Common questions and Answers

Question.. I paid for my Softraid 7 Pro Upgrade (from XT) on May 17, 2023... am I still covered and for how many years? I got an email asking me to move to 8 for a discounted price but I'm unsure if I am actually still covered from either upgrading to 7 Pro or from buying my last Flex 8.

I own several products of yours, two ThunderBay Flex 8s, an external 8th blade, and internal version as well. 9/17/21 was my last large purchase for one of the Flex8 units.

All in all just trying to see the difference between SR 8 and SR7 Pro for my Mac Studio M2 Ultra. 

@jd1 

The Flex should have given you a 3 year license. there is no more need for Pro. Enter your Flex license and see what you get.

@softraid-support my licenses were all upgraded already when you guys switched to 7. I added Pro so I could create other volumes from non owc drives. if you go to my account you'll see all my licenses but I'll try what you said.

@jd1 

I don't generally check user accounts. There is no more need to get Pro, however.

I have an active SoftRAID 7 XT. But if I want to upgrade to V8 I have to pay full amount. Above you stated that it would be free for the active license.

Softraid License policies and policy changes are a reason NOT to buy OWC hardware. I want to spend my weekend time on other topics than understanding how this works and I always feel that you want to rip-off more money from me.

@stefferber 

Sorry for the inconvenience. Post your license number so I can check. I will delete it before approving you post

Posted by: @softraid-support

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@stefferber 

Sorry for the inconvenience. Post your license number so I can check. I will delete it before approving you post

Thank you. Here the details

Can you fix this, too?

I recently upgraded my desktop to a Mac Studio M2 which came with Mac OS Sonoma installed. I was using SoftRAID 6 XT on my previous system and found out it wasn't compatible with OSX 14. I see that SoftRAID 8 is available but I don't want to buy a subscription and the "standard" version seems to not have all of the features that I had available with my SoftRAID 6 XT.  I don't think it is fair to lose functionality that was present before if I don't want to choose the subscription path. I don't mind paying for an upgrade but I don't want a subscription.

@wfjrfilms 

SoftRAID 8 is now a subscription model. Your SoftRAID 6 license has not expired, but does not work with Sonoma.

With enclosures you get 3 years of (upgrades and) support, but not lifetime upgrades.

The subscription model enables us to keep the proper engineering resources behind SoftRAID.

The free version allows you to have SoftRAID to check, your system, but as you noted, is feature limited.

Its far from trivial to maintain SoftRAID, and this is the cleanest way forward.

I upgraded my Softraid software to 7XT on 11/15/22 (current version 7.6) for my Thunderbay Flex 8. What features would I lose if I were to upgrade to 8 standard? *More specifically, although my upgrade and support plan has expired I see that the Softraid Monitor icon is still active (and blue) in my top menu. If I were to upgrade to 8 standard, would I lose the monitoring icon? Would I be able to see disk health info or warnings of disks in danger of failing?

@tylerdigital 

You will have to manually launch the SoftRAID app for warnings. notifications do not work (including email)

You can manage your volume, replace a disk, but you cannot create a "new" volume with Standard.

Also, there is no tech support.

Your 7.6 will work through Sonoma.

@softraid-support Thanks for the reply! So far 7.6 is working well with Sonoma on my M1 Max. I may hold off on upgrading to 8 while I still have monitoring on 7.6 though I'm curious to see the speed improvements on Raid 0 (4TB nvme through the shuttle) and Raid 5 spinning drives.

@tylerdigital 

You really wont see the speed improvements unless you are using a PCI card NVMe card in a Mac Pro.

I do not think there is much to see over Thunderbolt.

*Macbook Pro. Thanks and good to know. I am curious what the pros & cons are for the PCI NVME card vs U.2 shuttle NVME (I have the former) but that’s another conversation.

@tylerdigital 

There are two enhancements from our driver acceleration:

Reduced CPU usage, especially on Apple Silicon, as the communications from driver to disk are more efficient.

This enables the faster performance on PCI cards in the Mac Pro 2023.

A single PCI card can now get >20GB/s, which is pretty remarkable. That is the hardware limit of the Mac Pro. RAID 5 is awesome also, even on writes.

Since the bottlenecks on buses (Thunderbolt) are much higher than the driver latency, the primary benefit for NVMe devices like the shuttle will be much lower CPU loads.