Is it possible to have a raid10 with he M.2 expantion bay? Not that it would be worth it but is it possible? For science.
Certainly, there’s nothing special about the expansion bay, it’s just another set of M.2 slots connected over PCIe, the same as the slots in the laptop.
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How many SSDs are you going to RAID together for your RAID 10?
A coworker and I were talking about it the expansion bay, he thought it was like a raid card. That made me doubt my understanding that the expansion bay is basiy just a pcie “extender”
How many drives? In this hypothetical just the 4 internal M.2
Its not like a RAID card.
It more functionally equivalent to this, when used in a desktop PC:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Expansion-Drive-Adapter-Signal-Splitting/dp/B09C264XNP
You’d just connect the additional SSDs as normal, there is no specific raid support. You can always configure a software raid, though.
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The Ryzen 7 7040 series chipset does not support hardware/BIOS/firmware raid.
I have had a (rather disappointing) discussion on this matter (was back before the dual m.2 carrier released). Interested in a RAID 1 betwen the 2230 and 2280 for resiliency.
But since they are all directly attached anyways, you can do any form of software raid. ZFS might not be a bad start, or Storage Spaces. I have yet to test Storage Spaces vs microsoft’s dynamic disk raid.
The only concern by this point is the lack of ECC on the RAM, which is also not supported (by the Ryzen 7 series). Which make a “NAS on the go” a lot less enticing. But still technically doable.
If you ask me, I will rather do a RAID 5 on the 3 2280s, or RAIDZ1. Or “parity”.
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Why doing BIOS RAID when you can do software RAID instead?
Software RAID is far easier to manage and recover (if needed) than BIOS RAID. The overhead of software vs hardware RAID is not that much for RAID0/6/10