If you’ve followed things here at OWC for any meaningful amount of time, you already know that speed is very important to us. We pride ourselves on building and providing the fastest storage solutions on the planet. In fact, our latest products—the Express 1M2 USB enclosure, the ThunderBlade X8, and the Atlas USB4 CFexpress Type B reader—all feature major speed improvements over their predecessors and/or counterparts.
But we also realize speed isn’t everything. In fact, without reliability and security, speed means absolutely nothing. Which is why our software RAID management tool, SoftRAID, has always been such an important part of the solutions we offer. SoftRAID harnesses the flexibility of software to provide a range of features that go well beyond the traditional offerings, delivering robust protection coupled with exceptional speed.
SoftRAID 8 brings performance improvements, additions for Windows customers, improvements to SoftRAID Monitor to keep you informed on the health of your drives, more than 60 bug fixes and patches, and a major overhaul to our licensing model.
SoftRAID 8 supports RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, and 1+0 along with bleeding edge driver technology for the fastest RAID speeds available on both macOS and Windows.
What’s new in SoftRAID 8?
In SoftRAID 8, both macOS and Windows users will see massive performance improvements.
SoftRAID 8 now delivers up to 4X the efficiency on macOS machines, including both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. SoftRAID uses as little as 1/4 the resources to run RAID 4 and RAID 5 on macOS compared to SoftRAID 7.6.
Users with Apple Silicon Macs will see further improvement with up to 50% faster PCIe write speeds.
But we didn’t forget about Windows users. Windows machines will now see speeds up to 175% faster with RAID 5 in SoftRAID 8 when formatted in NTFS. Plus, SoftRAID 8 also brings Windows customers RAID 4 along with APFS support.
SoftRAID Monitor
As we noted at the top, SoftRAID 8 places speed on the same level of importance as security and reliability. That’s why we’ve included SoftRAID Monitor in the app.
SoftRAID Monitor employs a drive health monitoring algorithm to notify you of potential drive failure up to multiple months in advance, giving you peace of mind that your drives are—and will remain—in working order.
In SoftRAID 8, SoftRAID Monitor has been improved with support for remote notifications and more array types. SoftRAID Monitor can now deliver rich email notifications with health reports and direct escalation in the event of an issue to OWC’s support team.
SoftRAID Monitor also supports SMART Data for USB enclosures (i.e. OWC Mercury) and NVMe drives (i.e. OWC ThunderBlade).
Simplified premium offering
With SoftRAID 8 we’re also pleased to introduce a new, simplified tier structure with two offerings: SoftRAID Standard and SoftRAID Premium .
SoftRAID Standard provides the RAID essentials: unrestricted access and speeds to your RAID arrays, intuitive rebuilds in case a disk fails, and updates to maintain compatibility with your operating system. Best of all, SoftRAID Standard is free to download and use.
SoftRAID Premium builds off the Standard tier with features for more demanding RAID users. These include the ability to create ultra-fast RAID volumes, enhanced SoftRAID Monitor support with proactive failure detection, and access to OWC Pro Support.
Three years of SoftRAID Premium access is bundled with OWC enclosures. SoftRAID Premium can be bought seperately for $149.99 for the first year, and $79.99 per year thereafter. Access to SoftRAID Premium is maintained with an active subscription. Customers who choose to not pay for SoftRAID Premium will default back to SoftRAID Standard—still maintaining data access, data integrity, and OS updates for their arrays.
This new pricing tier allows SoftRAID 8 to provide an improved experience with essential RAID features at no cost, while offering access to SoftRAID’s unique feature set through a paid subscription.
SoftRAID 8 is available to download today.
Thanks. Does SoftRAID performs surface scans to repair (or at least find) bad blocks-sectors on disks? Its web page does not show it. If not implemented yet, it is my strong suggestion to implement it in future versions.
Can existing and very recent new owners (like a few days old) of SoftRAID XT 7.6.1 get a free upgrade to SoftRAID 8?
Thanks!
Yes! All customers currently with an active license get a free upgrade to SoftRAID 8 Premium. Expired plans are able to upgrade to SoftRAID 8 Standard at no cost as well.
I have SoftRaid 7.6.1 that I use on two ThunderBay 4’s. When I click “Check for Updates,” it says I am up to date. If I click on the link in the article for Premium, it wants to charge me. How do I get ver 8?
Check it now! Looks like you were checking a week early :)
When I saw the announcement for SoftRAID 8 I thought WOW ! , RAID 6 finally !
I can’t believe that you introduced another major upgrade to SoftRAID without the addition of RAID 6 ! What is going on with SoftRAID !
SoftRAID 8 has major performance, health monitoring, and usability improvements (not to mention a whole new RAID level on Windows). That being said, we’ve definitely had others ask for RAID 6 as well. Thanks for the feedback!