I hope we're pretty close now to getting RAID6 support, as this is one of the main reasons I bought my drive enclosure that came with a SoftRAID license back in 2021 (it was "coming soon" back then). I've been waiting almost 5 years for this. 

I cannot say, but I will confirm that RAID 6 is under active development.

Yes it is under development. I cannot say more, until we are ready for a public beta

Thanks!

Thanks for your comments. It takes time to do changes to the SoftRAID driver and this is a major change. But it is under development. SoftRAID was actually written before your engineering start, amazingly, and the same core is still working on SoftRAID from the late 90's!

On your RAID devices, I would guess they are hardware RAID? (which do not support SMART predictive failure)?

Were some of these failures in the 2000's? (Seagate in particular had 10+ years of bad drives because of the floods in Thailand, which took over a decade to fix. They affected all disk manufacturers, but Seagate in particular.

generally disks (that are pre certified) should fail at 1-2% per year, until they reach 20-25,000 hours, then they need to be replaced as the failure rate climbs dramatically. Certification removes 50% or more of early drive failures, by intensivfely testing drives before putting into critical use.

The other reason two drive failure is so rare with SoftRAID, is when one drive starts to fail, you are notified before it actually fails. (as soon as even a single sector is reallocated)

BTW: another thing I can mention as advice, keep all computer electronics on line conditioners, which help drives and computers last longer.

For what it's worth, I started programming in 1966 and have been around storage devices since then.  I happen to have six RAID arrays myself; in my business there are more, and I can't even imagine how many there are across our customer / subscriber base.  There is the mathematics and arithmetic (was on my way to be a mathematician at one point) and then there is the reality.

Disks fail; particularly rotating disks.  Personally there is no year, these days, in which at least one disk does not fail somewhere across my various configurations.  I have had two disks fail within a RAID configuration a few times (less than five, but more than one time) over the past, say, eight years.  And, one time, but one time only, I had three disks fail within relatively short order.  I believe some of this may be related to whether sets of disks were bought at the same time; then if there is a materials or manufacturing problem, several units could get hit at the same time.

With RAID 5, I would have lost my RAID array a few times over the past few years.  With RAID six it only happened once, and might not happen again in my remaining lifetime (which sounds ominous but isn't at all, really).  Now in my case, if I were to lose a RAID array I would not lose any data, but the primary software I use replicates continuously so when I lose one RAID array I rebuild from the others.  The problem is that most of the RAID arrays are used all the time, so when they go it is inconvenient and could cause some things I do to run much, much more slowly.

So, I am glad you are eventually going to get RAID 6 done.  At this point, from the time of that comment saying "one day", to the point of completion it will be many years, but that is better than never.  I'll end by saying, I hope you can raise it in priority so it gets done sooner, but I truly thank you for your intelligent responsiveness.

RAID 6 is under development. But it is at least a year away.

Note that with predictive failure, getting two failures at the same time is extremely rare. Much more rare that the odds of losing the volume from file system damage.

There are many "claims" about RAID 5 being dead, i.e, the volumes are so large that the parity data is mathematically going to fail frequently (monthly is about the claims I have seen). As a result, we did some math and felt that those authors did not understand error correction very well and errors should be far more rare.
So we did a test. Took two RAID 5 volumes, one actively uses, the other with random (verifiable) data, but static, so we could check for "flipped bits".

these two volumes ran for 18 months, 24/7 and not a single data error was found over 18 months.

"RAID 5 is dead" postulate is debunked.