Fortunately when I received the Mercury enclosure all I had to do was install the drives.
I ordered a Mercury Elite Pro Dual RAID USB 3.0 enclosure to move my backup to and was worried I would have to reformat and start my TimeMachine over from scratch.
Fortunately, I created the RAID using the independent mode of the enclosure and SoftRAID Lite. Worth, TX Age: Over 65 Experience Level: Power User Owned Product: less than a month Rating: 5/5 SoftRAID Line & Mercury enclosure are a great combination! NovemI had used SoftRAID Lite to create a RAID1 for my main TimeMachine using another enclosure and was not happy with the fact that the drives, nor the fans in that enclosure never shut down, even when the computer was asleep. Verified Buyer Reviewer: JBBob Location: Ft. I would recommend this item to a friend! This review is from OWC SoftRAID Pro for All Multi-Bay Storage Solutions (macOS and Windows). I would recommend SoftRAID, but I could recommend it more strongly IF the Raid 0 and Raid 10 and Raid 4/5 worked with all the major SSD mfgs most importantly: Samsung, Crucial, Western Digital, SanDisk, Seagate, and others in order of marketshare. For me right now just getting Raid 0 and Raid 10 to work optimally and then Raid 4 and 5 is more important than Raid 6. I very much want to see SoftRAID succeed. For now I will limp along hoping the next release at least fixes all the easiest problems/cases. SoftRAID is a great product and I hope these problems can be resolved soon. I do see new releases of SoftRAID with improvements and I do recognize that Apple puts their customers through too much for often a very small return and a return that is more about the Apple Ecosystem than it is customer satisfaction. The good thing is that this is agreed to be a problem so as long as it is pursued there is hope it can be resolved. If you presume an average SSD read/write speed of 500MB/s and you would have the following Raid 0 maximum limits as expectations. I don't know that this is happening, but I am concerned. When SoftRAID was independent of OWC it was a product that served its' users not a particular storage vendor. I hope this is not going to be the future, but there are a lot of examples of this. If SoftRAID is going to support only OWC products it is a dead product. I almost have the sense that SoftRAID tech support is blaming the SSDs. There is problem where a RAID 0 disk set doesn't realize consistent throughput enhancements when disks are added to the array. I feel as I am begging to see this already. Having said this, I am concerned with SoftRAID now as the OWC purchase or any purchase of a product often leads to its' decline and demise. The SoftRAID 6 release is welcome, even though the promised RAID 6 is still a promise. I like the product and want to see it excel. If so an unit with USB C Gen.Rating: 2/5 SoftRAID 6.2 Needs Improvement DecemI am a long time SoftRAID user. The HDD aspect vs TB3 is it because of the speed limitation of the HDD with its Sata 6GBs speed? The Sata is the bottleneck here? There is a QNAP TR-004 with USB-C (5Gbs) but I think a OWC alternative (link below) is a bit faster (USB C Gen. Some DAS are TB 3 and USB C directly connected, but the offer is limited. NAS units are usually networking devices.
So a direct connection as you say makes more sense and not over network. Just a working device with an additional layer of safety. The goal is to use some disks as scratch disks for photo editing and others for files storage while I close projects and they move from a “to edit” to a “ edited” folder but, need them easy accessible for re-edit sometimes. Raid 5 configuration seems to be a good compromise both for safety and speed. I am sorry forgot to mention the use of HDD. Network drive as a continuous of bytes like a local drive. Will always take longer because of the TCP/IP and ethernet Would personally go with the local solution as network transfers If you are copying data back and forth on a daily basis, I
One other note as far as local vs, network solution, if the use isįor strictly archive and backup, either solution is fine. Give them a callīefore making the OWC choice to see if it has been fixed.
Solution was broken by the latest Big Sur update. On that note, OWC has stated that at the moment, their Soft Raid (NOTE: When I refer to USB I mean all the usb 3 "flavors"). SSDs, you may only see marginal speed improvements over USB. If you are populating with HDD, Thunderbolt is a waste of moneyĪs it has zero advantage over a USB solution in terms of speed.Īlso, unless you use an enclosure that is populated with NVMe First, are you going to populate the enclosures with HDD or SSD?