SoftRaid Disk Errors

Is there any way to get support? 

System:

• M1 Mac Studio Ultra

• macOS 26.7

• SoftRAID 9.02

   

• Hardware: Two OWC ThunderBay enclosures ("OWC 36TB" and "OWC Raid")

Problem: DiskWarrior conflicted with the SoftRAID driver during a directory rebuild. The resulting bus timeouts caused SoftRAID to log 9 and 10 I/O errors across the drives

The physical disks are healthy, but SoftRAID marked both RAID 5 volumes as degraded and failed, locking them under Safeguard mode

 My Premium license has expired. SoftRAID Standard prevents me from clearing the I/O error counters, disabling Safeguard, and mounting the arrays

Request: Please provide a temporary emergency Premium activation key. I need to clear these false communication flags, mount both volumes, and back up my data immediately.

@steve223 
SoftRAID does not block mounting, ever. But yes, not having premium means limited features.
DIsk Warrior apparently fixed your directory? So your volume should be mounting. And what happens is the old directory, being corrupted, often has reads or writes outside the volume or disk boundaries, causing the IO errors. (SoftRAID tracks all IO errors, regardless.

You can ignore them for now, they do not mean anything important for data availability.

I seem to remember there was a reason you did not want to get Premium, but you need it now.

@softraid-support

Clarifying the actual situation, since there seems to be confusion:

Current status: The volumes mount, but they're in Safeguard mode (read-only). Every time I start the Mac, each drive throws error messages. The volumes are accessible for reading, but locked for writing.

What triggered this: DiskWarrior scanned the directory during troubleshooting, which caused bus timeouts when it interfaced with the SoftRAID driver. SoftRAID logged these as I/O errors and engaged Safeguard mode to prevent write corruption.

The problem: SoftRAID 9.0 became incompatible with DiskWarrior. That incompatibility locked my drives in read-only mode with persistent errors at every startup. Your software update created this situation.

On your response: You're right that the drives mount. But they're not usable. I can read data, but I can't write, I can't validate the volumes, and I get error messages every time I boot. That's a significant functional loss, not just a "limited features" situation.

The ask: A temporary Premium license to validate the volumes and clear Safeguard mode. Your software broke the compatibility; helping me fix it isn't an unreasonable ask.

You asked why I did not renew SoftRAID Premium — here is the direct answer, grounded in our prior forum history.

I did not renew because I purchased OWC ThunderBay RAID hardware (multiple ThunderBay 4 / RAID 5 units) with SoftRAID presented as included for that hardware. As I said in June 2023, I paid thousands for the enclosures and it was nowhere clearly stated that I would need an ongoing yearly software fee simply to keep using them as RAID. SoftRAID Support later acknowledged that the site did not state this explicitly and that sales language would be updated. That mismatch — hardware sold as a RAID solution, then full usability gated behind a recurring Premium plan — is why I refused the subscription model.

I also have years of reliability problems with these units on Mac Studio / Apple Silicon (ejections, rebuilds after restart/sleep, volume lock, long Monterey-era downtime), while Promise and NAS gear on the same machines did not behave the same way. In March 2024 SoftRAID Support granted me a free Premium extension “because of your incidents” through the end of that year and said you hoped I would then budget to renew. I appreciated the gesture, but it did not change the principle: after the included warranty window, Standard withholds settings and recovery actions that have repeatedly been the recommended fix for my own issues (for example the RAID disk timeout in July 2025, and clearing Safeguard / I/O flags after the SoftRAID 9.02 / DiskWarrior episode now). Paying AU pricing on a US$ subscription to unlock workarounds for problems I already lived with for years is not something I accept as fair.

I have been migrating toward NAS for that reason. I am asking again only for temporary Premium so I can clear Safeguard, validate, and protect data — not because I agreed SoftRAID should be rented annually to operate paid hardware.

Follow-up for anyone watching this thread.

After SoftRAID 9, my ThunderBay RAID 5 volumes have been effectively unusable for about two weeks. SoftRAID has repeatedly marked members as missing or failed. Today the “missing” drive showed up again — and SoftRAID still shows OWC 36TB as degraded / needs rebuilding / failed / Safeguard enabled, with no I/O errors, while flagging all four reasonably new 12 TB disks as failed. That is not a believable four-dead-drives story.

OWC support (case 03047045) had me blink the bay light, power off, reseat, then move the drive to another bay. None of that fixed it. Their next ask was a spare empty drive to erase in the “questionable” bay. I don’t have one — and after two weeks of downtime that is not an acceptable path.

Support has been roughly one email a day. I understand the time-zone difference. That still does not make this usable for anything important or time-critical. If you rely on SoftRAID + ThunderBay for work that actually matters, treat this as a warning: when SoftRAID brands the whole array failed with no I/O errors, and support moves at that pace, you are on your own.

I am pushing them for a real same-day recovery plan, not more ping-pong.