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
    403·
    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
            21·
            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.

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
        63·
        7 months ago

        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

        • mbfalzar@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          71·
          7 months ago

          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

            • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
              14·
              7 months ago

              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

              • mbfalzar@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                2·
                7 months ago

                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

                • accideath@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  3·
                  7 months ago

                  Which is fair, I suppose, if you really only have one SATA port left. Then a RAID 1 through that device might work well enough. Wouldn’t be my first choice though… and definitely not for RAID 0. Not that RAID 0 should be anyone’s first choice, nowadays.

                • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
                  13·
                  7 months ago

                  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.

    • 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.

  • aard@kyu.deEnglish
    13·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    102·
    7 months ago

    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.

  • mathers@l.mathers.frEnglish
    6·
    7 months ago
    1. 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.
  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    5·
    7 months ago
    1. Very likely no (but maybe some SMART data?)
    2. Probably only if it is the identical model, but depends on the the exact implementation I guess
    3. Probably if it claims to support them as individual drives, but you will be still limited to the speed of a single SATA3 connection.
  • Hiro8811@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    7 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·
      7 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·
        7 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
          1·
          7 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.

            • bassomitron@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              7 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?

  • Altima NEO@lemmy.zipEnglish
    3·
    7 months ago

    I cant see these being great if all youre doing is trying to add more storage. For one, raid is already not terribly great, and on some unknown hardware like this, who knows?

    If all you needed was storage, youd be better off getting an actual 2.5" drive in the highest capacity you can find, and it will still likely be cheaper thank a bunch of M.2 and perform better too.

      • RegalPotoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        7 months ago

        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.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    21·
    7 months ago

    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

    [Thread #660 for this sub, first seen 6th Apr 2024, 21:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    7 months ago

    IF JBOD, && Linux, THEN yes you can know, through SMARTTOOLS, or something like that…

    However, I can’t imagine how you’d get 2 separate PCIe

    ( presuming NVMe devices …

    … no, this thing must be presuming SATA, NOT NVMe …

    even in SATA, there’s no bifurcator for SATA, I don’t think:

    SAS has expanders, which can take a single SAS channel & attach something like 128 SAS devices onto it,

    PCIe has some kind of equivalent, and there is a PCIe card which crams loads of NVMe’s into it, out in the last year, but SATA??

    Hmm… )

    shrug

    • 1Fuji2Taka3Nasubi@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      7 months ago

      The equivalent of SAS expanders for SATA are called port multipliers, and the JMS562 chip in the picture can act as one (as well as becoming a sort of RAID controller).