SoftRAID for Windows 1.0.7 Brings TRIM to Cross-Platform RAID

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What is TRIM?

TRIM is an important part of keeping your solid-state drives (SSDs) healthy. And in our first update to SoftRAID for Windows, we’ve added several TRIM features that keep your drives running faster and longer.

SSDs handle data differently than traditional hard disks. They are divided into blocks, which are somewhat analogous to (but much larger than) traditional hard disk sectors. These blocks must be manipulated as a single unit. If your computer tries to modify a partial block, the SSD will temporarily copy it to a different area, erase the original, and then write it to your drive. This process slows down your drive (data-shuffling takes some time) and shortens its life.

To help avoid this situation, file systems such as NTFS can cooperate with SSDs, telling the drive that an area of the disk is no longer in use (usually when a file is deleted) by sending a TRIM command. This directive tells the drive that a block is no longer needed and can be overwritten when necessary. What this does is dramatically speed things up and extend your drive’s lifespan by avoiding extra erase and write cycles.

TRIM in SoftRAID 1.0.7

In the newest update to SoftRAID for Windows, we’ve added two important features to protect your SSDs:

TRIM + RAID

We’ve expanded both RAID 0 and RAID 1 to fully support TRIM requests from Windows. We’ll watch for TRIM commands sent to your RAID volumes and spread them out (for RAID 0 volumes) or replicate them (for RAID1 volumes) on your member disks. You don’t have to do anything to take advantage of this feature—SoftRAID for Windows will automatically watch for SSDs and do all the work for you.

TRIM + HFS+

SoftRAID for Windows includes MacDrive technology to make your RAID volumes cross-platform – your Mac (HFS+) RAID 0 and RAID 1 volumes are fully supported in Windows. And for the first time, we’ve added TRIM support to HFS+. So even when using Mac RAID volumes in Windows, your SSDs keep operating at their best.

We’re excited to keep innovating and are always looking for ways to protect your data and improve your workflow. If you’re already a SoftRAID customer (thanks!), the software will automatically find and offer to install this update. If you aren’t yet a SoftRAID fan, you can download a fully functional, 30-day trial at softraid.com.

2 Comments

Mitchel Mullin II says:

October 5, 2020 at 11:55 am

Hello!

Now that SoftRaid is available for Windows, I’m wondering if there are any benchmarks between it and Windows native Disk Management RAID1/0 or between SoftRaid and Storage Spaces?
- OWC Larry says:
  
  November 20, 2020 at 5:44 pm
  
  I do believe we are substantially faster, definitely on the READ functions + provide other capabilities, monitoring, and protections well beyond the built in tools. But we certainly should get such published. We highly focused on bringing the RAID 4, 5, and 6 capabilities to Softraid on Windows as well.