SoftRAID, the venerable RAID software solution, has been updated to 5.6.4 and is now fully compatible with macOS 10.13 High Sierra and also back to OS X 10.6.8. While fully compatible with High Sierra, it does not support APFS volumes – that level of support is slated for the upcoming SoftRAID 6.0.
Besides supporting RAID 0, 1, 4, 5 and 1+0, one of the best features is the Certify feature. Certify can run multiple passes to verify that every sector on a hard drive or SSD is valid, and is one of the best ways to make sure that new and repurposed storage is safe to use. It also incorporates a Monitor extension that constantly checks disks for any signs of trouble and can even send alerts via email. SoftRAID is $179 and has a fully-functional 30-day free trial. SoftRAID Lite is also available for $49. Specific changes in this 5.6.4 release:
• Now reports the number of total bytes written for most SSDs.
• Contains a work-around for a macOS bug which caused a kernel panic every time Apple’s Disk Utility program was used to erase a SoftRAID disk. This bug was introduced in Mac OS 10.12. With this work-around, the Mac no longer kernel panics but the Disk Utility application still hangs.
• All SoftRAID DMG files are now code signed, so users can be certain the image they download from our site is an unaltered DMG file.
• Fixes a bug which caused the SoftRAID Tool to crash when volumes were unmounted or initialized using the command line interface.
