SoftRAID can do 4 things:
1. Standard Mac HFS: Just like volumes created by HDT or Drive Setup.
2. RAID 1 (mirror): Created from two partitions on different disks. One is the primary and the other is a mirror. They contain exactly the same information. If the primary fails, SoftRAID will redirect to the mirror without any interruption. SoftRAID will beep and flash a SoftRAID icon to let you know that the primary or mirror has failed. Read I/Os are done withthe primary. Write I/Os are done with both.
In the SoftRAID software, you can check on the Mirror Status. Optimal means everything is working. Failed means either the primary or the mirror has failed. Rebuilding means the drives have gotten out of sync and the mirror is being rebuilt from the primary. Rebooting during a rebuild does not damage data integrity. Rebuilds will continue once the computer is up and running again.
You can establish a Mirror without wiping out both disks by adding a drive and setting it up in SoftRAID. The Mirror will be built while running in the background.
3. RAID 0 (stripe): This spreads data across 2-7 equal-sized drives. This is not redundant, however, and loss of any one drive causes a total data loss. If one drive is removed from the Stripe, you will see a Partition Missing in the status and the RAID will not function.
4. Weighted stripe: this is made of 2 or more paritions on 2 different buses which have unequal performance (5M/s and 10M/sec or 20M/sec for example). This is specific to Power systems having a RAID Stripe across dual SCSI or a PCI SCSI card and the internal SCSI. The faster bus will receive twice as much data as the slower bus to make up for the speed difference.
Conley will address any drive, but to use the functionality of the software you must update the driver.
There are five major functions under the Volume menu.
1. New: This is the function that allows the user to set up one of the two different levels of RAID. (The setup for RAID is in PowerSource 1927)
2. Delete: Removes the selected volume.
3. Create Mirror: Allows the user to create a mirror of an already existing drive.
4. Rebuild: This will rebuild a mirror that is out of sync. The rebuild happens in the background.
5. Rebuild: This will dictate how fast the rebuild occurs in the background.
There are new features:
Clear out of Sync: This will allow the user to cancel the rebuild request if the drives appear to be out of sync but the user knows they're not.
Split Mirror: Turns a Mirror array into 2 normal HFS volumes.
There are four major functions under the Disk menu.
1. Rescan SCSI bus: Does exactly that.
2. Show partitions: this will show the actual partitions of the drives instead of the drives.
3. Install Driver: Installs the Conley driver on the selected drive.
4. Initialize drive: Performs a standard initialization of a drive.
Machines Affected: PowerTower Pro with RAID