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?
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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.
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.
Yeah thats the problem with hardware raid in general.
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
Exactly
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
Because M.2 equals NVMe in some people’s minds, I suppose
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
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
so why not go for a larger SATA SSD then?
Because there’s no redundancy.
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.
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.
I don’t have any way to add them.
But you adding nvmes on the same slot?
M.2 is a form factor. Under that form factor it can run the NVMe or the SATA protocol.
No.
What are we seeing here?
This is a SATA/M.2 to SATA/2.5" adapter. No NVMe.
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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.
also nvme drives get HOT, and sticking em together in an enclosure with no heatsink or fan would probably have thermal throttle under load.
TIL these exist. Neat.
You’re neat
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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.
Then why does it list JBOD?
Because it does JBOD if the controller supports it. Pretty much none of the controllers you’ll find in consumer hardware support that.
What do you mean by “controller”?
The SATA controller on the motherboard. The thing you plug your SATA cable into.
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.
That’s cool that it has a utility but how would I even access that on a server? And how would I be notified if there was a problem?
External backup is not a possibility.
- 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.
- Very likely no (but maybe some SMART data?)
- Probably only if it is the identical model, but depends on the the exact implementation I guess
- Probably if it claims to support them as individual drives, but you will be still limited to the speed of a single SATA3 connection.
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
This one is SATA, yes.
What I mean is that I’m not sure there are adapters from PCIE the interface nvme drive use to SATA. If I’m not mistaken they don’t work with nvme 4.0
There is no NVMe in this device. It’s all SATA. The M.2 drives are SATA
Ahh, seems I have misunderstood what you said. I suppose it could work
No worries m8
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I have not. It seems M.2 SATA drives would be better than SD cards, no?
How would I go about using SD cards?
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
Gotcha. I missed that one. :)
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.
Then there’s no redundancy
Do not use one with any kind of logic. The mSATA ones are fine because they just passthough
Logic?
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.
I see that you, too, bear scars of RAIDs.
OP should be looking at backup before considering RAID anyway, because RAID is not backup.
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.
Okay well it has non-RAID modes as well…
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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]
Question, where did you find these?
Amazon. QNAP and StarTech Make them.
Why not ask QNAP or StarTech support about how they operate then?
Seriously? When was the last time you tried to use customer support for absolutely anything? There’s no such thing anymore.
The last time I used customer support was asking an aliexpress seller the size of a DC jack on their product, and they answered my question (in broken english) with exactly the information I was looking for.
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
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).
