How does SoftRAID determine how many hours a disk has been used?

SoftRAID tracks disk usage hours through two methods, depending on whether your disk supports SMART monitoring.

Disks with SMART support

For most modern disks, SoftRAID uses the disk’s built-in SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) system to query the power-on hours counter maintained by the disk’s firmware. This provides an accurate lifetime usage count for the drive.

SMART is supported on:

• Thunderbolt-connected drives
• SATA drives
• SAS drives (enterprise)
• Fibre Channel drives
• Most USB drives (requires macOS Tahoe/26.x with SoftRAID Premium)

To check if your disk supports SMART: Open the SoftRAID application and expand the disk tile. If the disk does not support SMART, you’ll see “SMART status: test unavailable.”

Disks without SMART support

For disks that don’t support SMART monitoring, the SoftRAID driver maintains its own power-on hours counter. This counter:

• Updates automatically when your Mac shuts down or when volumes are unmounted
• Is stored directly on the disk itself (not on your Mac)
• Remains valid if you move the disk to a different Mac
• Is preserved even if you reinitialize the disk with SoftRAID

This ensures accurate usage tracking across the disk lifetime, regardless of which Mac it’s connected to.