The Benefits of Software RAID
Why it beats out Hardware RAID in many situations
Why it beats out Hardware RAID in many situations
SoftRAID has been designed to optimize speed, safety and versatility.
It is constantly upgraded, has outstanding customer service, and gives you a 14-day completely free trial.
SoftRAID’s frequent online software updates allow you to take immediate advantage of all the improvements SoftRAID consistently makes (such as upgrades, new features and bug fixes) ensuring your system software is always top of the line.
Why spend extra money on an expensive controller chip for your hardware RAID system—a chip that can quickly become obsolete—when SoftRAID allows you to make use of the superior CPU you already have in your computer, in a way that won’t impact any of your other applications.
We are always looking for ways to improve SoftRAID which means always listening to our customers and taking their improvement suggestions seriously.
Software RAID can keep your data safer
With hardware RAID, if any part of the system fails (such as the controller, enclosure, or power supply) you can lose all your data. Hardware RAID controllers become obsolete after a few years and it may be impossible to replace your controller, and recovery your data. With cheaper hardware RAID you can also lose data if there’s a power outage.
You can easily move disks from a failed enclosure to a new one, and all your data is preserved. With software RAID your data can be split across different enclosures for complete redundancy – one can completely stop working and your data is still ok.
Think hardware raid is always faster? SoftRAID provides super-fast read and write speeds which can exceed more expensive hardware RAID solutions.
To maximize read/write speeds, SoftRAID harnesses the power of your computer’s powerful CPU, but only for mere microseconds at a time so other running applications aren’t impacted.
Even if your hardware RAID box controller chip was top of the line when you bought it, it can quickly become out of date as chip speeds improve, and you won’t be able to swap it out for a new one; with software RAID you can easily take advantage of improvements in chip technology by moving your RAID array to a new computer with a newer, faster CPU.
Many people wrongly view software RAID as a low performing solution that’s not powerful, even though it can compete on speed and outperform on safety when compared with hardware RAID.
In fact, expensive hardware RAID solutions are not automatically superior (especially since the chip in even fairly low-end laptops is usually more powerful than the chip in an expensive hardware RAID controller).
A statistic that may well surprise you is that the majority of companies who spend over $10,000 on RAID solutions choose software RAID because of its flexibility and value. Those companies have already shown where their confidence lies.
The majority of companies who spend over $10,000 on RAID solutions choose software RAID because of its flexibility and value.
Your data is at the manufacturer’s mercy.
If your hardware RAID system dies and the manufacturer has stopped shipping or supporting it, you could lose all your data.
The disk array formatting is proprietary, so moving your drives from a dead hardware RAID system into a new one could mean the loss of all your data if the new system is a different model, or from a different manufacturer, and uses a different array format.
Even if you can still get replacement parts you’ll spend time, energy, and money getting them shipped to you. With software RAID, it’s the software that does the formatting so you can move drives from a failing enclosure to a new one that’s a different model, or from a different manufacturer, and still be able to access all your data.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE TECHNOLOGY IN YOUR OWN COMPUTER!
SoftRAID uses the superior Apple Silicon CPU’s in your Mac—generally way more powerful than the RAID controller in lower-end hardware RAID boxes.
With cheaper hardware RAID, manufacturers use a lot of RAM to make up for a less powerful chip. The increased RAM provides a large write buffer to hold “in transit” data, so the lower-powered controller chip doesn’t have to work so fast to write data to the disk.
A power loss in a cheaper hardware RAID solution (with no power-loss protected cache) means you lose everything in the write buffer—potentially a substantial amount of data. You can buy hardware RAID solutions with power-loss protected caches, but this pushes the price up dramatically.
Why spend all that extra money when you don’t need to? SoftRAID uses the power of your computer’s superior CPU, and a small write cache that holds data for less than 5 seconds—so data is much less likely to be lost in a power outage.
You may hear that software RAID drains your computer’s processing power.
With SoftRAID, this isn’t true—you won’t even be aware that SoftRAID is running, no matter what applications you’re running, or how CPU intensive your work is.
SoftRAID calculations use your CPU for mere microseconds at a time and are spread across all the cores in your Mac’s CPU to impact the machine as little as possible.
You get the advantage of your Mac’s superior processing power with no inconvenient interruptions to your work.
SoftRAID’s SOFTWARE RAID WON’T DRAIN YOUR CPU’s PROCESSING POWER.