November 2nd 2015

By Mike Flaminio



On my desktops where I need to house a lot of data, I prefer to have a fast SSD drive for my boot system and applications, and a RAID for my media and data. I use a RAID with redundancy either as a RAID 1 or an external hardware RAID 5. A RAID doesn't mean you don't need to backup, but it gives a ton of piece of mind that you can work without interruption due to the inevitable drive failure.



With OS X 10.11 El Capitan, Apple has removed RAID support from the Disk Utility. It's important to note that a RAID still function under OS X 10.11, but you have no way to create and maintain your RAID using Disk Utility. You can dive in and use the Terminal, but to me that's not really a long-term solution.



Monday SoftRAID announced version 5.1 bringing full support for OS X 10.11 El Capitan. This means there is now an officially supported solution for building and maintaining RAIDs with OS X 10.11. SoftRAID is a great utility that offers much improved performance over AppleRAID (up to 86%), more features and better error monitoring for reliability. For example, my biggest peeve with AppleRAID is I have no idea when a RAID fails. As a result, I have to schedule maintenance to keep an eye on things where SoftRAID offers more proactive monitoring and diagnostics. Also included is the ability to combined hybrid RAIDs using SSD and HDD for a roll your own Fusion Drive.



If you're a personal or small business user, SoftRAID's $179 price might be a bit overkill, so I'm happy to hear shortly they will be releasing a new product called SoftRAID Lite. The idea is the Lite version includes the SoftRAIDs features to cover the core functions of OS X Disk utility, but not the full suite of capabilities. SoftRAID Lite will sell for $49 and is expected to ship in the coming days.