#Softraid lite full version
#Softraid lite plus
#Softraid lite mac

There's a lot of chatter about RAID 5 failures during rebuild. I have the non-XT version which allows me to manage my legacy enclosures as well. Softraid (without the 'XT') will work on other non-OWC devices.

#Softraid lite full version

You need to buy the 'RAID' version of the Thunderbay boxes as they come with the full version of Softraid if you want to run higher than RAID 1.Īpparently, Softraid 'XT' and 'XT Lite' are versions that are just for OWC enclosures. One thing to note and you may know this already. That's a good point, I currently have two old Lacie '2Big' enclosures that are doing some of what you describe, but they could easily be consolidated into the Thunderbay 6-drive enclosure. I am also looking at the new Thunderbay 6-bay model to have enough bays for both additional RAID flexibility (more parity drives) and other JBOD drives in one box (some drives can be for archives so they don't need to be super fast), but the 6-bay is pricey of course. I've been looking at the Thunderbay too.įor a little more capacity in the 4-bay model I think RAID 5 might be enough as long as I am disciplined with backups. OWC/macsales is a great vendor and support their products.Īfter doing more research I have decided the best solution for me will be RAID 1+0 using two enclosures to protect against enclosure related failure as well as drive failureĪnd of course I am using a two tier -local and remote backup strategy as well. Fast and as reliable as the drives you put in it. I highly recommend these as a DAS solution. Regardless, the issue supposedly raised its ugly head in something like 1 or 2 percent of Macs. That was a couple years ago and I don't know if it remains. Support told me that they were working with Apple to resolve it but that the issue was with Apple (not sure this is true or not).

#Softraid lite mac

I know because at one point I tried to hook the enclosure to an older mac mini I had lying around and it suffered from this. Drives mysteriously unmounted after a short period of time (30 min to an hour or two). ONLY PROBLEM I'VE SEEN or HEARD ABOUT: There were strange combinations of machines and Thunderbays which just didn't work. I don't believe TB3 adds any speed to the enclosure as the bottle neck is really drive speed anyway and TB2 is faster than it needs to be. The Six bay is brand new and looks great. Speed is quite good (I'm happy to run a Blackmagic speedtest if you like). I'm currently running RAID 1+0 (I have four 5TB drives yielding 10TB of usable RAID10 space). They support a bunch of RAID configurations and their app gives me a nice 'healthcheck' sort of dashboard. They issue updates periodically which a lot of the HW Raids do not.

it takes barely any CPU at all to run and just works. It was originally hooked to a 2012 Mini and is now hooked to a 2017 imac 5k with a TB3 to TB2 adapter. I have a 4-bay Thunderbay Thunderbolt 2 version and have been running it for maybe two or three years. Question (finally!): Has anyone here used the earlier OWC ThunderBay boxes and what were your experiences? The drives I will be using are 10TB HGST He10.

#Softraid lite plus

On the plus side ARECA appears to be very heavy enterprise level equipment and is well respected.Īt Lloyd Chambers recommendation I am now also looking at the OWC ThunderBay 6, Also a six bay box which uses SoftRaid as a RAID controller and can set it up for RAID 6. This being a hardware RAID I have been advised that all of the drives have to match. I have also looked at the Areca 8050U3-6, a 6 bay Thunderbolt 3 box which is a hardware RAID solution. So far I have been considering a Drobo 5D3 (I know the horror stories some people have had with Drobo's 'bricking', but I haven't had any of those problems and am currently using a 5 year old 5D and I am not getting the speed I'd like even though i have 128gb MSATA in the cache bay and 7200rpm drives.) I like that like the 5D I can set up the 5D3 with dual drive redundancy (Drobo's version of RAID 6) and swap out smaller capacity driives for larger ones as the need arises. Preface: I am deep into my search for a new DAS (not NAS) mass storage unit.