Mix NMVE drive brands(2 brands) in RAID card?

Flame Hardware Questions
1

Hey All,

I need to replace 2 nvme’s in one of my 4-drive OWC Accelsior 4M2 raid cards.

  • Softraid is giving a “Disk failure predicted” warning for the 2 drives. Drives are Samsung 980 PRO 2TB

The question, is it ok to mix NMVE drive brands in a RAID card running RAID-0?
Not sure why it wouldn’t be if they are both fast and have internal memory.

I ask as I’m in Chile at the moment and the 980 PRO’s are harder to come by and far more expensive then in the US. I originally was going to buy a couple backups before we left but…

Any opinions on the Western Digital Black 2tb Sn850x nvme?

The drives are under Manufacturer Warranty so going to contact them next. Anyone replaced drives with Samsung under warranty before?

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2

No takers?
fyi the great Internet says, “Terrible idea, manufacturing batches yes, different brands No”, to also, “Yes this best way to avoid multi drive failure at the same time”.

3

Never crossed the streams myself. I am curious on your experience with SoftRAID management. It created more issues than it solved for me, and I’ve given up on it entirely. Has it gotten any better?

4

Frequently, the advice to source heterogeneous drives extends as far as same brand, possibly different fab, possibly different country, most likely different local vendors, and to check the serial numbers when purchasing.

In practice, it’s usually better to buy more than you need and keep X number of spares in the safe.

Mixing brand, model, manufacturing date, vendor, and underlying technology may cause more problems than it solves. Technology moves right along, memory controllers, storage controllers, photolithographic techniques, blah blah blah.

One thing to consider is that Samsung Pro devices usually come with a 5 year warranty.

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5

ZFS is less fussy about device homogeneity at the cost of assuming lowest common denominator size and performance characteristics.

APFS is also supposed to not be fussy about mixing devices but my long distant experience of APFS snapshotting was uncontrollable and opaque.

You could also clench the unpinned hand grenade of BTRFS if there’s nothing left to live for.

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6

And for the price of a Starbucks and a Big Mac you can pick up Patriot 2TB NVMe sticks on ebay:

$100

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7

Great deals… just be aware it is PCI gen3.

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8

So far I haven;t experienced any issues since I started using it for the RAID cards in 2021. Have had good support from OWC which is getting rare now days.

The new version of Softraid is what alerted me to the two drives and Samsung Magician is basically useless on a Mac. The UI for it still looks like it’s a Windows 10 app, So they didil;t even bother to change that.

The SoftRAID pricing regime is not so great though .

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9

Yeah I guess that answers that, lol
Indeed mine are still under the Warranty. I need to replace the drives then ship the faulty ones back to the US, then claim the warranty. Seems that they send a prepaid box for you to send the stove back in.

10

Yeah when I tried it a couple months back Open ZFS was to unstable on my Mac unfortunately.

11

And you did give it a fair crack of the whip so props to you for that.
Everyone’s mileage varies.
My preference for ZFS is copy on write drives that mount on linux, macos and windows, so if my prehistoric linux box nosedives I can hook my raid up to anything in the house that powers on.
Other poeple have different strategies.

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