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).

  1. If I use RAID 1 and one of the drives fails, will I know?

  2. If a drive fails, and a slap in a new one, will it internally begin repairing RAID 1 again?

  3. 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?

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    383·
    7 months ago

    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.

    • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      7 months ago

      M.2 is a form factor. Under that form factor it can run the NVMe or the SATA protocol.

        • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
          5·
          7 months ago

          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.

          • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
            2·
            7 months ago

            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.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      61·
      7 months ago

      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.

    • Shimitar@feddit.itEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      You fan pretty effective software raid with Linux built in drivers. No need for hardware raid, specially not cheapo ones…

      Running Linux software raid for 20+ years with zero issues… Currently on USB3 and USB-C disks, but in the past all kind of mixed solutions (ide/sata/esata/USB/FireWire…).

      Speed is not a big issue in my experience if you consume your media over network anyway.

    • bonus_crab@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      also nvme drives get HOT, and sticking em together in an enclosure with no heatsink or fan would probably have thermal throttle under load.