weirdest enclosure

[Guarana [BAWLS]]

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/starte...ith-raid-black-silver/5768710.p?skuId=5768710

A dual SATA M.2 drive enclosure, in a 2.5" drive body for internal use? Weird.....

 

[cjcox]

Why do you think this is weird? People make various converters for going from one thing to another all the time.

I mean, "640K" might enough for some, but not for others, you know?

Think about people that are upgrading from old systems that only had M.2 internal SATA, they may even have had more than one (or more than one system). And now they are moving to NVMe, but don't to toss their old M.2 SATAs and would prefer some density... etc...

 

[Maxx]

Can't be that unusual/uncommon because it uses a standard bridge chip. If I had to guess, the ASMedia ASM1092R - two device ports, one host port, RAID0/1 support.

 

[Machupo]

here's some of the 4-drive versions of this in action (though direct SATA, not bifurcated lanes)

 

[Unknown-One]

That's actually a pretty neat little device, especially for boot drives in servers or industrial equipment that don't have many drive bays and/or lack built-in RAID support.

I could totally see configuring one of these with two small SSDs, enabling its internal RAID 1, and booting pfSense, Proxmox, ESXi, etc. off of it.

 

[daglesj]

Yeah remember a lot of M.2 SATA drives are quite small (physically and sizewise and sometimes not that fast) so you could pop a couple of 32/64GB in there if you have them laying around etc.

I had at one point, a load of 32GB M.2 SATA drives kicking about from some Chromebooks I was working on.

Nice to have options.

 

[kirbyrj]

You're not going to run NVMe off it, so I don't see why this wouldn't work fine for SATA m.2 drives. Might actually be a good idea for a backup RAID 1 configuration in a single bay.