This, in turn, means the company have much more of a focus on the Mac platform than most manufacturers in their field. One of the things that sets them apart is that many OWC products are designed to meet the needs of professionals working in audio and video.
Other World Computing are a long‑established supplier of storage and expansion solutions for computers. OWC make high‑quality computer accessories with musicians in mind. Perfect for the port‑impoverished Mac owner. I have had zero problems with it, other than the delay in compatibility with Big Sur.The Thunderbolt 3 Dock offers a comprehensive selection of connections and a pair of card slots. What I do like about SoftRaid is that it provides a continuous, simple diagnostic report on every drive in my system (six total) and monitors the health of my RAID structure. Since your ThunderBay shows up in Disk Utility, can you access it and its files? The fear of not being able to access my external files is why I have not installed Big Sur as of yet. It appears that the developer still has a lot of issues to work out before releasing the "final" version of 6.0, mostly due to changes in the Mac OS.
There is a lot of good, straightforward information to be found there. The first few topics in the blog discuss the problem you mentioned for both Intel and M1 Macs, and possible workarounds.
You might nose around the SoftRaid blog here: The ThunderBay icon not appearing on your desktop is a common problem with SoftRaid and Big Sur. My external drive is an OWC product, as is SoftRaid, so it is logical that SoftRaid was used to structure my external RAID 5. I cannot imagine that the installation process is any different than with most Mac apps-either drag and drop, or run an installer. SoftRaid XT is an application, so it resides on my startup SSD in the applications folder. Maybe Softraid has found clever ways to overcome the performance hit but I'd check out the read and write speeds which can really slow down your image processing against hardware RAID solutions which are pretty cheap these days or consider just a fast primary drive and daily backup approach.Ĭlick to expand.When I purchased my latest computer system a couple of years ago, my local vendor configured everything to my specifications, so I'm afraid I cannot describe the installation process.
I haven't run or tested the Softraid solution but have tested various software RAID implementations over the years and have never really been impressed with the performance, particularly read and write speed performance of software RAID implementations. And of course you can back up to more than one backup storage system whether or not you're running a RAID array if you want protection against multiple drive failures. But you don't really need RAID at all as there are other approaches like just storing images on one drive and then backing up to another drive or to cloud storage which also achieves the big goal of making sure you don't lose your images with a single drive failure. Setting up a RAID array is one way to make sure you have redundant storage (depending on the RAID level chosen) but personally I prefer hardware RAID solutions that tend to be a lot faster than software RAID. Click to expand.I"d say you should have some form of storage redundancy for your image files if they're important to you.