I’m looking for an external USB case that has 2x M.2 NVMe slots and can do RAID1, with a USB 3.2 20 Gbits connection to the PC (I’d even be happy if it’s just 10 Gbit’s).
Basically, I just want to have a simple fast external SSD with automatic mirroring, because I like to have the security that a drive failure doesn’t mean I have to restore 4 TB from my cloud backup, swapping a broken drive is much quicker.
So that likely is not a good choice. Do you have any recommendations for something like this?
I have an equivalent of this as a SATA SSD version already from IcyBox (https://icybox.de/product/externe_speicherloesungen/IB-RD2253-C31), and that works well, but it really feels like a waste of performance to still buy SATA SSDs when M.2 NVMe SSDs cost just as much per TB, and are way, way faster.
Yeah, not much at gen 2x2, particularly if you want hardware RAID. While I get hit for the Unitek Solidforce I’m not finding other JMS586A or JMS586U implementations. The lack of ASM2364 duals suggests it doesn’t support x2/x2 bifurcation.
Orico, Sabrent, StarTech, Yottamaster, a sanctions violating brand, and a bunch of Maiwo equivalents all offer dual USB 10 Gb.
FWIW, the solution I’ve used for the past decade and some is just to have two USB storage devices, backing one up to the other. Not as elegant but it works fine.
Thanks! As far as I understand, that “Offline Clone” means I’d have to remember to press the “Clone” button manually like once a day? That’s not very convenient, I’d really like something that just works automatically.
Orico, Sabrent, StarTech, Yottamaster, a sanctions violating brand, and a bunch of Maiwo equivalents all offer dual USB 10 Gb.
Do you mean those have dual M.2 with RAID1, or also just dual M.2 with an “offline clone” feature?
I would be fine with just having 10 Gbits speed, as that would still be significantly faster than SATA SSDs, especially in IOPS I assume. But it should be some proper automatic hardware RAID1.
Bump, anyone has any ideas? I’m still looking for this and still have not found anything…
M.2 drives are actually quite a bit cheaper per TB now than SATA drives, so having to buy the more expensive, much slower SATA drives just because there is no external RAID1 enclosure available for M.2 really would be sad…
@Tystros, I think you will find that the proper M.2 drives for raid and backup are still costly, which means that M.2 drives made for raid and backups are expensive. Right now, the most cost-effective per TB are Hard disks, and they will remain so for the foreseeable future.
I did find this too, but I think this is a rebranded version of the chinese product I linked in the first post, it looks pretty identical except for some small details:
