Question 1

If you put 2 m.2 drives in this, will it treat them like separate hard drives in your system, or merge them into 1 like a raid? And do both m.2 drives in each slot need to be exactly the same, or can you mix them up with different brands or sizes?

Accepted Answer

I put two identical drives and configured as RAID 1. You should only use dissimilar sized drives for RAID 0. Windows recognizes only one drive the same size as each individual drive. It would have been nice of StarTeam to provide a utility to examine health of each drive. Other RAID enclosures have included them.

Question 2

Does this support a single m.2 drive in JBOD mode and allow expansion to to 2 drives later if an additional drive is purchased?

Accepted Answer

YES IT WILL HANDLE SINGLE M.2 IN JBOD BUT IF THAT'S ALL YOU WANT STARTECH HAS A MUCH CHEAPER ADAPTER THAN WORKS WITH ONE M.2

I USE MINE IN RAID1 MODE WITH TWO 500GB M.2

Question 3

If one of the m.2 drives fails in a mirrored RAID, how will I know to replace it? Can the adapter report this via SMART status? Or will I have to periodically check the drive physically for a light?

Accepted Answer

The adapter has two LED indicators for drive error, which will inform you if one of the M.2 drives fails.

Question 4

If I use this adapter to Raid0 2 SSDs, will they be limited by the Sata III bandwith of 6Gbps (600Mbps) or will I get transfer speeds of 1000+ Mbps? (depending on the ssd of course)

Accepted Answer

You should the higher speed with raid depending on your mb. Also I believe that the adapter shown is a b key. Some m.2s are b key and some are m key

Question 5

Does this card support the Hynix  PCIe Gen3 x 4 PC300 NVMe 1TB drives?
Is the RAID 0, 1, 10 - Software or Hardware?

Accepted Answer

I am not sure but expect that it would,  at maximum speed of sata 3. It's actually a pretty simple piece of hardware,  I put a crucial ssd 512gb in one slot so that I still have a future ssd upgrade option,  worked faster than the muskin striker 512 gb sata 3 that I was using before.  I ran benchmark tests and it was 15% faster or more.  My memory isn't exact on this but definitely at least that much difference,  but it is how simple that it was to setup that makes me think it would work, possibly not at top speed depending on bios and other factors. Sorry but that's the best I can do on this.

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