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. Creating an array, including the new RAID 6 levels, takes Premium, which costs $149.99 for the first year and $79.99 a year after that. There is a 30-day trial, and most OWC RAID hardware comes with three years of Premium included.
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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. Version 9 also lets encrypted APFS volumes mount on a Windows machine through the built-in MacDrive layer, and SoftRAID Monitor’s predictive-failure warnings now cover HDDs, SSDs and NVMe drives.
Pricing is unchanged from version 8. Standard is free, and it keeps existing volumes mounting, reading, writing and rebuilding, so an array you already have keeps working without a payment. You need Premium to create or expand an array, run the Monitor app or get support, and it costs $149.99 the first year and $79.99 a year after. Buying the hardware is the other way in, because the SoftRAID SKUs of OWC’s enclosures ship with three years of Premium in the box. Diskless, the Express 4M2 Ultra is $579.99 and the Express 4M2 is $268.99. The ThunderBay 4 is $549.99 and the ThunderBay 8 is $799.99.
Who it is for
RAID 6 is for archives, because the risk it removes is the rebuild. 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. The buyer OWC describes is a studio holding years of finished projects and raw footage on a four- or eight-bay tower, and for that studio, dual parity on the enclosure it already owns is worth the upgrade. You pay for it in capacity. On a four-bay box RAID 6 costs two drives. A four-drive array of 24 TB disks nets 48 TB usable, where RAID 5 would give 72 TB.
What version 9 does not change is how SoftRAID gets onto a Mac. SoftRAID 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, but the driver is just as exposed to the next macOS update as it was, and that is the trade to weigh before paying the $149.99.
