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?

  • Hiro8811@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    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

    • Ebby@lemmy.ssba.comEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      IIR there are 2 versions, one using SATA protocol and the other using PCIe. The difference is keyed into cutouts between pins.

      I’m not entirely sure what the benefit of this setup would be over 2 independent SSD’s since one drive will max out the connection speed and 2 can use 2 ports.

      I’ve had a 2x SATA-based m.2 RAID card that plugged into PCIe for a boost in speed ages ago. It was fun, but I swapped it out for true PCIe based m.2.

      • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        I think their goal is to minimize space since it’s a mini-pc, so they don’t have 2 slots to spare but still want 2 drives? That’s how I interpreted it, at least.

        • Ebby@lemmy.ssba.comEnglish
          0·
          9 months ago

          Ahh good point.

          Heat may be an issue if it is very cramped, but could work. Letting the motherboard handle raid would be better, but add one heck of a bottleneck. I’m still leaning towards one large SSD or perhaps external storage.

          A video archive on external would work fine for a couple users, but sharing disk bandwidth with the system would suck pretty fast.

          • helenslunch@feddit.nlOPEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            Heat may be an issue if it is very cramped

            There is a fan for the SSD.

            I’m still leaning towards one large SSD

            Then there’s no redundancy.

            or perhaps external storage.

            I have no way to add external storage. It’s my understanding that USB storage does not work well.

            • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              9 months ago

              Have you considered SD card(s) as your redundancy? They’re not great/ideal, but microSD are incredibly small. Or this may be a good use case for a local NAS placed somewhere else in your home that your PC backs up to nightly?

              • helenslunch@feddit.nlOPEnglish
                1·
                9 months ago

                I have not. It seems M.2 SATA drives would be better than SD cards, no?

                How would I go about using SD cards?

      • helenslunch@feddit.nlOPEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        I’m not entirely sure what the benefit of this setup would be over 2 independent SSD’s

        The benefit is that I don’t have anywhere to connect 2 SSDs, much less M.2