this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
99 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

45390 readers
1339 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year 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] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Then why does it list JBOD?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Because it does JBOD if the controller supports it. Pretty much none of the controllers you'll find in consumer hardware support that.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year 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] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Super cool. I didn't know this existed.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year 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.
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year 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.
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year 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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)
load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year 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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 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]

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

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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).

load more comments
view more: next ›