensive and detailed list of SoftRAID 3 Features and Specifications. For questions on these, please contact us at support@softraid.com.

The current shipping version is SoftRAID 3.6.6. This release only supports Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard (10.4.x or later, including 10.5.x). Mac OS X Panther and Jaguar users (10.3.x or 10.2.x) should contact support@softraid.com for SoftRAID version 3.5.6.

SoftRAID Core Technology:

  • Application and Driver were written exclusively for Mac OS X 100% new code.
  • Entire application and driver written using Cocoa™.
  • Native Mac OS X disk driver.
  • Partition based volume management.

Requirements:

  • Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. 10.3.x users should contact support@softraid.com for version 3.5.6
  • Requires Mac OS computer with built-in PPC G3, G4 or G5 processor. Also works on Macintosh Intel processors.
  • Requires OS X 10.2 updated PCI firmware for SCSI and ATA cards.
  • Requires 2 or more drives for SoftRAID.
  • Notes:
    • Older Macintosh computers (G3/G4 upgraded) that run Mac OS X 10.2 usually work, but we can not "officially" support them.
    • Requires modern FireWire bus (Ti/Oxford) for best operation (Beige G3 and the B&W G3 are not good machines to run FireWire drives with SoftRAID.)
    • First generation FireWire drives are NOT supported, they may generate I/O errors. These drives contain the LSI firmware bridge chip. All FireWire drives with the Oxford or Ti chipsets are supported with SoftRAID.
      • SoftRAID 3 does not support Mac OS 9, meaning that any volume created by SoftRAID 3 or converted to SoftRAID 3 will not be available if you boot into Mac OS 9. (this has no effect on "classic mode").

SoftRAID 3 GUI:

  • Multi-threaded, modern interface.
  • "Permissions based" application, follows all Mac OS X password and permissions guidelines.
  • Graphic links between disks and volumes.
  • Volume tiles which give information on the state of the volume.
  • Disk tiles which give information on disks, and their state.
  • All elements updated in real time, as new disks and volumes appear.

SoftRAID 3 Features:

  • Supports non-RAID, RAID 0 (Stripe) and RAID 1 (Mirror) volumes.
  • Supports creation of non-RAID and Mirror startup volumes.
  • Supports ATA, SATA, SCSI, Fibre Channel, FireWire 400 & 800, and USB 1 & 2.
  • Supports any mix of drives and volume types in a system.
  • Supports creation and deletion of volumes without affecting existing volumes.
  • Supports up to 4PB volume size.
  • Supports all Mac OS X compatible PCI cards with device buses, such as FibreChannel, FireWire, ATA, and SCSI cards.
  • Supports moving existing volumes to new CPU's.
  • Supports moving drives to different buses (moving ATA disks with existing volumes into FireWire cases, for instance).
  • RAID 0 supports up to 16 disks per volume.
  • RAID 0 can be optimized for Servers, Workstation, Digital Video, Digital Audio.
  • RAID 0 supports 32, 64 or 128K "stripe unit size" increments.
  • RAID 1 monitors status of Mirror volumes at all times, notifying users whether volumes are "Optimal", "Out-of-Sync", "Failed", or "Missing Secondary".
  • RAID 1 supports up to 15 secondary disks per Mirror volume.
  • RAID 1 supports creation of "Read-only secondary" drives.
  • RAID 1 supports adding and removing disks without initializing disks.
  • RAID 1 volumes can automatically initiate rebuilds.

SoftRAID Application:

  • Gives an overall view of all disks and volumes.
  • Display's SoftRAID version and driver version loaded in main window.
  • Displays links to/from volumes and disks by clicking on them.
  • Expandable tiles for volumes and disks, displays information detail on disks: bus, ID, size, free space, drive model, serial number, I/O requests, and I/O errors; and on volumes: volume name, volume size, file system, RAID type, RAID status, optimization, journaling enabled/disabled, I/O requests, I/O errors.
  • Displays active driver version, and application version.
  • Displays bay numbers on Apple Xserve.
  • Creates RAID 1, RAID 0 and non-RAID volumes, on any combination of disks.

Disks functions:

  • Initialize disk drives with Apple Partition Map (APM) for PowerPC and GUID Partition Table (GPT) for Intel.
  • Zero disk, either first 100 sectors or entire disk.
  • Convert to SoftRAID 3 - can convert OS 9 controlled disks to SoftRAID 3, both Apple and SoftRAID controlled disks.
  • Convert to Apple format - can convert SoftRAID partition disks to Apple format. Non-RAID SoftRAID volumes will become Apple Standard volumes. SoftRAID mirror and stripe volumes will become Apple RAID volumes.
  • Exclusive "Blink Disk Light" feature to help identify disks.

Volume functions:

  • Can create volumes optimized for Digital Video, Digital Audio, Servers and Workstation.
  • Can create HFS, UFS, and Case Sensitive HFS file systems on volumes.
  • Can erase any volume without deleting it (useful for scratch volumes).
  • Delete volumes.
  • Mount volumes.
  • Enable/disable file system Journaling on any SoftRAID volume.
  • Rebuild Mirror volumes.
  • Set Mirror primary disk.
  • Split Mirror function, can split a mirror into non-RAID, "Read-only secondary" volume, or if 2 or more disks are split, split off a Mirror volume.
  • Recover a Failed Mirror volume when a volume fails due to I/O errors.
  • Add Secondary Disk to existing Mirror.
  • Remove Missing Secondary disks from existing Mirror.
  • Convert Read-only Secondary disk to non RAID volume, or rebuild the ROS to its original Mirror volume.
  • Convert non-RAID volume to Mirror volume.

Utility functions:

  • Clear I/O counters, by selected disks or volumes.
  • Show System Log file to search for problems or when I/O errors occurred.
  • Cancel functions, such as zero disk, or Mirror rebuilds.
  • Uninstall the SoftRAID driver from the system.

Preference controlled functions:

  • SoftRAID Application.
    • Require Administration password to launch SoftRAID.
    • Remember window positions.
    • Display Completion Dialogs.
    • Open/Close disk and Volume tiles by default.
  • Driver.
    • Write Volume errors to System Console log.
    • Record recoverable errors.
    • Use all disks for mirror reads.
    • Automatically rebuild Mirror volumes.
    • Save I/O counts to disk at shutdown or restart.
    • Save I/O counts at intervals (1 min, 10 min, 1 hour, 24 hours).
    • Mirror Volume secondary timeout (15 sec, 1 min, 2 min).
  • Monitor.
    • Options to display/not display various notifications.
    • Mirrors Volume is out of Sync.
    • Mirror Volumes rebuild is done.
    • Mirror Volume is missing secondary.
    • Disk has an error.
    • Disk has a recoverable error.

Partition Limits:

  • 16 disks per RAID volume (Stripe or Mirror).
  • 60 partitions per disk.


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