Raid 1 M.2 NVME SSDs

[Acans]

Hi there,

 

I setup a Raid 1 of my two M.2 NVME drives in my BIOS and it's showing in there successfully created, however when I boot into unraid, it shows them as two seperate unassigned drives.

 

Is there thing I need to do in unraid as well? I was planning on using Raid 1 on those SSD's for VM's.

[JonathanM]

2 minutes ago, Acans said:

Hi there,

 

I setup a Raid 1 of my two M.2 NVME drives in my BIOS and it's showing in there successfully created, however when I boot into unraid, it shows them as two seperate unassigned drives.

 

Is there thing I need to do in unraid as well? I was planning on using Raid 1 on those SSD's for VM's.

Unraid doesn't support BIOS software based RAID, but you can create a pool and add both devices to it and they will be set up with BTRFS RAID1.

[Acans]

Thanks for the above info!

 

I assume I’ll need to go back to the BIOS and undo the RAID 1 there before I setup what you advised.

 

If so I’ll wait until the morning as unRaid’s still got 8 hours for setting up Parity.

[JonathanM]

33 minutes ago, Acans said:

Thanks for the above info!

 

I assume I’ll need to go back to the BIOS and undo the RAID 1 there before I setup what you advised.

 

If so I’ll wait until the morning as unRaid’s still got 8 hours for setting up Parity.

No experience with that exact scenario, but my gut feeling is that Unraid will happily set up whatever you tell it to, the only issue would be that the motherboard may try to manipulate the disks and undo what unraid has done.

 

Since it's a new setup with zero data to lose, now is the ideal time to perform the experiment if you want. Just be prepared to redo it in Unraid after you reboot if removing the disks from the BIOS RAID does mess it up.

 

If I were you, I'd take the opportunity to learn. Set up the pool, confirm it's working, check the BTRFS stats and info on it, reboot and remove the disks from the BIOS RAID, and do a btrfs file system check after you boot back into Unraid. It's good to know how to keep up with the health of a BTRFS RAID volume on Unraid anyway, currently the stock setup isn't as thorough with BTRFS health checks as it should be.

[JonathanM]

If you click on one of the devices in the pool, it will take you to a page with some tools to do a BTRFS scrub, and list some stats.

Here is a link for extended monitoring options.

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/46802-faq-for-unraid-v6/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-700582

 

[Acans]

I thought they were added to the pool correctly but they weren't formatted before I disabled the RAID in BIOS.

 

So I'm unsure if it would have made a difference. Anways after realising that, I added both to the pool as you adivsed and formatted and they are working great now.