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?
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.
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 speed isn’t the concern I would use Sata drives. They are cheaper anyway
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
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
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.
TIL these exist. 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.
Because it does JBOD if the controller supports it. Pretty much none of the controllers you’ll find in consumer hardware support that.
Super cool. I didn’t know this existed.
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.
I couldn’t find any manuals. Nothing that referenced my questions. Thought maybe there was just a “conventional” way that these functioned.
https://www.qnap.com/en/product/qda-a2mar seems to be the one in your image. From the users guide it seems it does everything you listed. The prices I’ve seen are about 100 € / $ though plus the two SSDs you need, personally I’d invest in external backup instead, that covers more data loss scenarios than this adapter.
