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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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.
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