I have three HGST NAS (4TB) drives that are floating around. I was thinking the possibility of installing two these to my workstation in mirrored RAID setup. Because I like to do weekly backups of the system disk and I don’t need this data to be in NAS and eat the storage. Having a mirrored system would add peace of mind.
Is is as easy as plugging the drives in and using BIOS to do a raid in SATA or are there some downsides to this? I think this is what is referred as software RAID if my memory serves.
Just plug the drives in and use whatever tools your operating system itself provides to do the actual RAID configuration. The one offered in the BIOS is also technically software RAID, but I would recommend avoiding it.
In Windows, setting up a mirror is quite simple, happens in the same disk management UI where you would usually format your drives and create partitions. Not 100% familiar with alternative ways since I don’t use Windows that much.
In Linux, you have many more options: ZFS, BTRFS, mdraid and possibly more. ZFS and BTRFS come with data integrity guarantees and would work well for your use case, probably.
If you are interested in this topic then I recommend taking the time and understanding the basics of all the options and the tradeoffs that you might be facing.
After exploring my options I think there are so many valid reasons to use the Freenas server with ZFS even with a single drive rather than plugging the disks locally.
I just don’t hear good stories about a software RAID.