Certifying is worth the wait!
Without certifying, your data is at risk
Certifying a large disk with SoftRAID can take a long time—often a day or two (or more)—but it’s worth it!
If you don’t take the time to certify a disk, you run the risk of losing all the data you put on it. After you have certified a disk, you know that it can safely and reliably store your files.
Certify more than one disk at a time
You can certify many disks at once. On Thunderbolt buses, certifying 4 – 8 disks at once takes only slightly longer than certifying a single disk.
Certify your SSDs as well as your HDDs
SoftRAID doesn’t just certify rotating drives. You can use SoftRAID’s certify feature to test new SD memory cards before you use them in your digital camera, video recorder etc. Whether it’s an SD, SDHC, or SDXC card, SoftRAID will let you know if your new card has any bad sectors on it that could put your data at risk. Remember to use at least 2 certify passes; 3 is even better.
Use certify to “revitalize” your SD cards
It’s a good idea to regularly “revitalize” or “recondition” your SD memory cards, and SoftRAID’s certify can help you do that.
SSDs that don’t use TRIM (such as all USB flash media) get slower the more they are used, because instead of actually erasing old data, flash just labels those sectors as “clean”. When you need to write to these previously used sections, data has to be erased first, slowing the process down. In addition, the more you write to an SD, the harder it is to find ‘clean’ areas to write to.
Certifying your SD card will fill the memory with zeros, essentially ‘erasing’ all the data, and making it behave like new. However, always remember that certifying will erase all the data from your drive, so be sure to back up your data first. (It’s not possible to restore data from a card that’s been certified as the data has been overwritten with zeros.)