Hmm - there is wrong information in the MAN page, the count parameter apparently is mandatory despite what's reported by the man page (SoftRAID 5.8.4)...

It seems I am hit by the same issue. I have just filed a bug report (with much more details than posted here) but then - after more debugging and sear...

Both links result in 404's. Might be good to fix so when searching the forum and find this solution you can read the solutions :-)