Best value JBOD/SPAN card for 2 SSDs?

[keke27]

Hello Everyone!

I have 2 SSDs, only one installed at the moment. That acts as my drive C, Windows 10 installed on it.

The other one has smaller capacity, and I would like to use it to expand my current system SSD.

I don't want RAID 0, current performance is perfect for me. I just want a somewhat bigger drive C.

Could you recommend me a good i/o card, preferably PCIe, that is JBOD and SATA3 capable? For a reasonable price, of course. 🙂 (I know Adaptec, it's too pricey for me.)

I make daily backups, so mirroring is not needed.

By the way, JBOD and SPAN is different in any way?

Thank you for your recommendations in advance!

Keke

 

[basroil]

The question here is WHY do you want a bigger c drive? You can easily just move files to another drive, or if you really want it you can do NTFS folder mounted volumes (use a disk as a folder within another drive)

 

[keke27]

No, that was not the question. Yes, mouted volumes is a good idea and I will use them to save large files on my existing HDDs.

But...

I do HAVE another SSD, about 70GB, fast and good. Using it as a separate drive, with a separate letter, is pointless. I think the best way to utilize it is to add its capacity to my C drive. (Perpetual rule in the Windows world: drive C can never be big enough.)

 

[basroil]

No, that was not the question. Yes, mouted volumes is a good idea and I will use them to save large files on my existing HDDs.

But...

I do HAVE another SSD, about 70GB, fast and good. Using it as a separate drive, with a separate letter, is pointless. I think the best way to utilize it is to add its capacity to my C drive. (Perpetual rule in the Windows world: drive C can never be big enough.)

The point is that your question is the wrong one for what you want to do. You are best off treating them as separate drives, it's MUCH faster that way, and more resilient too

And there is no "perpetual rule" like that, maybe it was true back in the early XP days when HDDs were 30GB and the OS took up 8 of those, but that hasn't been true in ages. In fact, windows 10 lets you save ANYTHING to other drives, not only files and win32 applications, but also UWP applications too!

 

[keke27]

I would not call it as a "solution". It may be an opinion. Running out of disk space IS still an issue today, especially in the SSD world. As I said, I have several smaller SSDs, so it was not a solution for that. I am just amazed how many answers start with "why would you want to do that"? Trust me, the asker does have a reason. Having - lets say - two volumes with 10-10 GB-s free is far worse than one block of 20 GB free, especially on a system disk.

I did find a German JBOD capable SATA 3 card for about 60 EURs (about 65 USD), from Dawicontrol. With CrystalDiskMark, some values are about 20% slower, some others about equal to the ones connected directly to the motherboard. Not bad for the price. The main problem is that the card is not UEFI compliant, this affects boot times significantly. So this IS the solution, with a tradeoff, I admit.

Thank you.

 

[keke27]

In addition, I don't know why "the solution" would be more resilient. It is not.

If you are backed up regularly, it does not matter how you use your drives, separately or joined in any way (JBOD or Windows, even as a system volume).

My little advice to everybody is to avoid RAID 1 (that I used for many years), as daily backups are far better, they run unnocieably in the background and protect you against scenarios that RAID would never do.