External dual M.2 NVMe in a RAID1 array

Hardware Hub Storage
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I’m trying to make it easier for my wife to back up her photos of our tiny humans from her iPhone.

As such, is anybody aware of an external M.2 NVMe SSD enclosure where I can put two drives in and then put the pair of drives into a RAID1 array and connect it to my wife’s MacBook air over USB-A or USB-C?

Thanks.

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If you want hardware RAID Akitio makes some but they only have SATA SSD versions, if you are fine with software RAID Sabrent has dual NVMe enclosure.

Few words of caution tho:

  • If you have RAID 1 it protects from drive failure but if controller dies you may be SOL if they have some bullcrap proprietary RAID and they don’t have the same model in 2 years when yours breaks
  • No amount of RAID will protect you if you get ransomware/malware while the disk is connected - both will get nuked
  • No amount of RAID will protect you if your laptop decides to blow it up with high voltage. You’d thinks it’s unlikely but Louis Rossman talks about Apple laptops shorting some crappy component to ground and pushing 12V to NVMe. Who is to say it won’t do it to USB?

Look, the point is both your laptop and drive enclosure can destroy old backups for variety of reasons and there is no guarantee it won’t happen at the same time.

Depending on your budget I would:

  1. Pay Apple for cloud storage
  2. Go with 2 USB-C SSDs from two different manufacturers (see SanDisk if you think I’m paranoid) and rotate them on a weakly basis.
  3. Go with 3 USB SSDs in Tower of Hanoi scheme
  4. Go full NAS that can protect your old backups with snapshots
  5. Go with NAS → offsite NAS or NAS → Encrypt → Cloud that can protect from flood, fire, lightning, tornado… you name it

When initial backup is done, do you really need NVMe level performance?

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Thank you for that awesome reply!

Few things that I am going to address here:

  1. re: RAID controller
    I was only planning on using RAID1 so that my wife, who is NOT technologically inclined, can plug ONE device in, and it will be done.

  2. re: ransomware/malware
    This is true for any storage setup, RAID or otherwise.

  3. re: NVMe overvolt
    That’s not really a RAID issue.

(Also presumably, this can happen to ANY external storage device, regardless of drive interface.)

  1. re: Pay Apple for cloud storage
    I want to keep the data local. To the points you raised above, internet can die. LAN is less likely. (It’s died ONCE, as a result of a power outage, in 8 years.)

  2. re: Go with 2 USB-C SSDs from two different manufacturers
    Was thinking of getting an external NVMe RAID enclosure and installing two Sabrent Rocket NVMe 1 TB SSDs in it (because I already have the SSDs and three years later, I still haven’t even opened the box).

Also, I don’t have enough USB-C ports as it is.

  1. re: NAS
    I already have multiple NAS systems at home actually. The problem is that backing up 128 GB of pictures (my wife filled her phone with pictures of our tiny humans), and right now, backup jobs run VERY slowly over WiFi. (Not for a lack of bandwidth. I have no idea what Photos is doing on MacOS, but exporting them to Photoprism over WebDAV is RIDICULOUSLY slow. (It’s 6% complete (for 160 GB) after 3 days.)

  2. re: NVMe speed
    Again, I’m just using hardware that I’ve already purchased years ago that I’m not using for anything else.

To backup pictures – there might be something that can be said about the 4 kiB random I/O/s being potentially useful here rather than STR.

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Sabrent thing runs two drives on a single Thunderbolt 3 cable, so Disk Utility and strap it to RAID 1 then?

Actually, how old is the MacBook? Does it have Thunderbolt 3? If not they have USB3.2 version. Still no onboard RAID.

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Think about it… I have no idea how will software RAID work if it gets suddenly disconnected by accident - will it be graceful or will it crash and burn.

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Thank you.

It’s a 2018 MacBook Air so it has 2 Thunderbolt 3 ports via USB-C.

Yeah, I saw that.

Depends on how well and/or how fault tolerant the way that macOS software RAID works (or doesn’t work).

Or, perhaps, more importantly – what tools does Apple make available such that if the software RAID1 crashed and burned – how easy or how difficult will it be to recover from it, IF it can be recovered at all.

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Hey, since you plan on using RAID 1, and Sabrent thing uses one cabe for two independent drives you could basically get RAID-ish™ setup if you use the drives as two separate Time Machine targets. Additional benefit is not worrying what happens if it disconnects by accident and you can recover using any NVMe to USB adapter, even with just one SSD.

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…basically…

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You can try “Orico - RAID Dual Bay”. I did bought this device, but i use it in raid 0 but it can do raid 1. It work with 2 nvme.

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I’ll look into that.

Thank you.

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