OWC: SoftRAID 6, we’re showing off of the show is going to be officially debuted this fall. SoftRAID is twenty years of development and research into it. It’s an amazing platform. The best RAID engine, I’d argue, on the planet.
BSVP On_Site: Hi, Sue Lawson here. NAB 2019. I’m here for BSVP On-Site. Here at the OWC, Other World Computing booth, talking to Larry O’Connor and we wanted to go ahead and certainly touch upon the exciting new SoftRAID that they have available for us. SoftRAID 6, I believe.
OWC: SoftRAID is gonna bring fully PFS support. It’s gonna bring encryption and it will bring RAID 6 or you can go from single parity with RAID 5 to dual parity with RAID 6 which but a lot of folks I know is really important. People who have extra concern about their data, want to have the ability for something weird happens you can, but with RAID 6 you really lose two drives without any data loss. RAID 5 of course gives you you know one drive you know without data loss. But the real beauty of SoftRAID and you know we’re offering all that extra protection and it’s depends on what you’re doing. RAID 6 might be overkill maybe not, but the real secret sauce, one of the real secret sauces and software beyond just being a really high speed RAID solution is this drive its predictive failure. A lot of folks rely on S.M.A.R.T. and S.M.A.R.T just doesn’t get it done by the tiny S.M.A.R.T. might even tell you right away even when you’re experiencing problems. But typically people start running S.M.A.R.T. start looking for problems.
If there is a S.M.A.R.T. failure you know when problems start to creep up and SoftRAID is designed to tell you about the potential of a drive failing way before that drive starts to impact your workflow. Now we want our customers to have the information. You may have another six months to a year out of a drive. It might even be out of warranty. But that’s not what our concern is. Our concern is that you always have drive availability and you have the ability to swap a drive before it’s a problem. You don’t wait until your tire goes flat. If you can see it is starting to get near the edge you know it’s time to replace it.
BSVP On-Site: Absolutely. Now am I mistaken or is SoftRAID now available for Windows as well as Mac is that right?
OWC: That is correct and that’s, how you say, the really, really exciting is that we showed off the show we’re releasing for the first time SoftRAID for Windows. We’re bringing that RAID engine over to the Window side. We’re arguing there really isn’t a good software RAID solution and on top of all that, you know, this is for folks understand and you know we won’t point fingers at for the whys but folks there’s a lot of mixed environments where Macs use certain parts of the production process mixed ingest but you may have a PC somewhere in the chain. may have to have a PC in the chain for somebody that wants to do their work on a PC whatever that may be. SoftRAID for Windows doesn’t just give you that great rate technology all that disk protection. It also now lets you move a Mac volume to PC inter-operably. So what you do on your Mac you can plug in.
You have a ThunderBlade there you’re ingesting with on a Mac and you have a post-production process or a review where they need to be able to access at that need it on a PC now is plug and play on the PC as well as on the Mac. We’re providing platform interoperability. So regardless of your platform you know with the benefit of a direct-attached high-speed solution you can now move platform to platform without having any special requirements or compatibility to mess with. It just works. That’s really cool.
BSVP On-Site: It is really cool. SoftRAID 6. OWC, Other World Computing. Larry O’Connor, Sue Lawson, NAB 2019.
