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MPG Table of Contents   Page 1: Introduction Page 2: Why you need more space than you need Page 3: Why you should avoid Port Multiplication Page 4: SATA, Firewire, and USB Page 5: eSATA compared to Firewire 800 Page 6: How to Partition Hard Drives Page 7: RAID striping and mirroring Page 8: Step-by-step to setting up RAID on Mac OS X Page 9: RAID 5 for Performance and Reliability Page 10: SoftRAID — easier RAID Page 11: eSATA PCI-Express card configuration

Partitioning and RAID

SoftRAID — easier RAID

SoftRAID is a 3rd-party (non-Apple) program for RAID on Mac OS X. It offers a interface that is easier to understand and less error-prone than Apple’s Disk Utility, and (quite literally) doesn’t crash as Apple’s Disk Utility is prone to do.

I’ve used SoftRAID as a satisfied customer for years, and the company takes pride in it. If you buy SoftRAID, please let them know you heard about it here. You can also get SoftRAID included with various OWC external hard drive enclosures.

For anything but the most basic RAID setup, SoftRAID has many benefits. The only downside is that when Apple issues a major system update (eg Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.5), one may have to wait a short while for an update.

There are a number of superior capabilities Specifications in SoftRAID over Apple’s Disk Utility:

• More intuitive display of volumes and drives; much easier to avoid mistakes!
• Commands to create a startup CD or DVD;
• Ability to blink the disk lights (helpful when you have 4/6/8/10 disks!);
• Notifications and system logging when disk “events” occur;
• Can delete individual volumes without partitioning;
• Can convert RAID sets to its own format;
• Can delete volumes on a drive without affecting other volumes on the same drive.
• And more!

Multi-threaded

SoftRAID is a multi-threaded “filter” driver (one thread per CPU), and under heavy loads it can offer significantly higher performance than Apple’s single-threaded Disk Utility driver.

A forthcoming version of SoftRAID will offer a single-threaded option (checkbox), to work around bugs in other flaky components; this can be a (rare) issue today with certain hardware.

Faster and easier RAID set creation

Perhaps the best feature of SoftRAID is faster and easier creation of RAID sets—none of the confusing Disk Utility nonsense of having to partition first, then make a RAID set out of the partitions.

SoftRAID lets you select all the desired hard drives, then in one step make a RAID set of the desired type and total size (no mental gymnastics required). Not only is this much faster, it’s less error-prone, especially when you’re working with 4 or more drives.

For example, here is all you have to do to create Speedy, a 2-drive striped RAID of size 64GB; select the two drives (or 10 drives), then choose Volume => New… to bring up the dialog:

Better display of RAID setup

SoftRAID makes it easier to see what’s going on. You can click on a drive to see the volume(s) to which it belongs, or you can click on a volume to see the drives/partitions it is composed of. This might not seem like a big deal with one or two drives, but with 6, 10 or 12 drives, it’s all too easy to make a mistake, a constant risk with Apple’s Disk Utility.

Shown below is the way SoftRAID displays the drive-to-volume mapping. The drive on Channel 0 Port 0 has been partitioned, and forms part of the Data and Speedy volumes.

Shown below is the way SoftRAID displays the volume-to-drive mapping. The volume Data is composed of two drive partitions as shown.

RAID need not be hard

Setting up RAID is not hard, and has many benefits. SoftRAID makes it easy and less error-prone and more reliable (during creation) than Apple’s Disk Utility.

For more examples, see The DIGLLOYD Mac Pro.