This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Disk Tiles
A disk tile shows you the size and type of a disk attached to your Mac. You can click on the disclosure triangle to see more information about a disk and whether you need to replace it.
SoftRAID displays a separate tile for each disk connected to your Mac.
It will display tiles for:
any hard disks inside your Mac
all SSDs and external disk drives connected via Thunderbolt, SATA, FireWire, Fibre or USB
connected USB flash drives (aka thumb drive) – yes, SoftRAID even works with those!
Disk tiles show you whether a disk is working correctly or needs to be replaced. You can also click on a disk tile to see which volumes use that disk.
What’s on your disk tile
There’s a lot of information shown on your disk tile:
- The SMART* status of a disk – this is checked each time you run the SoftRAID application, every time you startup your Mac and every 24 hours while your Mac is running.
- If a disk is predicted to fail. SoftRAID uses internal counters in each disk to determine if a disk is more likely to fail.
- Any label you have added to this disk. The label is a name you can add to make it easier to keep track of a particular disk. The SoftRAID Monitor uses a disk’s label when reporting errors in dialog boxes, log files or via email. The disk above has been labeled: “Offsite Backup #1.”
- The total number of reads and writes.
- The total number of errors.
- The number of hours a disk has been used.
- The progress and time remaining for any disk operation – like certifying or verifying a disk.
*SMART is a monitoring system in disk drives that SoftRAID Monitor uses to assess drive reliability and anticipate drive failures.
Volume Tiles
A volume tile shows you information about a volume. You can click on the disclosure triangle to see more information about a volume and whether it has encountered any errors.
SoftRAID displays a tile for all volumes which your Mac can access without using a network. A RAID volume uses parts of two or more disks to store your files.
Volume tiles show you the size and RAID level of each volume. They also show you whether a volume is degraded, i.e no longer protected from a failing disk. You can click on a volume tile to see which disks it uses.
What’s on your volume tile
There’s a lot of important information shown on your volume tile:
Testing Disks with SoftRAID
Verify
SoftRAID’s Verify allows you to test your disks without destroying any of the the volumes, or data, on them. Verifying a disk ensures that it can be read without errors. Read more here.
Certify
With SoftRAID’s Certify, you can fully check a new disk to make sure it is completely reliable before storing important data on it. Certify is also useful if you are repurposing an older disk.
IMPORTANT! Certifying a disk will completely wipe all the data from it so be careful not to do this with any disk that has data you want to keep on it.
Read more here.
For more information about verifying and certifying disks, see the page on testing disks.
Testing Volumes
Nervous about the integrity of your data? Want to make sure all of the data on a volume can still be read? You can Validate your SoftRAID volumes at any time, just to be sure. This won’t affect any of the data on your volume, it’s perfectly safe.
When you validate a volume, SoftRAID checks every block in your volume to make sure it can be read without errors. Then it does additional checks depending on the kind of RAID volume you have.
Validating a volume is not required, but it’s a good safety measure. You can think of it like checking the pressure on your spare tire; if you get a flat you have the peace of mind that your spare is ready to go. Validation gives you the peace of mind that if you have a disk problem and need to restore your data, it’s all checked and up-to-date.
To find out more about the process of validating SoftRAID volumes, click here.
SSDs
We’ve redesigned the SoftRAID driver to process TRIM commands even more efficiently and now supports continuous data transfers over 10GB/s enabling you to take advantage on breakthrough technologies like the OWC Accelsior 8M2.
SoftRAID supports all SSDs (Solid State Disks), even non-Apple SSDs. Unlike most other RAID solutions, SoftRAID supports TRIM on all RAID levels.
What is TRIM?
TRIM is a feature of most SSDs which improves read and write performance and helps extend the life of the memory chips in an SSD. TRIM commands allow the file system to tell SSDs when a file is deleted. This allows SSDs to erase the flash memory, which corresponds to the deleted file, in the background so it is ready for subsequent writes to the volume. Without TRIM commands, this erase operation must instead be done as part of the write to the volume, greatly increasing the time required to write a large files.
The SoftRAID Monitor also constantly monitors SSDs to make sure their memory chips are not worn out. When they have less than 10% of their life remaining, the SoftRAID Monitor will warn you.
These features require disks which support SMART. This feature is not supported by SSDs shipped by Apple. They are not available on disks connected via USB or FireWire and may not be available if a disk is connected via some third party interface cards.