It also allows certification of all disks in a RAID array. With fewer “volume slowdowns”, it’s possible to read and write data to your drives at a faster rate. Now build a second, identical freeway, and have each freeway carry half the traffic. Imagine a freeway running at capacity – that’s a single Thunderbolt connection to a RAID array. The speed comes from having two separate Thunderbolt “pipes”, each pipe dealing with a portion of the data. In fact, it’s possible to attach two arrays to a Mac, each one to a different Thunderbolt or Thunderbolt 2 port, and SoftRAID can make it into one huge and very fast volume.
#What is softraid software
It’s a software solution that works with any disks - they don’t even have to be in the same enclosure.
#What is softraid mac os x
SoftRAID is a Mac application that has been around since the days before Mac OS X - 1996, to be exact. However, there’s always a risk in a RAID array that a second drive can fail during the disk-intensive rebuild process, resulting in loss of the entire RAID 5 volume. If one drive fails, it can be replaced and its contents can be restored by rebuilding the data from the parity information. To work, a RAID 5 array must have at least three drives in it.
#What is softraid code
For each block of data, a parity code is calculated and then stored across the drives. RAID 5 is described as “block-level striping with distributed parity.” In simple terms, that means that blocks of data are written to each drive in the array fairly equally. By not providing the mirroring of RAID 1 or adding “parity” data that describes what has been written to each individual drive (used in RAID 5 and other modes), the failure of one drive in the “striped array” means that the entire RAID 0 volume is lost, and along with it all of the data it stored. However, despite its speed advantage over RAID 1, an inherent problem exists in RAID 0. RAID 1 provides good data protection but does incur a speed penalty, as data must be written multiple times whenever it is copied to the volume. This ensures an identical copy of all the data ends up on all of the drives, automatically. RAID 1 also displays a single volume to the user, but behind the scenes the software or hardware that controls the RAID automatically “mirrors” the data to each drive in the array. The positive feature of RAID 0 is that read and write operations can take place concurrently, resulting in performance improvements when writing big files. RAID 0 “stripes” data across all of the disks in the array, meaning that it distributes the contents of files equally among all disks.
The most basic forms of RAID are RAID 0 and RAID 1. An array is just another way of describing the digital “volume” that your computer sees and uses to store and retrieve data. Simply put, hardware or software is used to generate a “redundant array” from two or more physical drives. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. That’s why RAID 5, and OWC’s ThunderBay 4 solution in particular, is a popular way to add big, speedy and reliable storage to a Mac system. With that amount of storage built into today’s Macs, fast and secure backup is a necessity. Today’s data storage needs are climbing exponentially with 1 to 3TB hard disk or Fusion drives increasingly common in high-end iMacs and up to 2TB internal SSD options for the 2013 Mac Pro.
Thursday, August 6th, 2015 | Author: Steve Sande Tech 101: RAID 5 Offers Big Storage, High Performance, Reliability for Your Mac
0 kommentar(er)
