Softraid Upgrades RAID Management Software for Mac OS X

SoftRAID LLC announced SoftRAID 4.0, a major upgrade to its acclaimed RAID management software for Mac OS X. SoftRAID 4.0, is demonstrated at MacWorld 2009, in San Francisco. SoftRAID 4.0 will be released by the end of Q1, 2009.

SoftRAID 4.0 brings new enhancements to RAID which make it an even better solution for backing up volumes on both workstations and servers the backup process. SoftRAID Mirror volumes have been the central part of the backup strategy for Mac users for over a decade. Users have taken one of the mirror disks to a secure location as part of a mirror backup. Periodically, the mirror disk gets brought back to the Mac to be rebuilt (resynchronized) with the volume. With 1 TeraByte volumes, this rebuild process can take several hours. Now SoftRAID 4.0 introduces Fast Mirror Rebuilds. With Fast Mirror Rebuilds, SoftRAID keeps track of which parts of the volume are used when a mirror disk is not present, and only rebuilds those sectors when the other mirror disk is reconnected. This allows users to rebuild their mirror volumes in minutes rather than hours.

SoftRAID version 4 brings many additional new features to the Mac for the first time. These features include: Email notification of errors and events which occur with your SoftRAID volumes, a Command line interface for remote maintenance, verification of disks and volumes, SMART error reporting and disk certification.

"The release of SoftRAID version 4 dramatically changes the landscape of backup software for Mac OS X users.", noted Mark James, Vice President of SoftRAID, LLC. "With the innovations of Faster Mirror Rebuilds, ShapShot disks, error reporting, and data verification, users can not only backup easier than has ever been possible, but be confident that the disks they store data on are reliable and not about to fail."

With this release, SoftRAID, LLC continues to deliver the best software RAID solution for the Mac. "This release includes many features that we have been working on at SoftRAID over the past couple of years.", said Tim Standing, Vice President of Engineering. "SoftRAID 4 is ready for Snow Leopard and will make it much easier for graphics professionals and server administrators to guarantee the integrity of their files."

SoftRAID continues to be the most cost effective method and reliable method of providing both real-time and off-site backup for busy professionals, small businesses and server administrators. No other backup solution combines blazing fast backups with the ability to seamlessly recover from hardware failures without having to restore from backup media. In addition, SoftRAID users don’t have to worry about losing file attribute metadata or the data corruption issues which plague other solutions like TimeMachine.

The SoftRAID 4.0 release is available electronically for $69 to all 3.x owners. A bootable CD version is available for $20 more, plus $7 P&H. Users who purchase SoftRAID 3 after January 1,2009, will receive a free upgrade to SoftRAID 4.0.

The SoftRAID 4.0 electronic download is $129 and the retail CD is $149, both available from the SoftRAID website and retail outlets worldwide.