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SoftRAID Changelog

What's new in SoftRAID 5.8.4

Nov 4, 2020
  • New features in version 5.8.4:
  • Adds a feature which warns the user if Secure Boot is enabled. This warning appears when the SoftRAID application is first launched, Secure Boot is enable and a SoftRAID disk is attached.
  • Adds ability to sign up for the SoftRAID News email list.
  • Adds a work-around for a kernel panic bug which was introduced in macOS 10.15. This bug causes a kernel panic when an HFS+ volume is created on a 4Kn HDD (a disk with 4 KB sectors) which is housed in a USB 3 or USB 3.1 enclosure.
  • Adds support for OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual U2 enclosures to SoftRAID XT and SoftRAID Lite XT.
  • Bugs fixed in version 5.8.4:
  • Fixes a bug which could prevent the Mac from restarting after uninstalling SoftRAID.
  • Fixes a bug which caused the SoftRAID application to be relaunched after a restart when the user had just uninstalled SoftRAID.
  • Adds code to ensure that SSDs are always the primary disks in RAID 1+0 volumes which contain equal numbers of SSDs and HDDs. This code gets run when RAID 1+0 volumes are created and at the end of a RAID 1+0 volume rebuild.

New in SoftRAID 5.8.3 (Nov 4, 2020)

  • New features in version 5.8.3:
  • Adds support for Traditional Chinese to the SoftRAID application and SoftRAID Monitor.
  • Bugs fixed in version 5.8.3:
  • Fixes a bug in the SoftRAID application which limits the size of reads and writes to NVMe SSDs to 128 KB.
  • Fixes a bug which prevented a newly installed version of the SoftRAID driver from being loaded. This bug only occurs on macOS 10.15.

New in SoftRAID 5.8.2 (Nov 4, 2020)

  • Fixes a bug which occasionally causes volume corruption when creating or deleting volumes. This could occur when creating or deleting volumes on one OWC Accelsior 4M2 when a second OWC Accelsior 4M2 is installed in the same Mac.
  • Fixes a crash which occurs when the SoftRAID application is first launched.
  • Fixes a crash which occurs when creating RAID 1+0 volumes when running with Simplified Chinese as the chosen language.
  • Fixes a bug which prevents the Uninstall SoftRAID function in the SoftRAID application from working when running macOS 10.15.
  • Fixes a bug which causes some volumes to not appear in the SoftRAID application when running macOS 10.15.
  • Fixes a bug which caused a newly installed version of the SoftRAID driver to not be loaded by Mac OS. This could occur when running macOS 10.15.
  • Fixes a bug in the SoftRAID application which causes newly created volumes to have incorrect creation dates

New in SoftRAID 5.8.1 (Nov 4, 2020)

  • Removes the test to see if the user is running macOS 10.15 with SIP enabled. You can now run the SoftRAID application on macOS 10.15 with SIP enabled. The bug, in macOS 10.15, which caused SIP to be incompatible with SoftRAID, is fixed in macOS 10.15.1.

New in SoftRAID 5.8 (Oct 11, 2019)

  • SoftRAID 5.8 b3 Release NotesSeptember 25, 2019SoftRAID 5.8SoftRAID 5.8 includes important bug fixes and changes that improve SoftRAID compatibility with macOS 10.15 Catalina. Major Features introduced since
  • SoftRAID 5.0:
  • Support for SMART reporting on USB and FireWire disks (SoftRAID 5.6). With SMART over USB, SoftRAID now supports health monitoring and failure prediction for USB and FireWire connected disks.
  • Addition of simplified Chinese localization (SoftRAID 5.6) brings to 5 the number of languages supported by SoftRAID. Support for French, German and Spanish came in SoftRAID 5.5 and Japanese was added in SoftRAID 5.5.5.
  • Man page for SoftRAIDTool (command line tool) added in SoftRAID 5.5.5
  • Ability to convert stripe (RAID 0) volumes to RAID 1+0, and some RAID 0 volumes to RAID 4 (SoftRAID 5.5).
  • Additional information shown for disks which are predicted to fail, making disk problems easier to investigate (SoftRAID 5.0.6).
  • Support for RAID 4, 5 and 1+0 volumes. Macs can use any SoftRAID volume as a startup volume (SoftRAID 5.0).
  • Convert AppleRAID stripe (RAID 0) and mirror (RAID 1) volumes to SoftRAID (SoftRAID 5.0).
  • SoftRAID status indicator added to menu bar (SoftRAID 5.0).
  • Huge improvements to speed and performance throughout most releases

New in SoftRAID 5.7.3 (Jan 8, 2019)

  • New features in version 5.7.3:
  • Adds support for Akitio Thunder3 Quad X and Thunder3 Quad mini to SoftRAID XT and SoftRAID Lite XT.
  • Bugs fixed in version 5.7.3:
  • Fixes a bug in the SoftRAID application which can causes the “Zero Sectors” feature to fail.
  • This would occur on NVMe blades which had 4 KB sectors and a maximum transfer size of 128 KB.
  • Fixes a bug in the SoftRAID application which causes the “15 minutes” option to display twice when certifying disks.
  • Fixes a bug in the SoftRAID application and SoftRAID Monitor which prevents SSDs with uncorrectable errors from being marked as predicted to fail.
  • Changes the way that SoftRAID Tool reports fatal errors. These are now written to the SoftRAID.log rather than the system.log file.

New in SoftRAID 5.7.2 (Nov 9, 2018)

  • New features in version 5.7.2:
  • Enabled code in the SoftRAID application to display the OWC product registration page when a new ThunderBay 6 is attached to the Mac.
  • Added code to work around problems in Mac OS which can cause applications to be quarantined by the Finder indefinitely.
  • Bugs fixed in version 5.7.2:
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused clipping in the more info text of the collect system info opt-in dialog. This was only visible when SoftRAID was run with some non-English languages.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID XT version of SoftRAID Easy Setup which caused it not to
  • recognize disks in OWC enclosures.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID XT application which prevented it from working with disks in OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad enclosures.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused newly created or erased volumes to be write protected when running Mac OS 10.14.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which prevented the “no errors” string from being displayed if a disk had not been initialized to SoftRAID format.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which could result in unmountable volumes. This could occur if a user selected a RAID 4 or RAID 5 volume which was missing 2 or more disks and selected “Remove Missing Disks” from the “Volume” menu.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application and SoftRAID Monitor which caused some SSDs to be incorrectly marked as predicted to fail.

New in SoftRAID 5.7 (Sep 13, 2018)

  • New features in version 5.7:
  • Changed the way that SMART statistics are collected in SoftRAID Monitor. The new code checks SMART every time a disk is inserted rather than waiting for the next scheduled time for checking SMART.
  • Increased protection from corrupted volumes caused by Mac OS kernel bugs.
  • Added the ability to collect anonymous disk and system information and send it to the SoftRAID team. This will allow the SoftRAID team prioritize work on the features our customers use most. The user must opt-in to enable the collection of this data.
  • Added the ability to collect anonymous SMART data from disks and send it to the SoftRAID team. This will allow us to further improve our code which predicts disk failure. The user must opt-in to enable the collection of this data.
  • Bugs fixed in version 5.7:
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which could cause a kernel panic if a volume was unmounted and then unplugged. This would occur when running macOS 10.14 Mojave.
  • Replaced SoftRAID Easy Setup application with a 64 bit version.

New in SoftRAID 5.6.7 (Sep 13, 2018)

  • New features in version 5.7:
  • Changed the way that SMART statistics are collected in SoftRAID Monitor. The new code checks SMART every time a disk is inserted rather than waiting for the next scheduled time for checking SMART.
  • Increased protection from corrupted volumes caused by Mac OS kernel bugs.
  • Added the ability to collect anonymous disk and system information and send it to the SoftRAID team. This will allow the SoftRAID team prioritize work on the features our customers use most. The user must opt-in to enable the collection of this data.
  • Added the ability to collect anonymous SMART data from disks and send it to the SoftRAID team. This will allow us to further improve our code which predicts disk failure. The user must opt-in to enable the collection of this data.
  • Bugs fixed in version 5.7:
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which could cause a kernel panic if a volume was unmounted and then unplugged. This would occur when running macOS 10.14 Mojave.
  • Replaced SoftRAID Easy Setup application with a 64 bit version.

New in SoftRAID 5.6.7 (May 5, 2018)

  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID XT and SoftRAID Lite XT applications which affects serial
  • number validation.

New in SoftRAID 5.6.5 (Feb 20, 2018)

  • New features:
  • Added a new version of the SMART over USB drivers. This version adds support for USB disks connected via CalDigit ThunderBay 2 docks. It also adds support for USB enclosures which use the JMicron interface chip.
  • Added enhancements to better support the OWC ThunderBlade V4.
  • Bugs fixed:
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID XT, SoftRAID Lite and SoftRAID Lite XT applications which caused the incorrect web page to be displayed when the user selected “Upgrade to SoftRAID” menu item under the SoftRAID menu. Previous version would display the purchase page on the SoftRAID web site. The upgrade page is now displayed instead.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID application to always indicate that SMART over USB was disabled.
  • Fixed a bug in SoftRAID Easy Setup which caused it to exit with an error right after it is launched. This occurred when SoftRAID Easy Setup was used with SoftRAID XT and SoftRAID Lite XT.
  • Fixed a bug in SoftRAID Easy Setup which caused valid serial numbers for SoftRAID XT and SoftRAID XT Lite to be reported as invalid.

New in SoftRAID 5.6.4 (Jan 17, 2018)

  • SoftRAID 5.6.4 includes important bug fixes and changes that allow SoftRAID to be compatible with macOS 10.13 High Sierra.
  • High Sierra involves a completely new file system (APFS) as well as major changes to the ker- nel, security and third-party software requirements, and the SoftRAID team has worked hard to ensure that SoftRAID will work flawlessly with High Sierra, although it does not yet support APFS. This means that currently, SoftRAID does not support creating, modifying or converting APFS volumes. However, SoftRAID’s certify, verify and monitoring features will work with APFS formatted disks. Full support for APFS will be included with SoftRAID version 6.
  • New features:
  • With SoftRAID 5.6.4 ‘SoftRAID for ThunderBay’ has been renamed ‘SoftRAID XT’, and ‘SoftRAID Lite for ThunderBay’ is now ‘SoftRAID Lite XT’. (SoftRAID XT is a version of SoftRAID bundled with OWC hardware).
  • SoftRAID now reports the number of total bytes written for most SSDs. If available, this is displayed in the disk tile for the SSD (in SoftRAID’s main UI window). We will be adding support for additional SSDs in the future. If the total bytes written value does not appear for your brand of SSD, please contact [email protected] so we can add it.
  • Added support for future OWC products to SoftRAID XT.
  • Bugs fixed:
  • SoftRAID 5.6.4 contains a work-around for a macOS bug which caused a kernel panic every time Apple’s Disk Utility program was used to erase a SoftRAID disk. This bug was introduced in Mac OS 10.12. With this work-around, the Mac no longer kernel panics but the Disk Utility application still hangs.
  • SoftRAID takes security very seriously, and all SoftRAID DMG files are now code signed, so users can be certain the image they download from our site is an unaltered DMG file.
  • SoftRAID 5.6.4 fixes a bug which caused the SoftRAID Tool to crash when volumes were unmounted or initialized using the command line interface.

New in SoftRAID 5.6.3 (Sep 25, 2017)

  • SoftRAID 5.6.3 includes important bug fixes and changes that allow SoftRAID to be compatible with macOS 10.13 High Sierra.
  • High Sierra involves a completely new file system (APFS) as well as major changes to the kernel, security and third-party software requirements, and the SoftRAID team has worked hard to ensure that SoftRAID will work flawlessly with High Sierra, although it does not yet support APFS. This means that currently, SoftRAID does not support creating, modifying or converting APFS volumes. However, SoftRAID’s certify, verify and monitoring features will work with APFS formatted disks. Full support for APFS will be included with SoftRAID version 6.
  • Bugs fixed in version 5.6.3:
  • The SoftRAID driver was changed to be compatible with a kernel security feature added in macOS 10.13, High Sierra. High Sierra includes increased kernel security features which cause the behavior of some kernel functions to change. These changes cause disks hang when used with previous releases of SoftRAID.
  • The SoftRAID driver has been changed to handle disk errors better. Previous releases could cause a kernel panic with RAID 4 and 5 volumes if there was a read error during a cache flush operation. Cache flush operations result in read/modify/write operation to disks.
  • The SoftRAID driver has been changed to use fewer threads. MacOS 10.13, High Sierra, now limits the number of kernel threads which can run at one time. If this limit is exceeded a kernel panic results. Previous releases of SoftRAID would cause this limit to be exceeded during disk update operations. This would happen when 4Kn disks were used or when a group of disks contained more than 4 SoftRAID volumes. The new driver uses no more than 1 thread per disk for disk update operations.
  • SoftRAID now correctly loads a newly installed SoftRAID driver all the time. If there was no installed driver, previous versions would fail to load a new driver. This bug was introduced in SoftRAID version 5.6.
  • This version of SoftRAID loads the correct version of the SoftRAID driver after the driver has been updated. Previous versions of SoftRAID could load the old version of the driver from the driver cache rather than loading the most recently installed version. This would occur if the SoftRAID driver was updated when no SoftRAID disks were attached to the Mac.
  • Subsequently, when a SoftRAID disk was attached, the old version of the driver would load.
  • The SoftRAID driver no longer reports read errors on stripe (RAID 0) volumes as write errors.
  • The command line interface of the SoftRAID Tool no longer returns an error every time the disk unmount command is used. This command is used to unmount all volumes which use a given disk. In previous versions, this command would return an error even if it was successful.
  • The build scripts for creating SoftRAID now code sign all of the SMART over USB drivers. In previous releases, one of these drivers contained the wrong code signature.

New in SoftRAID 5.6.1 (Jun 23, 2017)

  • Bugs fixed:
  • Incorporates revised SMART over USB drivers. The changes fix the bug which
  • caused Drobo devices to be unavailable when SMART support for USB and FireWire
  • devices was enabled.
  • Fixed a bug in the build script which occasionally caused SoftRAID Easy Setup to fail
  • with an error on Mac OS 10.12.

New in SoftRAID 5.6 (May 23, 2017)

  • New features:
  • Added the SoftRAID Easy Setup application which makes creating your first RAID volume quick and easy.
  • Added support for SMART reporting on USB and FireWire disks. This allows SoftRAID to monitor the health of these disks and predict the failure of them too.
  • Added simplified Chinese translation to SoftRAID.
  • Added a 5 second pause at shutdown and restart. This helps prevent corrupted volumes caused by bugs in Mac OS.
  • Added a workaround for a bug introduced in Mac OS X 10.10 which causes the system to load an old version of the SoftRAID driver, rather than the one which was just installed. (This bug still exists in Mac OS 10.12.) The work around is to always force a restart after installing the driver (Apple Bug ID #: 30688985).
  • Bugs fixed:
  • Fixed bug which caused disk certify to not test all parts of a disk. This would happen if you stopped certifying a disk and then resumed certifying it later (SR-427).
  • Fixed a bug which caused write errors during the Random Access Test of a disk certify operation. This would only happen on 4Kn disks (disk with a native sector size of 4 KB).
  • Fixed a bug which prevented the SoftRAID Monitor from loading if a user had set the umask value.

New in SoftRAID 5.5.6 (Feb 21, 2017)

  • New features:
  • Sometimes, when email notifications are sent through a yahoo.com mail account, the subject line gets garbled. This is the result of some, but not all, yahoo email servers being able to handle Q-encoded UTF-8 text. The work around in version 5.5.6 is to detect when the outgoing email account is on yahoo.com and then convert the subject to straight ascii text.
  • SoftRAID Lite and SoftRAID Lite for ThunderBay now allow you to delete all volumes created by SoftRAID and SoftRAID for ThunderBay including volumes with RAID levels 4, 5 and 1+0.
  • Bugs fixed:
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Monitor which prevented it from reliably sending email notifications.
  • Fixed a bug in SoftRAID driver which could cause mirror volumes to rebuild instantly, leaving secondary disks with invalid data. This would only happen if more than one secondary disk was missing or out of sync. (SR-305).
  • Fix a bug in the SoftRAID driver which causes disk errors in mirror and RAID 1+0 volumes (SR-416).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which could cause some RAID 1+0 volumes to fail early in the rebuild process with a disk error (SR-381).
  • Fixed problem which caused certifying 4 Kn disks (disks with 4 KB sectors).
  • The SoftRAID application no longer crashes when you attempt to create a volume with more than 16 disks (SR-399).
  • The volume tile now updates immediately when the user enables or disables the volume’s safeguard (SR-320).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Monitor which could cause log entries to be corrupted or incomplete. This primarily affected the SoftRAID_Email.log file when SMTP logging was enabled.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused big pipes connected to the volume tiles to be missing 2 pixels on their left side when displayed on Macs with Retina displays (SR-374).
  • Fixed a problem with the filename of the Japanese QuickStart Guide. The filename was causing DiskWarrior to say that the file was incorrectly encoded (SR-415).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Monitor which caused it to display the “Disk is missing from a mirror volume” dialog even when this preference was disabled (SR-413).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which caused the SoftRAID Monitor status indicator in the menu bar to go yellow whenever a mirror read-only secondary volume was attached.
  • Fixed several broken links in the SoftRAID On-line help (SR-386).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Monitor which caused it to sometimes skip the SMART test on startup. This would happen if you configured email notification to send an email on reboot. (SR-303 & SR-299).
  • Fixed a bug which caused Tech Support Reports to sometimes be missing volume headers (SR-238).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which prevented it from warning users if a volume was missing a disk. Older versions of SoftRAID would only warn a user once. This version warns a user every time the startup or restart (SR-68).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Monitor which caused some log entries to be truncated. This especially affected the log entries for disks which are predicted to fail (SR-407).
  • Fixed a bug which caused mirror read-only secondary volumes to be identified as mirror volumes in the SoftRAID log (SR-262).
  • Fixed a bug which allowed users to attempt to convert AppleRAID RAID 1+0 volumes (SR-406).
  • Fixed several bugs which caused incorrect error messages to be displayed when sending test emails in the Email Notification window.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which made the error count text in disk and volume tiles display incorrectly if there are 1 or more errors (SR-360).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Monitor which caused the incorrect IPv4 address to be listed in email notifications (SR-392).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID applications which causes clipping of the text for the “Log SMT commands” preference button in the Servers tab of the Email Notification window. This clipping only occurs when the user is running with German as the chosen language.
  • Fixed two bugs in the SoftRAID application where the incorrect text was being displayed when the chosen language was Japanese. The incorrect text was displayed in the Preference and Quit menu items.
  • Fixed problem with the title of the Certify Disks dialog (SR-378).
  • Fixed a problem with the warning dialog which gets displayed if the user starts certifying an SSD with only 1 pass. The buttons were not translated (SR-379).
  • Fixed a typos in mirror dialogs (SR-362 and SR-349).
  • Fixed a bug in SoftRAID application which caused disconnected mirror secondary disks to become new volumes when reconnected. This occurred if an additional secondary disks was added to the volume while the first secondary disk was disconnected. (SES-348).
  • Fixed a bug which indicated that TRIM was enabled on an SSD when it was actually disabled in the SoftRAID preferences (SR-290).
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID Monitor indicator to not appear in the menu bar if no SoftRAID formatted disks were attached (SR-386).
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID Monitor to use a lot of CPU time when it first started up. This was accompanied by warning messages in the system.log file which said that SoftRAID Monitor was “inherently inefficient” (SR-318).
  • Improved the capture of volume headers in Tech Support Reports (SR-238).

New in SoftRAID 5.5.5 (Aug 30, 2016)

  • New features:
  • Added a work-around to SoftRAID driver to help mitigate damage to volumes caused by the Mac OS bug which causes disks to disappear from the Thunderbolt bus.
  • There is now a man page for SoftRAIDTool. Type “man softraidtool” in a Terminal window to view information about using SoftRAIDTool from the command line.
  • SoftRAID and SoftRAID Monitor are now localized to Japanese.
  • Bugs fixed:
  • The SoftRAID driver would cause a kernel panic when the Thunderbolt cable was repeatedly disconnected and reconnected to a ThunderBay with a 4 disk RAID 5 volume.
  • Fixed a kernel panic which could occur when clearing the i/o counts on a disk. This would happen if you cleared the error count on a disk which was part of a volume and the volume was unmountable because it was missing too many disks.
  • Fixed a kernel panic which occurs when fsck is run on disks which have a max transfer size of 128 KB.
  • Fixed a bug which could cause 2 SoftRAID Monitor menus to be displayed simultaneously.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused a white rectangle to be drawn at the left edge of each disk and volume tile. This would remain until the main window was resized.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which could result in a rebuilt volume which was not in sync. This would happen if you tried 2 times to resize a volume which was out of sync and then let it rebuild after the second resize completed.
  • The SoftRAID application now restores a disk’s label if you certify or zero a disk and then re-initialize it
  • Fixed a bug which caused the progress indicator in the volume to remain after a user tried to delete a volume which could not be unmounted
  • Fixed a bug which prevented users from converting volumes back to AppleRAID after the evaluation period had expired
  • Fixed bug which could prevent installing the SoftRAID driver on startup volumes other than the boot volume
  • Fixed a bug which prevented the SoftRAIDTool from performing zero, verify and certify disk operations if they were run using the command line interface
  • Fixed a bug which could cause SoftRAID users to download beta versions of the application by mistake (SR-244).
  • Fixed a bug prevented adding SoftRAID Read-Only-Secondary volumes back to their original mirror volume. This bug also prevented converting Read-Only-Secondary volumes to new mirror volumes.

New in SoftRAID 5.5 (Apr 12, 2016)

  • New features in version 5.5:
  • SoftRAID can now convert AppleRAID stripe (RAID 0) and mirror (RAID 1) volumes to SoftRAID format. When you convert an AppleRAID volume, all of your files are preserved. You can even convert Apple non-RAID volumes to SoftRAID.
  • SoftRAID can now convert stripe (RAID 0) volumes to RAID 1+0. It can also convert some RAID 0 volumes to RAID 4 (requires a stripe unit size of 16 KB).
  • The SoftRAID application and SoftRAID Monitor are now translated into French, German and Spanish.
  • The user interface now conforms with the look of the Finder in El Capitan, Mac OS X 10.11.
  • The SoftRAID Monitor menu bar indicator is now displayed in grey when the user has selected the “Graphite” appearance in the “General” panel of System Preferences.
  • The SoftRAID application and volume icons are new.
  • The SoftRAID Monitor now detects a bug in Mac OS X which causes disks to be ejected while in use. When this occurs, a dialog is displayed giving the user instructions which can help prevent this bug from reoccurring (for more info, see: https://softraid.com/pages/support/faq/faq_disappearing_disks.html).
  • Bugs fixed in version 5.5:
  • Fix kernel panic bug which occurs when you remove 2 disks from a RAID 5 volume.
  • SoftRAID now prevents users from removing disks from RAID volumes in situations where it might result in data loss.
  • Fixed a bug which could cause the SoftRAID Monitor to display a dialog indicating that the user was in evaluation mode even when a serial number had been entered.
  • Fixed a bug which caused two warning dialogs to appear the first time SoftRAID is run, both of which say that SoftRAID can be used for 30 days in trial mode. This version only displays one of these dialogs.
  • Fixed a bug which caused some entries in the SoftRAID.log file to be garbled or incomplete. This would occur when two or more entries were being written simultaneously.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented “Uninstall SoftRAID” from deleting the SoftRAID Lite preferences. Using the “Uninstall SoftRAID” menu option in any version of SoftRAID now deletes both the SoftRAID and SoftRAID Lite preferences.
  • Rebuild and validate operations now start instantly regardless of volume optimization setting. They run for the first 15 seconds as if the volume were optimized for workstation before using their actual optimization setting.
  • The “missing disk” string in the volume tile is now blue for RAID 1 volumes which contain at least 1 in-sync secondary disk. If there are no in-sync secondary disks, the string is red.
  • Prevented any disk which has a progress bar from being added to a volume or used to create a new volume.
  • The SoftRAID application no longer deletes the SoftRAID.log file when you select Uninstall SoftRAID from the Utilities menu.
  • Fixed a bug which allowed a user to shrink a volume to a size smaller than that which is displayed in the Resize Volume window.
  • Fixed a bug which caused SoftRAID to display Xsan volumes. SoftRAID would also display an error dialog when it couldn’t read from the Xsan volumes.
  • Fixed several bugs which affected installing or uninstalling the SoftRAID driver on volumes other than the startup volume.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented the SoftRAID application from automatically updating the driver on bootable volumes other than the current startup volume.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented the SoftRAID Monitor and SoftRAID application from connecting to the SoftRAID upgrade server.
  • Removed the help button from all dialogs which are displayed before the user logs in. The Apple help system does not work until the user logs in so these buttons were non- functional.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused tiles for AppleRAID volumes to incorrectly indicate that they were missing disks.
  • Fixed a bug which could cause the “Launch SoftRAID” menu item in the SoftRAID Monitor menu to launch the incorrect copy of SoftRAID.
  • Change SoftRAID application so it no longer creates an error entry in the system.log file (the entry was: “Could not find imaged named ‘SR_AppHeaderText’.”).
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID application to stop working if one or more of the volume names included kanji characters.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which could cause the driver event queue to become full. This happened when many degraded volumes were present and would cause a error dialog to appear which said that the driver event queue was full.
  • All versions of SoftRAID now use the ThunderBay volume icons if all the disks for a given volume are in a ThunderBay enclosure. Icons only change when a volume is first created.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Lite application which could cause it to crash when the preferences window was opened if SoftRAID Retail had been run before.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Lite application which caused it to overwrite the RAID preferences used by the SoftRAID driver for RAID 4, 5 and 1+0 volumes.
  • Fixed a bug which caused Tech Support Reports to not include crash logs.
  • Disabled serial numbers for purchases which have been refunded or upgraded.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID Monitor to crash at launch or when a new serial number was entered.

New in SoftRAID 5.1 (Nov 2, 2015)

  • New features in version 5.1:
  • This version is fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan.
  • The SoftRAID application now indicates if a disk has TRIM enabled.
  • The driver now uses only the primary disks for reading from mirror (RAID 1) and RAID 1+0 volumes if the primary disks are SSDs and some of the secondary disks are HDDs. This results in higher read performance with these volumes.
  • You can now resize a SoftRAID volume even if there are other volumes on the same set of disks.
  • Bugs fixed in version 5.1:
  • Fixed a bug that could cause data corruption on RAID 4 and RAID 5 volumes which contain 2 or more unreliable disks.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver that could cause data corruption when validating out of sync RAID 4 and RAID 5 volumes.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application that could cause the application to hang when it was quit. This could happen for instance after a disk was removed from the Mac when SoftRAID was blinking its disk light.
  • Added a workaround for a bug in Mac OS X that prevents some volumes from being unmounted.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver that caused changes to the list of primary disks for a RAID 1+0 volume to not take effect until after a restart.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver that could cause the SoftRAID application to hang if a disk was removed from a volume when it was rebuilding.
  • Fixed several bugs that affected how SoftRAID handled volumes that fail during validation due to a read or write error. SoftRAID now displays “validate failed” in the volume tile and adds an entry for the error in the SoftRAID.log file.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application that prevented it from resuming a disk zero, verify or certify operation if the SoftRAID application crashed or was force quit. The new code saves the current position every 60 seconds so that an operation can be resumed.
  • Changed the disk certification code so that errors written to the log now include the pass number.
  • Fixed a bug that caused duplicate log entries of errors during disk certification.
  • Fixed several bugs in the SoftRAID application that affected adding or removing more than one disk from a volume simultaneously.
  • Fixed several bugs that affected rebuilding and validating read-only SoftRAID volumes.
  • Fixed a bug in SoftRAID that could result in the maximum volume size being incorrect in the volume resize window.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the SoftRAID application to fail if a user tried to resize a volume and a disk was spun down.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the resume operation dialog to appear if a user performed a zero disk, verify disk or certify disk twice in a row.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Tool that prevented volumes from being validated when the validation was started from the command line.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the SoftRAID application to use up all the free space on a disk when adding the disk to a small volume

New in SoftRAID 5.0.7 (Apr 6, 2015)

  • New Features:
  • Support for RAID 4, 5 and 1+0 volumes. Macs can use any SoftRAID volume as a startup volume.
  • Complete support for high resolution displays.
  • Improved volume validation which will optionally fix parity or mirror data during the validation operation.
  • Improved error reporting.
  • Improved the predicted disk failure feature to provide more detailed information about how a disk is failing.
  • Up to 30% improvement in read/write performance for mirror volumes.
  • Numerous bug fixes in the SoftRAID application.
  • A SoftRAID status indicator which is always displayed in the menu bar.
  • Full support for the new kernel security features introduced in Mavericks (Mac OS X 10.9).

New in SoftRAID 5.0.6 (Feb 19, 2015)

  • New features:
  • The SoftRAID application now sorts the disk and volume tiles. All SoftRAID disks and volumes are now displayed at the top. SoftRAID disks which contain labels are displayed alphabetically above those which do not contain labels.
  • The SoftRAID application now displays additional information about disks which are predicted to fail. This makes it easier to determine the problems a disk has encountered.
  • Bugs fixed:
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which could cause data corruption in RAID 1, 4, 5 or 1+0 volumes. This bug would corrupt data during a volume rebuild and could result in incorrect volume data on RAID 4 or 5 disks and on RAID 1 and 1+0 secondary disks.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID application to display an incorrect value for the maximum size a volume could be resized to. The old application could calculate the maximum size for a volumes using space on the disks which could not actually be added to the volume. This version only uses space on the disks which can be added to the volume.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused disk labels to be erased when a SoftRAID disk was initialized.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which affected Tech Support Reports.

New in SoftRAID 5.0.5 (Nov 20, 2014)

  • New Features:
  • Support for RAID 4, 5 and 1+0 volumes. Macs can use any SoftRAID volume as a startup volume.
  • Complete support for high resolution displays.
  • Improved volume validation which will optionally fix parity or mirror data during the validation operation.
  • Improved error reporting.
  • Improved the predicted disk failure feature to provide more detailed information about how a disk is failing.
  • Up to 30% improvement in read/write performance for mirror volumes.
  • Numerous bug fixes in the SoftRAID application.
  • A SoftRAID status indicator which is always displayed in the menu bar.
  • Full support for the new kernel security features introduced in Mavericks (Mac OS X
  • !10.9).

New in SoftRAID 5.0.4 (Sep 22, 2014)

  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which caused a kernel panic when validating a RAID 1 volume and with "Validating updates mismatched mirror blocks" disabled or when validating a RAID 4, 5 or 1+0 volume with"Validating updates incorrect RAID blocks" disabled.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Monitor which caused the status indicator to disappear when a disk was removed when running under Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Monitor which caused SoftRAID to notify a user only once that a new version of SoftRAID was available.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which could prevent the Mac from restarting or shutting down if the SoftRAID application was running.
  • Fixed several bugs in the SoftRAID Monitor which caused incorrect dialogs to be displayed when using German as the language for Mac OS X. These bugs affect dialog boxes which appeared at the start and end of a volume rebuild.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented users from starting rebuilds on the command line.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused the incorrect volume icons to be used when running SoftRAID under Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which allowed the user to shutdown or restart their Mac when a certify disk, zero disk or verify disk operation was in progress. The application now always displays a confirmation dialog when shutting down or restarting if a disk operation is in progress.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which could cause a volume to fail to resume rebuilding if a rebuilding disk was removed and then reattached.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which prevented users from using iCloud email address in the form [email protected] or [email protected].
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused the about box to always indicate that the serial number was invalid.
  • Fixed a bug in SoftRAID which caused the 30 day evaluation period to expire after running a beta release.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID Monitor to crash every time it started to display a dialog. This bug only occurred in Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which caused a kernel panic when creating volumes. The kernel panic only occurred when running Mac OS X 10.6 or 10.7 and creating a volume using all of the SoftRAID initialized disks attached to the Mac.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused caused a crash when making volumes on disks which were less than 138 MB in size.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver caused a kernel panic when large writes were performed on a RAID 4 or RAID 5 volume which used SATA disks connected via a USB 3 adapter.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the about box in the ThunderBay Installer to fail to appear.

New in SoftRAID 5.0.2 (Aug 4, 2014)

  • New Features:
  • Support for RAID 4, 5 and 1+0 volumes. Macs can use any SoftRAID volume as a startup volume.
  • Complete support for high resolution displays.
  • Improved volume validation which will optionally fix parity or mirror data during the validation operation.
  • Improved error reporting.
  • Improved the predicted disk failure feature to provide more detailed information about how a disk is failing.
  • Up to 30% improvement in read/write performance for mirror volumes.
  • Numerous bug fixes in the SoftRAID application.
  • A SoftRAID status indicator which is always displayed in the menu bar.
  • Full support for the new kernel security features introduced in Mavericks (Mac OS X 10.9).

New in SoftRAID 4.5.3 (Oct 23, 2013)

  • New Features:
  • This version of SoftRAID adds support for Mavericks (Mac OS X 10.9). It recognizes the new location where third party drivers are loaded and is able to correctly detect SoftRAID drivers loaded at this location.
  • This version uses a new update mechanism for detecting and loading future versions of SoftRAID.
  • Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID application to display volumes in EFI partitions. This bug only occurs when running Mavericks (Mac OS X 10.9). (The EFI partition is found on all disks formatted on Intel Macs and contains code used early in the boot process.)
  • Fixed a bug which could cause the SoftRAID application to hang.

New in SoftRAID 4.5.1 (Dec 18, 2012)

  • The driver in SoftRAID 4.5 failed to load on Macs which use the 32 bit kernel when running Mac OS X 10.7. These are the same Macs which cannot run Mac OS X 10.8 and include the 2007 Mac Pro and early 2007 Mac Book Pros. The error which resulted in the driver failing to load was caused by a bug in the release version of Xcode 4.5.2, Appleʼs developer environment. The SoftRAID driver version 4.5.1 is built with a different version of Xcode which correctly builds drivers for 32 bit kernels.

New in SoftRAID 4.5 (Dec 17, 2012)

  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which caused data corruption when writing to stripe and mirror volumes. This bug only occurred on the new Mac mini (Late 2012).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which allowed some menu items in the “Disk” menu to remain enabled when a volume tile was selected.

New in SoftRAID 4.3.3 (Aug 21, 2012)

  • New Features:
  • Changed the way SoftRAID serial numbers are handled. It is now possible to upgrade to a new version of Mac OS X (e.g. upgrade to Mountain Lion) without having to re- enter your SoftRAID serial number.
  • The SoftRAID Monitor now allows you to have different limits when it checks the free space on your volumes. For instance, you can have it check to make sure that there is 20 GB free on your startup volume and 100 GB on your data volume.
  • Add text to disk tiles in the SoftRAID application to indicate if a disk is connected via a Thunderbolt bus.
  • Changed the Email Notification settings so that the SoftRAID Monitor no longer logs SMTP commands by default.
  • Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused a crash when running under Mountain Lion. This crash would occur frequently when the main window was either resized or was zoomed using the zoom button at the top left corner.
  • Fixed a bug which could cause a single sector on a SoftRAID volume to be overwritten. This would only occur if another volume was created or deleted on the same disk.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused the pipes in the main window to momentarily point in a random direction when a disk was initialized, certified, zeroed or converted to a new format.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the “Evaluation Mode” dialog to appear multiple times when running SoftRAID.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID Monitor to send out an email indicating that a Mac had rebooted not only when it rebooted but also every time a user logged out and then logged back in.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented changes in volume state from being correctly written to disk. This bug caused disks which were split from mirror volumes to sometimes get reattached to those mirrors after a reboot. This bug also caused the “Remove Missing Secondary Disks” command be undone after a reboot.
  • Fixed a bug which could prevented a Read-Only-Secondary volume from being reattached to its original mirror volume. This would occur if a user split a second disk from the mirror volume after the Read-Only-Secondary volume was split off and before it was reattached.

New in SoftRAID 4.3.2 (Jun 6, 2012)

  • New Features:
  • SoftRAID now contains a work-around for a bug which Apple introduced in the Mac OS X 10.7.4 update. In this update to Lion, Apple accidentally disabled one of the two mechanisms used by the SoftRAID driver for reading and writing data to volumes.
  • This bug only appeared in Macs which could not run the 64 bit Lion kernel (i.e. early Intel Macs). The SoftRAID driver in version 4.3.2 does not used the disabled mechanism for reading and writing to volumes when running on 10.7.4.
  • SoftRAID can now use special recovery files to recover volumes on disks with damaged partition maps or bad RAID information. If you have a volume which no longer mounts, SoftRAID engineers can use a SoftRAID Tech Support Report you generate to create a recovery file. They can then send you the recovery file which you can open with the SoftRAID application to fix the partition map and RAID information on your disks. SoftRAID recovery files can also be used to recover damaged or deleted AppleRAID volumes.
  • All parts of SoftRAID are now cryptographically signed. This means that you can run SoftRAID even if you have Gatekeeper enabled on Mountain Lion, Mac OS X 10.8.
  • The SoftRAID Monitor now includes more detailed information in the email notifications and log entries which it sends out when a disk is predicted to fail. This information now lists the specific SMART attributes which caused the SoftRAID Monitor to warn you about a particular disk.
  • SoftRAID now writes entries to two separate log files: one for general information and the other for email notification events. The new log file for email notifications is named “SoftRAID_Email.log” and is located in the “/Library/Logs” folder.
  • SoftRAID can now perform as little as 5 minutes of random access testing when certifying a disk. This allows users to certify disks which lack fans and might overheat and fail permanently when tested for longer periods of time.
  • The Email Notification window now contains a preset for iCloud email addresses.
  • Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed a bug which could cause a hang if the cable was pulled on a ThunderBolt disk while reads to a mirror volume were in progress.
  • Fixed a kernel panic bug in the SoftRAID driver. This bug would cause a kernel panic 5-10% of the time a secondary disk was disconnected from a mirror volume if the volume was mounted and if there were large files being written to it at the same time.
  • Fixed a bug which listed the incorrect offset in the SoftRAID log file when an i/o error was encountered during a disk certify, disk verify or zero sectors operation.
  • Fixed a bug which allowed 2 write errors to occur while zeroing disks before the operation was stopped and an error dialog was displayed. The new code stops on the first error.
  • Fixed a bug which caused duplicate entries in the SoftRAID log file when an i/o error was encountered during a disk certify, verify or zero sectors operation.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused the disk tiles in the New Volume window to be drawn incorrectly when the window was resized.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused disk tiles to display the incorrect amount of free space after zeroing or certifying a disk.
  • Fixed a bug which caused SoftRAID to hang if the user entered one too many characters in the serial number window.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Tool which would infrequently cause SoftRAID volumes to no longer mount. This would occur if the user selected the volume tile and chose Update Boot Cache. This bug would only occur on disks with GPT partition map format and that lacked an EFI.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented the SoftRAID application from launching correctly on Mountain Lion DP2. This bug could also occasionally prevent users from using earlier versions of SoftRAID on other versions of Mac OS X.

New in SoftRAID 4.3 (Feb 24, 2012)

  • New Features:
  • Added code to initialize the EFI partition on all SoftRAID GPT formatted disks. These partitions are also checked and reinitialized if needed when a user chooses to Rebuild Boot Cache on a volume. By correctly initializing the EFI partition on each SoftRAID disk, SoftRAID now allows users to update the firmware on their Mac when it is started up from a SoftRAID volume.
  • Changed the dialog which appears in the SoftRAID application is first launched under Mac OS X Lion (10.7) with non-Apple SSDs attached. The new dialog allows the user to disable TRIM directly rather than requiring the user to open the preferences window to disable TRIM.
  • Changed the algorithm used for blinking disks lights so that the blinking was more visible on ThunderBolt disks.
  • Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which could cause data corruption on the secondary disks of mirror volumes. This would only occur if the Mac was running Lion (Mac OS X 10.7), the mirror volume contained 2 or more SSDs (Solid State Disk) and TRIM was enabled in the SoftRAID preferences. This bug also caused Macs booted from mirrors volumes (with 2 or more SSDs, TRIM enabled and running Lion) to hang within a few minutes of use. This bug was introduced in SoftRAID version 4.2.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID application to always install a copy of the driver whenever it was launched under Mountain Lion (Mac OS X 10.8 DP1) and then require a reboot immediately afterwards.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which resulted in i/o errors if one of the disks in a mirror volume was removed while a read was in progress. This would result in an error if “Stripe mirror reads across all disks” was enabled in the SoftRAID preferences.
  • Changed the validate volume code so that it correctly handles SSDs when TRIM is enabled. Previous versions of SoftRAID could erroneously indicate that the data on the disks for the mirror volumes did not match if the volume contained SSDs and TRIM was enabled.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented entries from being written to the SoftRAID.log file after any resize volume operation. This would occur if a volume was expanded using the “Expand Volume to Fill Disks” menu item or if a volume (or disks containing volumes) were converted to SoftRAID format. Logging would not resume until the SoftRAID application was quit and restarted.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which could cause the rebuilds to never complete. Rebuilds would copy all the sectors to the secondary disks but the volume tile progress indicator for the rebuild would never disappear. This bug would only occur when Fast Mirror Rebuilds was enabled. It was introduced in version 4.0.
  • Fixed a bug which caused SoftRAID to hang when deleting a volume. This would happen 5% of the time on Macs with faster Intel Macs with multi-core processors.
  • Fixed a bug which caused SoftRAID to fail to create a volume. It would display an error dialog that one of the disks was busy when in fact the disk was not busy. This would happen 1 - 2% of the time a volume was created.
  • Fixed a bug which occasionally prevented the SoftRAID Monitor from displaying error dialogs.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which could cause disk tiles to continue to say “data disk”, “primary disk” or “secondary disk” even after the corresponding volume was deleted or converted to Apple Disk Utility format.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused BlueRay burners to appear in disk tiles when a BlueRay disk was inserted in the burner.
  • Fixed several bugs in the SoftRAID application which caused the application to continue to save a tech support report even if one of the Cancel buttons was clicked.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID application to always indicate that a full rebuild was required before a validate even when no rebuild was required.Fixed a bug which could prevent volumes from being expanded. This would happen if the volume was originally less than 4 GB in size.
  • Fixed a bug where SoftRAID always updated the driver preferences anytime any application preferences were changed. This bug was introduced in SoftRAID version 4.2.
  • Fixed a bug which resulted in the SoftRAID application failing to remember the position of the main window.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID driver which caused a volume safeguard to become enabled when a read-only-secondary disk was added back to a mirror volume.
  • Added code to the SoftRAID application to prevent some volume commands if the disks used for that volume are busy. Previously, SoftRAID would accept a command and then hang.
  • Add code to the SoftRAID application to prevent some disk commands if the volumes on those disks are busy. Previously, SoftRAID would accept a command and then hang.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which could prevent Apple Disk Utility volumes or AppleRAID volumes from being converted to SoftRAID volumes.

New in SoftRAID 4.2 (Dec 19, 2011)

  • New Features:
  • All parts of the SoftRAID product now run as 64-bit code. This means that under Snow Leopard and Lion (Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7), the application will launch faster and be more responsive.
  • The mirror rebuild algorithm has been optimized to use less CPU time. The new algorithm uses 50-75% less CPU time than the one used in previous versions of SoftRAID. This change also speeds up all mirror rebuilds. On SSDs, rebuilds can be 10 - 50% faster
  • On disks which support larger transfer sizes, SoftRAID will perform mirror rebuilds in larger blocks (up to 4 MB). This results in 10 - 20% faster rebuilds.
  • All verify, zero and certify disk operations now use larger blocks (up to 16 MB) on disks that support them. This results in a 10-15% speed increase of these operations.
  • SoftRAID can now resume a zero, verify or certify disk operation. If you quit SoftRAID during one of these operations and then relaunch it the next day, SoftRAID will allow you to resume the operation where you left off.
  • The SoftRAID driver now supports TRIM commands for all brands of SSDs when running under Lion (Mac OS X 10.7). This can dramatically increase the useful life of SSDs. Unlike most other RAID solutions, SoftRAID even supports TRIM on stripe volumes (RAID 0). Support for TRIM commands can be disabled in the SoftRAID preferences.
  • The SoftRAID Monitor has new code for sending out email notifications. The code in previous versions of SoftRAID would fail to send out emails 1-5% of the time. The new code is much more reliable.
  • SoftRAID can now detect when an SSD is worn out. This works on most brands of SSDs which are currently shipping except those sold by Apple. This also works on Intel SSDs and SSDs using the SandForce controller which were shipped in the past couple of years. The SoftRAID application now displays the “media life remaining” in the expanded disk tile of a SSD. When the SSD indicates that it has less than 10% of its media life remaining, SoftRAID will display a warning dialog. You can also configure SoftRAID so that the SoftRAID Monitor will display a dialog at startup or send you an email notification when your SSD has less than 10% of its media life remaining.
  • The compression algorithm used for Tech Support Reports has been changed. Tech Support Reports are now 8 times smaller and can be reliably sent as email attachments.
  • The SoftRAID Tool can now display the raw SMART data from a disk. To display the the SMART data from all disks, use the following command: “softraidtool disk all getsmartdata”.
  • When creating a stripe volume (RAID 0), SoftRAID now supports stripe unit sizes of up to 1 MB on FireWire disks when running under Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) or later.
  • The SoftRAID application is now much better at detecting disk hangs. It can detect a disk hang during most SoftRAID operations and will indicate the disk offset where the hang occurred.
  • Notes about eSATA cards: Some eSATA cards are unable to support transfers which are larger than 128 KB in size. If your SATA disks are attached to one of these cards, you will not see a dramatic speed improvement with this version of SoftRAID. To determine if your eSATA card limits transfer sizes, follow these steps:open a terminal window, type "softraidtool disk all info", look for the entries for the disks attached to your eSATA card. In these entries is a line which begins “Max Transfer Size:” which will give you the maximum transfer size for that disk. If this line indicates that the maximum transfer size is 128 KB, disks on this eSATA card will not see as much of a speed improvement with this version of SoftRAID.
  • Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed a bug which prevented SoftRAID from creating “Boot OSX” volumes when creating SoftRAID volumes on USB disks. (The “Boot OSX” volumes are used during the boot process when starting up from a RAID volume.) In previous versions of SoftRAID, users had to use the “Rebuild Boot Cache” feature to make volumes on USB disks bootable. This is no longer necessary.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID application to hang if a volume was mounted/ unmounted repeatedly in quick succession.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused the progress thermometers in the volume tiles to flicker when mounting or unmounting volumes.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Monitor which caused garbage characters to appear in the subject line of outgoing emails when those emails were viewed in certain email clients (e.g. Entourage).
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused the application to crash if a disk encountered an error while the application was running.
  • Changed the SoftRAID Monitor so that the date field for outgoing emails now conforms to RFC 5322.
  • Fixed a bug which caused log entries in the SoftRAID.log file for disk errors to always indicated that they occurred at offset = 0. This would happen on SoftRAID non-RAID volumes.
  • Fixed a bug which caused full rebuilds of mirror volumes using Intel SSDs to be come very slow if the volume was in use simultaneously on a server.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID Monitor which prevented some dialogs from being displayed and some email notifications from being sent out unless a user was logged in.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented some panic log files from being added to the Tech Support Report file.
  • Fixed a bug which caused volumes to no longer be bootable after they were expanded.
  • Fixed a bug which caused SoftRAID to encounter a fatal error if more than one disk was added to a mirror volume at the same time.
  • Fixed a bug which caused a SoftRAID mirror volume to no longer be bootable if more than one disk was added to a mirror volume at the same time.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID driver to incorrectly handle disk underrun and overrun conditions.

New in SoftRAID 4.0.7 (Jun 6, 2011)

  • Fixed a bug which caused SoftRAID to enter expired evaluation mode if it was run on Mac OS X 10.7 DP3 or later.
  • Fixed a bug which caused volumes to no longer be bootable if they were converted from Apple Disk Utility format to SoftRAID format. These volumes are now bootable.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented SoftRAID from recovering a failed mirror volume if the failure was caused by an error on one of the volumeʼs secondary disks.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the Rebuild button to do nothing if an out-of-sync mirror was connected to a Mac and “Automatically start mirror rebuilds” was disabled.
  • Increased the amount of SoftRAID.log and system.log files included in a Tech Support Report. The report now includes the most recent 128 KB of each file.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which caused disk tiles to still say “data disk” or “secondary disk” after a convert volume operation had completed.
  • Change the disk and volume convert code so that volumes which are converted to SoftRAID will only have their Safeguards enabled if “Safeguard volumes by default” is enabled in the SoftRAID application preferences.

New in SoftRAID 4.0.6 (May 14, 2011)

  • Fast Mirror Rebuilds - rebuild mirrors 50 times faster!
  • Disk Certification - test your disks with rigid disk certification
  • Volume Validation - verify your volumes are 100% readable
  • Volume Safeguard - protect your volumes from accidental deletion
  • SMART Reporting - get a health checkup on your disks
  • Predictive Disk Failure - be alerted when your disk is statistically more likely to fail
  • Email Notification - receive notification of issues via email
  • Command Line Interface - manage your server remotely
  • New Tech Support Report Function

New in SoftRAID 4.0.4 (Apr 5, 2011)

  • Fast Mirror Rebuilds - rebuild mirrors 50 times faster!
  • Disk Certification - test your disks with rigid disk certification
  • Volume Validation - verify your volumes are 100% readable
  • Volume Safeguard - protect your volumes from accidental deletion
  • SMART Reporting - get a health checkup on your disks
  • Predictive Disk Failure - be alerted when your disk is statistically more likely to fail
  • Email Notification - receive notification of issues via email
  • Command Line Interface - manage your server remotely
  • New Tech Support Report Function - helps us support you more quickly and easily than ever before!

New in SoftRAID 4.0.2 (Feb 17, 2011)

  • Added complete support for Advanced Format disks. These are the new type of disks with 1 KB, 2 KB and 4 KB sectors. SoftRAID can now initialize the disks correctly with either APM or GPT format and create and delete volumes on them.
  • The disk and volume discovery code in the SoftRAID application is now entirely multi- threaded. This means that the SoftRAID application no longer hangs waiting for a single disk to spin up like it used to.
  • Added code to work around a bug in some WiFi network equipment. The bug resulted in SoftRAID thinking that a serial number was already in use when it wasnʼt.
  • The SoftRAID application and driver now allow volumes to be made read-only and later converted back to read-write.
  • The disk certification code now uses a random pattern for all passes except the last one (which is still zeros). This was done to circumvent the data compression found in some controllers on SSDs (Solid State Disks). In earlier versions of SoftRAID the use of data compression would result in SoftRAID only testing a small fraction of the total memory locations during a certify operation.
  • Changed the SoftRAID Monitor so it no longer accepts connections on the port it uses for Bonjour communication.
  • Added support for email addresses which use Google Apps for Business.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented the SoftRAID Monitor from using an outgoing mail server if no authentication was required.
  • Fixed many bugs which prevented the “Send Test Email” function in the Email Notification window from working correctly.
  • Added an option to allow SoftRAID to log all SMTP commands and their responses when sending out email notifications.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID Monitor to send out volume full email notifications every hour.
  • Fixed a bug which caused the SoftRAID Monitor to check whether a volume was full when the volume was too small to check. A volume must be at least twice as large as the free space threshold. For instance, if SoftRAID is set to send emails if less than 10 GB of free space is available on a volume, it will not check any volume which is smaller than 20 GB in size.
  • Fixed a bug which could cause the SoftRAID application to hang during launch.
  • Added code to notify the user, with dialogs or via email, whenever the primary disk of a mirror volume fails.
  • Fixed a bug which caused volumes on disks with 512e sectors (disk with 4 KB sectors which emulate 512 byte sectors) to be very slow when they were formatted with APM partition maps.
  • Added code to handle the Escape key in all SoftRAID dialogs and windows. It will now dismiss the dialog in the same way that the Command-Period key press does.
  • Added user editable list of disks and volumes which is used to determine which disks and volumes the SoftRAID Monitor will not check. The file is named: “MonitorExclusionList.plist” and located in the SoftRAID application support folder (at “/ Library/Application Support/SoftRAID/”).

New in SoftRAID 4.0.1 (Sep 9, 2010)

  • The SoftRAID application and SoftRAID Monitor now run in German if the user is running Mac OS X in German. The SoftRAID Monitor also sends out email messages in German.
  • New SoftRAID driver code fixes a kernel panic which some users were encountering. This kernel panic could occur on any type of SoftRAID volume and was only seen in conditions where there was a high rate of simultaneous small i/os (4 - 16 KB) for a prolonged period of time (15 - 90 minutes).
  • There is no longer a delay at startup when the SoftRAID Monitor loads. This delay was proportional to the number of SATA disks attached to a Mac and was usually 1 second for every SATA disk (e.g. a Mac Pro with 9 disks would experience a 9 second delay). It was caused by running the SMART test on each SATA disks one right after another. SMART tests are are now staggered and performed on a dedicated thread. This prevents the delay at startup even when a large number of SATA disks are connected to a Mac.
  • There is a new Volume preferences which keeps the driver from rebuilding or validating more than one volume at a time. This was added to keep rebuild and validate operations from swamping a SATA or FireWire bus. This problem was most often seen when a user had multiple SoftRAID mirrors on disks behind a single SATA port multipliers or on the same FireWire bus.
  • The SoftRAID tool now has a status command. It returns a brief description of any error conditions on SoftRAID disks and volumes. It also returns a status of zero if there are no errors and 1 if any errors are found. To invoke this command, type “softraidtool status” in a Terminal window.
  • The SoftRAID application no longer displays “failed SMART test” for some disks while it is in the process of getting SMART data.
  • The SoftRAID application is now more accurate at determining the time remaining for disk certify, verify and zero sector operations. Previous versions could generate wildly inaccurate values on very fast SATA disks.
  • This version fixes a bug which would occasionally result in the SoftRAID driver no longer being present on a volume. When this happened and the startup volume was a SoftRAID volume, the Mac could no longer be started up. This bug only occurred when a user installed or reinstalled the SoftRAID driver and then quit the SoftRAID application immediately.
  • The SoftRAID application no longer become unresponsive after the driver has been installed on a volume or after driver preferences have been changed.
  • The SoftRAID Monitor now automatically creates a new SoftRAID.log file if it has been previously deleted by the user.
  • The Tech Support Report produced by the SoftRAID application now includes more diagnostic information. In addition, the report now includes the last 32 KB of the system.log and SoftRAID.log files (i.e. the most recent entries) rather than the first 32 KB.
  • The user can now copy a SoftRAID serial number and paste it into the Enter Serial Number dialog box in the SoftRAID application.
  • SoftRAID now strictly enforces read/write permissions on all SoftRAID volumes. In version 4.0, SoftRAID would allow other kernel code to write to a volume which had been opened only for reading. (All other Mac OS X storage drivers still allow writing to volumes which have only been opened only for reading.) Write permissions were correctly enforced in earlier version of SoftRAID version 3.x but had to be disabled to prevent a kernel panic caused by the HFS file system code in Leopard beta releases. This kernel panic in the HFS code has been fixed in currently shipping versions of Leopard and Snow Leopard so it is safe for the SoftRAID driver to resume enforcing write permissions.

New in SoftRAID 4.0 (May 27, 2010)

  • SoftRAID 4.0 includes these key features, many of which are not available on any other RAID product for Mac OS X:
  • Accelerated Mirror Rebuilds: mirror rebuilds can now take less than 10 minutes even on 1 - 2 TB volumes.
  • Email Notification: the SoftRAID Monitor can send out email messages in response to error conditions to ensure that you know when things are going wrong before itʼs too late.
  • Command Line Interface: there is now a SoftRAID command line interface. You can check the status of your SoftRAID volumes, start a mirror rebuild or perform most SoftRAID functions remotely, even from your iPhone.
  • Checking SMART Status on Disk: the SMART status on every disks is checked every time you launch the SoftRAID application and every 24 hours your Mac is running. In addition, the parameters returned with the SMART status are used to determine if your disk is more likely to fail in the next couple of months.
  • Disk Hours of Use: SoftRAID now keeps track of how many hours each disk has been used. This will allow you to replace old disks before they fail.
  • Validating Volumes: you can now read every sector on a volume even when it is in use without interrupting your work. For mirror volumes, the data on each disk in the mirror is compared to ensure that all disks contain identical copies of the volume.
  • Certifying and Verifying Disks: new disks can now be certified before you use them to ensure that each and every sector is reliable.
  • Support for SSDs and Disks with 4 KB Sectors: SoftRAID now has complete support for SSDs and disks with 4 KB sectors.
  • The SoftRAID Log: all SoftRAID specific errors and events are now written to one log file. You can monitor the health of your SoftRAID disks and volumes without wading through all the diagnostic messages in the system.log file

New in SoftRAID 3.6.8 (Mar 3, 2009)

  • Fixes several minor bugs, including working around a Mac OS X issue which can cause volume to become unmountable.
  • SoftRAID 3.6.8 also addresses an issue when converting volumes to AppleRAID format.

New in SoftRAID 3.6.7 (Jun 26, 2008)

  • Fixed a bug which could occasionally cause a kernel panic when converting a volume from Non-RAID to Mirror (RAID 1). This would only occur if the user was running Leopard and the there was a lot of file activity on the volume when the conversion took place.
  • Fixed a bug in the SoftRAID application which could cause the application to hang while installing or reinstalling the SoftRAID driver.
  • Fixed a bug which caused SoftRAID to treat all Case Sensitive HFS volumes as non-bootable.
  • Fixed a bug which could cause a kernel panic when large i/o requests were sent directly to a Stripe (RAID 0) volumes rather than through the file system. The two applications which would sometimes elicit this bug were Aperture and FinalCut Pro.
  • Fixed a bug which prevented users from converting AppleRAID disks to SoftRAID format. This bug only occurred when the disk contained a Case Sensitive HFS volume and used the APM disk format.
  • Work around a bug in PGP Desktop which causes the PGP driver to bind to each SoftRAID volume even if the volume is not encrypted. This bug would cause every SoftRAID volume to appear twice in the main window of the SoftRAID application.
  • Added code to the SoftRAID driver which allows the driver to use the backup copy of the SoftRAID volume data if the main volume data becomes unreadable. This increases the ability of the SoftRAID driver to continue to function correctly in spite of data errors on a disk.