It’s an inevitability that all HDDs eventually fail. However, being prepared for drive failure can lessen the potential impact on your workflow.
SoftRAID, the premier software RAID solution, makes failure prediction possible with its built-in monitor. Most disks will start having internal errors a week or two before they fail. The SoftRAID Monitor checks for these errors and warns you if a disk is having problems and likely to fail.
At the 2016 Digital Cinema Society Post Production Expo, Tim Standing of MacSales.com and SoftRAID went in-depth about HDD failure rates, what causes failure and predicting failure with SoftRAID.
Check out the video below to see his entire presentation at the expo:
For more on SoftRAID and how it can protect your data against disk failure with features such as disk certification, visit: www.softraid.com
Currently using a OWC Thunderbay 4 mini to hold 2 drives that are Superduper backups of my iMac. One clone is from last Friday and the other is updated every night of the week. The remaining two drives are both live TimeMachine drives.
My question is whether my current two-drive TimeMachine setup or a SoftRAID RAID-1 is the better way to utilize the two drives?
When an internal HDD fails, there’s nothing better than a bootable backup, which can either be on an external local drive or on a network. There are a number of apps that facilitate this; I like Super Duper!
When a drive begins to get flaky and you’re in the process of replacing it, do full backups at least daily and keep a thumb drive handy. When failure seems imminent, quickly save what you’re doing to that thumb drive. About five years ago, doing that saved me a lot of grief.