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Hardware Compatibility
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Topic starter
Hello,
On MacOS. I've been running SoftRAID on my 10 year old Thunderbay, and it has been a great product. Currently, I do not run premium, but am considering it for the ability to monitor SMART status on USB attached external drives used for Backup. The product sales page for SmartRaid premium says it can do this "With version 8.6, monitoring extends beyond Thunderbolt to cover nearly all USB-connected drives as well."
I've been unsuccessful finding out if the following OWC docks are compatible in that manner; i.e. they are capable of passing SMART status (I suppose through UASP or SCSI/ATA translation).
- OWCTCDRVDCKSN: NVMe U.2 + SATA Dual-Bay Drive Dock
- OWCTCDRVDCK: SATA Dual-Bay Drive Dock
Can anyone from SoftRAID support speak to these particular combinations passing full SMART data for health monitoring? In my mind, OWC certainly would have tested their own products in this respect, prior to saying it is compatible with nearly all USB-connected drives, though the sales team says they can't say.
Thanks so much!
This topic was modified 2 months ago 2 times by ross10101
Posted : 03/03/2026 2:00 pm
It took a while to get these exact docks and test, but I can confirm, with Tahoe (and later), SMART over USB works within SoftRAID.
The main USB devices that are not producing SMART are those with older chipsets. Most modern USB drives should definitely pass SMART over USB.
@softraid-support Is the SMART data passthrough available to other SMART monitoring tools like AIDA64 on Windows 11, Linux SmartMon Tools and CrystalDiskInfo on Windows?
I'm assuming its pretty standard since my old Silverstone dual drive bay does that and it's very old and being retired and replaced by the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad 4-Bay USB 3.2 Gen 2 RAID Enclosure (OWCMEQCTJB000)
I'm just using it as an non raid external drive enclosure with no extra software or proprietary drivers. It will just be using the generic driver Windows automatically loads for it.
It's not blocked by firmware to only allow OWC SoftRaid to read it, correct?
Posted : 19/03/2026 2:56 am
Topic starter
@softraid-support Thanks for taking the time to confirm the compatibility. That's perfect! I really appreciate it, and your marketing team could list that on the drive dock page as a help to others.
One other thought... I am willing to bet if you offered a USB drive monitoring only version of softraid at a lower price point you would get more sales from folks who just want to monitor the health of their time machine backup drives. Would be a welcome offering!
Posted : 19/03/2026 10:36 am
No, our enclosures are "generic" to the system it is connected to. Only "Hardware RAID" enclosure actively block SMART data. What can be a factor is some enclosures are JBOD, but the USB chips being used do not support SMART. Especially older chipsets. Any modern OWC enclosure should support SMART with standard industry SMART drivers, Linux and Windows.
Posted : 19/03/2026 11:35 pm
Donat reacted
We have discussed it. There is more to it than that, but the good news is now that we can get SMART Over USB, its a viable product and may get "resurected".
Posted : 19/03/2026 11:36 pm
@softraid-support Responding to the "resurrected" post.
For Windows 10 and 11, as far as I know, if the bridge chip supports the USB Attached SCSI Protocol such as the ASMedia ASM-235CM used by the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Quad 4-Bay USB 3.2 Gen 2 RAID Enclosure, then SMART should work as expected unless the vendor has a modified firmware that limits some or all SMART functionality or ties it to a specific piece of software or if the enclosure uses hardware raid. Neither of these limitations apply to the OWC enclosure I mentioned.
The last point was answered for me and I'm certain it should work since it's seen as "generic" by the system.
That being said, the engineering and design of the OWC enclosure looks really good and there is nothing generic about that. :) It even looks like the back fan is easily replaced if needed and the hard drive retention mechanism looks solid.
Thank you for the replies.
Posted : 20/03/2026 12:15 am
@donat
Generic meant we do not have any special hardware that requires OWC software to use them.
I did not mean our enclosures are "cheaply built", as you noted. ;-)
Some enclosures I have seen in the past, require special drivers to be able to use at all.
Posted : 20/03/2026 1:07 am
