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Thoughts on these SATA/M.2-->SATA/2.5" adapters? (feddit.nl)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

51 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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).

If I use RAID 1 and one of the drives fails, will I know?
If a drive fails, and a slap in a new one, will it internally begin repairing RAID 1 again?
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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[–] [email protected] 38 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (4 children)

M.2 is a form factor. Under that form factor it can run the NVMe or the SATA protocol.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 months ago (1 children)

TIL these exist. Neat.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Super cool. I didn't know this existed.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (9 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Do not use one with any kind of logic. The mSATA ones are fine because they just passthough

[+] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

I see that you, too, bear scars of RAIDs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

OP should be looking at backup before considering RAID anyway, because RAID is not backup.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 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]

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