New disk? SoftRAID's certify feature will tell you if your disk is bad, before you save precious data to it—protecting you against using a disk that is faulty, or about to fail.
SoftRAID monitor is always watching your disks, and will tell you if a disk is becoming unreliable and when it is predicted to fail. Wouldn't you love advanced warning of a disk failure, so you can plan for a replacement?
If you use a SoftRAID mirror (RAID 1), RAID 4, RAID 5 or RAID 1+0 volume, your work is protected against disk failure. Even if one of your disks fails, you can keep right on working and make your deadline. None of your files will be lost. How great is that?
All disks fail—good ones at about 3% a year, bad ones at 25% a year, and really bad ones at 33%.* With SoftRAID, disk failure doesn't mean catastophe.
The more disks you have, and the longer you have them, the more likely you are to experience disk failure.
SoftRAID's unique RAID features protect your files by alerting you to impending disk failure, and provide fast data access. Even better? If a disk does fail suddenly, you can carry right on working so you don't lose your files, or miss your deadline! (RAID levels 1, 4, 5 and 1+0,)
Choose SoftRAID RAID 0 and achieve incredible speeds for editing scratch work.
Choose SoftRAID RAID 5 or 4 (with SSDs) to achieve fast access with data redundancy
SoftRAID helps you work fast, save your data and make your deadline.
With a double-tired truck, the load is spread; if a tire fails, the truck stays safe.
Not only does this speed up data access, but if one disk fails, your data is safe on the remaining disk(s)—as long as you are using RAID 1 or higher. More about RAID…
SoftRAID offers five different RAID volume levels to store your data, depending on whether your priority is data safety, data access speed, or a combination of both.
RAID levels 4, 5, 1+0 and 1 provide the greatest protection from disk or hardware failure and can be used as part of a backup strategy to protect your business from theft, fire, flooding and other calamities.
Add disks and enclosures to increase data safety.
| SAFE: | RAID 4 & 5 |
| SAFER: | RAID 1+0 |
| SAFEST: | RAID 1 |
How fast do you want to access your data? RAID levels 1+0, 4, 5 and 0 give you the fastest data access. Use up to 16 disks in a single volume for increased speed—spread volumes over two or more enclosures for incredible performance.
You can't get this level of flexibility and performance from hardware RAID.
Add disks and enclosures to increase data access speed.
| FAST: | RAID 1+0 |
| FASTER: | RAID 4 & 5 |
| FASTEST: | RAID 0 |
If you need fast access to your files and ensure they're protected against disk failure SoftRAID has you covered.
By compromising just a little on each, you can have a system that is both fast and safe. RAID levels 1+0, 4 and 5 will give you a good balance of safety and speed.
| SAFER & FAST: SAFER & FAST: |
RAID 1+0 |
| FASTER & SAFE: FASTER & SAFE: |
RAID 4 & 5 |
Read more about SoftRAID RAID Levels on our RAID LEVELS page
On the RAID levels page we show you how to choose the most suitable RAID—whether you're a video editor, photographer, architect, designer, musician, or a business/individual with a lot of crucially important data. Whatever you use your computer and data storage for, SoftRAID will help you keep your data safe.
You've probably heard or read about the advantages of a hardware RAID set-up. Now find out how SoftRAID beats out most hardware RAID solutions and can save you hundreds of $$$...
SAFETY
With software RAID your data can be split across different enclosures for complete redundancy - one enclosure can completely stop working and your data is still ok. With hardware RAID, if the enclosure fails, you can lose all your data. With cheaper hardware RAID you can also lose data if there’s a power outage.
SPEED
Think hardware raid is always faster? SoftRAID provides super fast read and write speeds which can match more expensive hardware RAID solutions. Plus a hardware RAID CPU chip can become technologically redundant fast; with software RAID you just buy a new computer!
COST
Many people wrongly view software RAID as a less powerful, cheap solution. Expensive hardware RAID solutions are not automatically superior, often containing chips less powerful than in a standard laptop. In fact, a majority of companies who spend over $10,000 on RAID solutions choose software RAID for flexibility and value. Those companies have already shown where their confidence lies.
A reliable Thunderbolt enclosure combined with state of the art RAID software makes a perfect pairing, and, with ThunderBlade, provides incredible speeds.
OWC is now bundling SoftRAID XT with a variety of ThunderBlade and ThunderBay products. View the full lineup on OWCDigital.com
Using two ThunderBlades striped together with SoftRAID XT, it's now possible to get faster software RAID performance than is possible with a hardware RAID enclosure.
Read about other ways to optimize the speed of your SoftRAID RAID system here
Apple stopped actively developing AppleRAID in 2009,removing full support for it in Mac OS X 10.11. If your Apple RAID volumes develop problems, you're stuck—unless you transfer them to SoftRAID!
You can use those same volumes with SoftRAID, and transferring is easy.
With SoftRAID You don't even need to copy all the files from one volume to another. You can simply convert your AppleRAID stripe (RAID 0) and mirror (RAID 1) volumes to SoftRAID volumes without losing any of your precious data. Your volumes will be just as fast or faster and you can take full advantage of SoftRAID's renowned speed, reliability and support.
Not only is SoftRAID Lite more reliable than AppleRAID, it is up to 86% faster than AppleRAID too!*
Your data is completely safe when you convert from AppleRAID to SoftRAID and back again
Want to see how much better SoftRAID is than AppleRAID? Just download SoftRAID, convert your AppleRAID volumes and use it for 30 days. If after 30 days, you decide not to purchase SoftRAID or SoftRAID Lite, you can convert your Stripe (RAID 0) or Mirror (RAID 1) volumes back to AppleRAID and be exactly where you started.
*We measured performance using a 2 disk mirror configuration - SoftRAID mirror volumes read data up to 86% faster than AppleRAID when using SSDs. When measuring speed using 2 HDDs, SoftRAID mirror volumes read data up to 56% faster than AppleRAID.
We have been creating RAID software for Mac OS since 1996. We started on Mac OS 7. In fact, our team wrote the original version of AppleRAID.
We shipped the first version of SoftRAID for Mac OS X over 15 years ago and have been actively developing SoftRAID and supporting Mac OS X ever since. Our current version includes many features you won’t find on any other RAID product.
