What happens when my SoftRAID Premium subscription expires?

The short answer: your data is completely safe and your volumes keep working.

When your Premium subscription expires, SoftRAID automatically reverts to SoftRAID Standard. Nothing happens to your drives, your volumes, or your files. You will retain full read and write access to all your data.

What keeps working

• Your SoftRAID volumes continue to mount and work normally
• You can read and write files as usual
• SoftRAID launches and you can inspect your volumes and drives
• You can initialize a disk, add a disk to a volume, or remove a disk from a volume

What stops working

When SoftRAID reverts to Standard, the following Premium features are no longer active:

• SMART monitoring and health alerts — SoftRAID will no longer warn you if a drive is showing signs of failure
• Creating new volumes or deleting existing volumes
• Email notifications
• Premium technical support — support moves to the community forum at https://forums.softraid.com/

The most important thing to know

SMART monitoring stops when Premium expires. This means SoftRAID will no longer alert you to a failing drive. If a drive fails in a redundant volume (RAID 1, 4, 5, or 1+0), the volume will continue to work and you can still rebuild — but you won’t know it’s degraded until you open SoftRAID manually, and you won’t receive any health alerts.

If you let your subscription lapse, check your volume status manually when you next open SoftRAID, and renew promptly if any drive issues are shown.

Renewing Premium

You can renew at any time, but renew before your subscription expires or within 60 days of expiry to keep your renewal pricing. After 60 days, your license expires permanently, and you will need to purchase a new license at the full $149 starting price.

Once you renew and enter your new serial number, all Premium features are restored immediately.

Renew here on the OWC Software store.

What if I decide not to renew?

SoftRAID Standard is free and your data remains fully accessible. If you want to continue managing your volumes — creating new volumes, rebuilding after a drive failure, monitoring drive health — Premium is required. Standard is best suited for users who have finished setting up their storage and simply need their existing volumes to keep working.