SoftRAID announced an upgrade to its RAID management software that promises to drastically reduce the time it takes for a mirror backup. Demonstrating their product during Macworld Expo in San Francisco this week, the company explained how the new version, which works for both workstations and servers, will increase the speed of mirroring.
Those familiar will mirroring, synchronizing and/or backing up know the process can take lots of time. SoftRAID 4.0 introduces Fast Mirror Rebuilds, which keeps track of which parts of the volume are used when a mirror disk is not present. Then the software only rebuilds those sectors when the mirror disk is reconnected. The feature should be welcome as storage devices with capacities in the terabytes become more prominent.
Other features of SoftRAID 4 include e-mail notification of errors and events which occur with owners’ SoftRAID volumes. There’s an interface for remote maintenance.
SoftRAID plans to release the new version by March 2009. It will cost $129 to download; a CD-version of SoftRAID 4 will cost $149. Users of SoftRAID 3.x will be able to upgrade for $69.