Best RAID solution for Deskmini Windows box?

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Hi all, signed up to ask about setting up redundancy in my Windows homelab. I like hardware and software scares me, so the videos about hardware RAID being bad stresses me out.

I have a Deskmini X300 running Windows set up as a homelab/NAS that I remote into for small light batch tasks, like sorting old photos and backups on it and other network drives. Long story short, I like dialing into something physical, it’s easier than learning Linux and new tools, and it’s easy to set up for light gaming when I’m home.

It has one 4TB SATA SSD and I want to add another for redundancy. This is a setup Wendell has mentioned but I assume he’d run Linux.

  1. What is the most reliable redundancy solution in my case with Windows - X300’s motherboard RAID (1), Storage Spaces (mirroring), or SnapRAID? Or are the differences too small to matter for personal use? I’ve also heard of StableBit.

  2. Same question if I were to add a third 4TB SDD in the open NVME slot, for a total of 3 4TB SSDs?

  3. What Windows software should I look at to occasionally back this X300 onto my unRAID NAS?

Thanks in advance. Really enjoy listening to y’all talk about tech that’s just beyond my understanding.

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Welcome to the forums!

I would recommend checking out windows storage spaces:

Overall it’s worked well for me at work and when I was using it at home. But make sure it’s meets your needs before using it. But I believe it would do everything you’d want.

  1. Snapraid is good and probably fine for you use case and I think RAID1 would work as well. I unfortunately haven’t used StableBit so can’t really provide much direction on that.

  2. I would use snapraid with mergerFS to accomplish adding drives as needed and would probably be the best solution. I would check out this article:Combining Different Sized Drives with mergerfs and SnapRAID - Self Hosted Home and see if it will provide the features that you need. Storage spaces will also support this and would probably be easier.

  3. You have a few different option for backing up to unRAID, but simplest would probably be something like syncthing or you could use windows built in tools to back up to unRAID.(here is a video on how to set it up with unRAID: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bwrd7dHjqs)