SoftRAID sucks!

I don’t usually have a negative opinion… but in this case, SoftRAID 4 definitely SUCKS!

I only had minor issues in the past with SoftRAID 3. It just seemed to ‘work’ and you never had to think about it.

When the upgrade (and 30-day trial) for version 4 was offered, I jumped. It seemed like a worthwhile upgrade, and there was real value in being able to try the new features for 30 days.

It was going along fine, until I had six days remaining. That was when I had troubles beyond belief. The drives in the RAID array started to go away. Then, I couldn’t rebuild the set. Then, I was informed there was an unrecoverable error. Then, I was told there was a problem with the partition data, and I should contact SoftRAID support to assist in fixing this “major” problem.

It went downhill from there…

I had troubles, but was able to reformat the drives that were involved. It should be noted there was NO hardware failure of any kind, in any of the drives. It was all due to SoftRAID ‘losing it’s mind’ and not being able to recover.

I had a good backup, so knew I could restore. The only problem, it took forever to restore, then rebuild my iTunes Library. It isn’t *that* big, but around 65K tracks. Way more than I could ever dream to recover from scratch.

Anyway, thought all was well, after hours of restore, and rebuilding iTunes. And then I come to find I was really trashed. The library I thought was back, was really in a state of disarray.

So, now in the process of recovery from my “back up of the back up…”

Hopefully I will soon see how much SoftRAID really cost me.

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Update:
A new day and it seems like I am back. Albeit, without SoftRAID. I am now running the library on a discrete standalone external FW800 drive. For safety and security, I have this ‘main’ drive backed up to two other external FW800 drives. In this end this is probably better, although slightly more cumbersome, than the software RAID. Thank goodness for the robustness of SuperDuper! It is definitely worth the small price for a reliable, versatile, and configurable backup solution.

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