OWC released SoftRAID 9 on September 17, 2026, and the headline is RAID 6: for the first time, the software RAID that OWC bundles with its ThunderBay and Express enclosures can build an array that survives two simultaneous drive failures, on Windows and on macOS 27 or later. The free Standard tier stays free. Premium, which is where array creation and the new RAID 6 levels live, is $149.99 for the first year and $79.99 a year after that, as of September 29, 2026, with a 30-day trial and three years of Premium included with most OWC RAID hardware.
Last updated: October 2026. Some links below are affiliate links. Buy through them and it helps keep the site running, at no extra cost to you. Prices and requirements were read on owc.com on September 29, 2026.
What changed
Version 9 adds RAID 6 and RAID 6+ to the existing 0, 1, 4, 5 and 10. RAID 6 spreads two sets of parity across every drive in the array, so any two drives can fail, or one can fail during the rebuild of another, without data loss. RAID 6+ puts the parity on dedicated drives instead, which OWC positions for SSD arrays where concentrating the parity writes sustains higher speeds. Both levels need macOS 27 on the Mac side; on Windows they run on every version SoftRAID supports. Also new: encrypted APFS volumes now mount on a Windows machine through the built-in MacDrive layer, and SoftRAID Monitor’s predictive-failure warnings cover HDDs, SSDs and NVMe drives.
Pricing is unchanged from version 8. Standard is free and keeps existing volumes mounting, reading, writing and rebuilding. Premium is what creates or expands an array, runs the Monitor app and gets support, at $149.99 the first year and $79.99 a year after. The SoftRAID SKUs of OWC’s enclosures ship with three years of Premium in the box: on September 29 that was the Express 4M2 Ultra at $579.99, the Express 4M2 at $268.99, the ThunderBay 4 at $549.99 and the ThunderBay 8 at $799.99, diskless.
Who it is for
RAID 6 is an archive feature. A rebuild on a large array of spinning drives takes twelve to thirty hours, and a single-parity RAID 5 array has no protection during that window. A studio holding years of finished projects and raw footage on a four- or eight-bay tower is the buyer OWC describes, and for that buyer, dual parity on the enclosure they already own is worth the upgrade. On a four-bay box RAID 6 costs two drives of capacity, so a four-drive array of 24 TB disks nets 48 TB usable instead of RAID 5’s 72 TB.
What version 9 does not change is how SoftRAID gets onto a Mac. It is still a kernel extension, and on a Mac with Apple silicon that still means booting to Recovery and setting Reduced Security before the driver loads. Our Thunderbolt DAS and RAID roundup lays out why we route spinning-disk parity arrays to hardware RAID and keep SoftRAID for NVMe striping and OWC’s sealed ThunderBlade boxes. RAID 6 makes the parity math safer. It does not make the driver any less exposed to the next macOS update, and that is the trade to weigh before the $149.99.
