New Features/Suggestions - SoftRAID Forum

Suggestion: add ability to re-sort Disk or Volume list in Softraid app on MacOS

SKS — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 02:26:14 +0000

New feature request:

Would it be possible to provide the Softraid app on MacOS with display sort options, e.g. disk name, volume name, size, age, or drag-and-drop reordering? The app defaults the order of disks and volumes displayed to the system-assigned diskxx number.

There are times when I want to group some of my disks or volumes together by function, or (OCD) see them in sorted order by name, size, age, etc.

Thank you... Steve

Mac OS 26 Compatability

dgiffin — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 09:51:03 +0000

Can you please post updates on your compatibility testing for Mac OS 26 please as you can?

Not possible to make a case-sensitive volume with SoftRAID app

envoy510 — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:52:46 +0000

This is a problem for me, since I archive things from Linux machines and they have case sensitive filesystems. I made a new RAID 1 from 2x24TB drives and didn't notice this oversight and now I either have to live with it or rebuild everything (which took days).

Please add an option in the "New Volume" dialog to select HFS+ Case-sensitive.

Thank you.

"Certify Only" license entitlement/capability?

AllenAT — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 13:51:27 +0000

This feature may already exist, or can be accomplished by some other method - if so, please advise.

For those who own a full license of SoftRaid, it would be nice to be able to allow the option to "certify only" on 1-2 additional computers since the process takes so long. (~1 day for every 2TB?). I have 1-2 other computers around that I can put in amphetamine mode, and leave them alone until the certify is done, versus on my primary computer where I work, and periodically install additional software (requiring a reboot, etc.) I also do not want to take resources away from the certify process.

I am in the process of certifying a new drives on a new Thunderbay Mini, and I have a replacement Mercury elite pro quad on the way. It would be nice to just connect these to my Mac Laptop and have them going in the background. Right now, I believe I have to purchase a full license even through I will not use either of these arrays on my Laptop.

Thanks

Certify time estimations

llh — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 19:10:25 +0000

SoftRAID support has said in other forums that during the certification process the HDDs slow down nearing the end of each pass, producing a massive estimated time increase. Then when the next pass starts the time goes down again. This cycle happens each pass. If that slow down at the end of a pass is a known occurrence, and it's consistent, couldn't you factor that into SoftRAID's time estimation to have a more accurate/realistic estimation, rather than have the massive fluctuations?

ZFS

sengtastic — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 02:33:55 +0000

It would be great if Softraid could incorporate ZFSonOSX for more advanced ZFS filesystem features. Would pay extra to have the polished interface of Softraid with the ZFS features and it would be good to incorporate and support the open source project.

Push Notifications

wfiveash — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 18:11:50 +0000

I'd like to see SoftRAID support push notifications, especially for long running operations like volume validation. It would also be nice if the notification could indicate whether the operation succeeded or failed.

Add disk to Raid 5 array

AnilD — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 15:56:29 +0000

Will adding a disk to an existing raid 5 array be supported one day?

The knowledge base says it may be developed in a future release, but a more recent forum topic suggests the feature will never see the light of day?

RAID 6

uwemoeschel — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 21:53:21 +0000

quote from the OWC knowledgebase https://software.owc.com/knowledge-base/does-softraid-support-raid-6/

RAID 6 is a widely requested feature, as it allows users to add larger capacity disk drives. We are working on the implementation of RAID 6 for a future SoftRAID release.

Is RAID 6 being worked on, especially with the larger thunderbays it would make sense to have RAID 6. Any thoughts?

NVMe blades and SMART data

SoftRAID Support — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 18:10:12 +0000

SMART is a kind of self diagnostic for disks. With Flash media, SMART information is not as useful for predicting imminent failure, but is useful nethertheless. SoftRAID is also using anonymous data collected from users to try to isolate additional methods to predict future failure on NVMe drives. It will take time, but hopefully we will find some patterns in the raw SMART data we collect (only with users who opt-in to SoftRAID's anonymous data collection)

SoftRAID 8 brings added support for SMART with NVMe blades. SoftRAID now displays media wear indicators and Total Bytes Read (TBR) on NVMe .

This information can help you protect your data with more timely replacement of your blades. You can be aware of excessive wear on one or more of your blades and take action before failure.

When should I consider proactively replacing my NVMe blade that has not yet failed?

We suggest when your blades reach Total Bytes read of about 2,000 Times the capacity in TB, its time to replace the drives.
(example: with 1TB blades, when your blades reach 2,000TB read, its advisable to plan to replace the drives)

Wear indicators correlate with the Total Bytes Read. The wear indicators will generally track with the TBR. The more data read, the less wear remaining on the drives. (Writes cause the media to wear far more than reads, but these numbers still correlate)

If you see one of several blades wear indicator dropping faster, it could be starting to fail.

(Example: you have a Thunderblade 4 drive enclosure. 3 of the drives show 96-98% wear remaining, but one drive is showing 60%. This indicates while the drive is not failed, it is likely to fail much sooner than the other 3 drives)

If you have any NVMe on Thunderbolt that SoftRAID does NOT display Wear indicators, please post a SoftRAID tech support file. We will also want to get the raw SMART data from the blades, which we will tell you how to collect.

Feel free to comment or post additional questions about SMART over NVMe here.