Question nvme to nvme raid controller?

[ouroborus]

I've been looking around for a RAID controller that plugs into an NVME slot, hosts NVME drives, and is bootable but haven't found anything (at all, let alone bootable). Has anybody seen something like this?

 

[CountMike]

I've been looking around for a RAID controller that plugs into an NVME slot, hosts NVME drives, and is bootable but haven't found anything (at all, let alone bootable). Has anybody seen something like this?

M.2 NVME slots do not support multiple drives, look for PCIe x16 to multiple M.2 adapters.

 

[ouroborus]

M.2 NVME slots do not support multiple drives, look for PCIe x16 to multiple M.2 adapters.

An NVME slot doesn't have to support multiple drives for this to work. One of the features of a RAID controller is making multiple drives look like one drive.

 

[CountMike]

An NVME slot doesn't have to support multiple drives for this to work. One of the features of a RAID controller is making multiple drives look like one drive.

That's just some types of RAID but M.2 slot is actually a a micro PCIe x4 slot and has only 4 PCIE lines which a single NVME drive needs for full speed. RAID is just collection of individual drives in different configurations. I suppose you want RAID 0 which makes no practical sense with NVME drives. RAID 0 was useful for slow mechanical HDDs to speed them up as it makes drives work as one but with total number of platters and heads to do multiple reads and writes at same time. It doesn't speed up individual drives. If you use 2 or 4 NVMe SSDs on same PCIe x4 bus, speed drops by 2-4 times, negating RAID 0 usefulness. If you want just to make it to look just as one single drive capacity, there are SW solutions that can do that without losing any performance.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I've been looking around for a RAID controller that plugs into an NVME slot, hosts NVME drives
Has anybody seen something like this?

How exactly do you imagine connecting multiple NVME drives to a single M.2 slot?

Closest I could find with similar functionality would be Konyead 3003K
But that is PCIE x8 adapter.

https://www.amazon.com/stores/KONYEAD/page/3ECC9942-361E-4781-922D-7757340F526C?ref_=ast_bln

 

[ouroborus]

That's just some types of RAID but M.2 slot is actually a a micro PCIe x4 slot and has only 4 PCIE lines which a single NVME drive needs for full speed. [...]

I understand that I would be sacrificing speed. I want the mirroring of RAID 1 but I don't necessarily need the increased speed RAID 1 could offer.

How exactly do you imagine connecting multiple NVME drives to a single M.2 slot?

There are adapters that convert m.2 sockets to PCIe sockets. They look to be basically socket adapters, there doesn't seem to be an IC involved. From what other info I've been able to find, NVME is just PCIe with a different socket.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805713824772.html
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07YDH8KW9

Combine that with the more common PCIe RAID cards that have m.2 sockets, and you have an NVME RAID that plugs into an NVME slot.

So I was hoping to find the equivalent all-in-one solution.

 

[USAFRet]

Why "RAID 1"?
What function do you want it to provide?

 

[ouroborus]

Why "RAID 1"?
What function do you want it to provide?

Doesn't really matter in the context of the question. I'd just like to know about any NVME-to-NVME RAID controller cards.

But, I'm interested in the mirroring of RAID 1 for uptime rather than speed. Trying to recover from a hardware failure using a backup with today's data sizes takes days. With RAID 1, I could "just" pop in a new drive and continue even while it's repairing the mirror. Also, I could boot off of hardware raid (at least, with Windows. Linux would probably let me boot from software raid).