RAID 6

@davidement 

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.

@softraid-support - just wanted to check in since we're about 6 months away from when you were hoping to have RAID 6 support available? Are you able to share any updates with any internal milestones?

Thanks!

@nyc_th 

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

@softraid-support Thanks for the update

It’s now been two more years since my last interaction and still no RAID6. This year?

@davidement 

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

It's now 2026, and I see that this thread was started back in 2023 asking about the feature and being told it's on the roadmap. That's a pretty long roadmap.

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. 

@pyronaut 
We are in Private beta, so it is getting closer. It cannot be "public" as the beta requires custom partition maps that cannot be used with normal volumes. Give us until hopefully summer for public beta.
There are factors outside out control, but what we have is good performance, pretty stable and looking good.