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?

  • BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    82·
    3 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.

    • helenslunch@feddit.nlOPEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

      I couldn’t find any manuals. Nothing that referenced my questions. Thought maybe there was just a “conventional” way that these functioned.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4·
    3 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
    3·
    3 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

      • RegalPotoo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        3 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.

          • CouncilOfFriends@slrpnk.netEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

            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.

  • Altima NEO@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    3 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.

  • Paragone@lemmy.worldEnglish
    02·
    3 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·
      3 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).