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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.