Trying to squeeze some more storage in my MiniPC. I have questions about these. These use hardward RAID with selectable modes (Individual/JBOD/RAID1/RAID2).
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If I use RAID 1 and one of the drives fails, will I know?
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If a drive fails, and a slap in a new one, will it internally begin repairing RAID 1 again?
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Can I use these as “individual” or JBOD and have 2 separate drives through the same connector, and use something like TrueNAS to software-RAID them?
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Neat, but I see it personally as the worst of both worlds, unless you have a bunch of NVMEs sitting around.
You’re going to be bottlenecked by SATA speeds, so even one NVME would be bottlenecked, let alone 2. So for me, going with a larger SATA SSD (which you could of course RAID with another) would probably get you still better speeds.
Then you have issue of it breaking. Personally, I have never had good luck with secondary board RAID items like this. They always fail after a while. The only stable raids I have seen are motherboards and SAS. Whenever I see “Make this interface into another RAID” I think of the… 5-7 failed cards sitting behind me.
M.2 is a form factor. Under that form factor it can run the NVMe or the SATA protocol.
Answered elsewhere in this thread. Yes, I’m aware, but the only real life use case is plugging in nvme drives
There are m.2 sata drives. They have a different pin layout and everything. It depends on what you want out of the QoS of your system and what bottlenecks you have.
Yeah, just then I still think it’s the worst of both worlds. You still have a single point of failure, that raid controller on that device probably can’t be ported anywhere else (at least most of the cheap controllers I’ve seen haven’t been able to, most mobo raids I’ve been able to recover), and so if you don’t have redundancy anyway, then a larger SSD is to me, the way to go. Honestly a single SSD and a nightly backup to an external would be how I’d do it if I was on a budget and only had one SATA port remaining.
Yeah thats the problem with hardware raid in general.
unless you have a bunch of NVMEs sitting around.
SATA, not NVMe.
You’re going to be bottlenecked by SATA speeds
Speed is not a concern for me.
If you don’t have a bunch of nvmes lying around that you want to use, then why not just go for a few sata drives and raid those together? You do what you like, to me that just seems like more storage for your buck
I don’t have any way to add them.
But you adding nvmes on the same slot?
No.
What are we seeing here?
Just as an uninvolved third party, I’m trying to figure out how NVMe entered this response to a question about a SATA to SATA form factor converter
Because M.2 equals NVMe in some people’s minds, I suppose
Right, mostly because the only things you plug into an m.2 slot right now are nvme drives. Which is why I’m honestly trying to figure out what OP wants. They say speed isn’t a concern just storage, so why not go for a larger SATA SSD then? Unless I’m missing something, buying this adapter to add m.2 slots would only give op a couple m.2 slots, vs just adding a sata drive itself. Honestly I don’t know what they’re trying to to do and their comments have made me more confused
My desktop has a wireless card in an m.2 slot (as do those of my wife and both children), one of my laptops has a SATA m.2 as its only drive because it only has a SATA m.2 slot, another laptop has a SATA m.2 as the scratch drive because it has one NVMe and one SATA, and “the only things you plug into an m.2 slot right now are nvme drives” is such a wild take that I’m baffled as to where it came from
so why not go for a larger SATA SSD then?
Because there’s no redundancy.
Neither is there if this controller dies… Like the other person said, my response would be “you don’t have 2 sata ports then?”. Better raid support and better capacity. Take it from my life lessons. Raid 0 is not a backup, it is barely redundant. It’s primary use is production environments where you do not want your system to go down when a drive fails.
TIL these exist. Neat.
You’re neat
JBOD relies on an optional SATA extension, which most of your controllers won’t have.
That leaves you with RAID in the controller - which is a bad idea, as you don’t have much control over what is going on, and recovery if it fails will possibly messy.
Then why does it list JBOD?
Because it does JBOD if the controller supports it. Pretty much none of the controllers you’ll find in consumer hardware support that.
What do you mean by “controller”?
The SATA controller on the motherboard. The thing you plug your SATA cable into.
- Since you mentioned that speed wasn’t a concern, I would go with software raid, which would also alleviate your concerns about 1 and 2.
I’m not saying this rudely. This sounds like a “read the manual” moment, since different vendors can have different settings.
Or at least links to the exact one you are looking at.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters NAS Network-Attached Storage NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
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Super cool. I didn’t know this existed.
If I’m not wrong these are not compatible with nvme? I remember I wanted to buy something like this but I couldn’t find PCIE to SATA, pretty sure I’m wrong but not in the mood to research
This one is SATA, yes.
Do not use one with any kind of logic. The mSATA ones are fine because they just passthough
Logic?
As in, hardware RAID is a terrible idea and should never be used. Ever.
With hardware RAID, you are moving your single point of failure from your drive to your RAID controller - when the controller fails, and they fail more often then you would expect - you are fucked, your data is gone, nice try, play again some time. In theory you could swap the controller out, but in practice it’s a coin flip if that will actually work unless you can find exactly the same model controller with exactly the same firmware manufactured in the same production line while the moon was in the same phase and even then your odds are still only 2 in 3.
Do yourself a favour, look at an external disk shelf/DAS/drive enclosure that connects over SAS and do RAID in software. Hardware RAID made sense when CPUs were hewn from granite and had clock rates measures in tens of megahertz so offloading things to dedicated silicon made things faster, but that’s not been the case this century.
OP should be looking at backup before considering RAID anyway, because RAID is not backup.
Correct, it’s not obvious when first diving in but the main use for RAID is increasing performance and availability by allowing up to a specific number of drive failures. For that to work, ideally in an enterprise you’d have a primary and secondary controller to mitigate that point of failure which is not typical for most homelabs and makes backup even more important.
