#│forum
Hardware RAID 1 support via a mini pci-e card
# │forum
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clearloop
08/08/2023, 1:27 PMHi does anybody have any experience with an extension mini pci-e card that provides hardware RAID 1 SATA support? If so what card can you recommend? My goal is to create a data drive that is highly reliable (by having a copy of the data on the second drive). Want to manage the risk of drive failure.
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_dhanos_
08/08/2023, 1:36 PMThere are cards based on ASM1061R, but they're more problematic than helpful. A chip in a Mini PCIe card is not going to be this powerful to provide reliable and fast hardware RAID.
Also, RAID 0 actually is less reliable than a single disk. Did you mean RAID 1?
I would suggest software RAID in this case. Neither RAID 0 nor RAID 1 needs to calculate parity which means software RAID will work as well and the benefit is if the controller dies, you can connect the drives to any other machine and still access the data without a need to buy the same controller card again.
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clearloop
08/08/2023, 3:45 PMAh, yes… I meant RAID 1 (exact data copy).
@_dhanos_ thanks. Would software RAID not be a big hit on the raspberry pi from a performance perspective?
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_dhanos_
08/08/2023, 3:48 PMRAID 1 does not have to calculate the parity., so no. Even with parity, and I tested 5 HDDs in RAID5 (1 parity drive), I was able to saturate the 1Gb/s network connection without issues.
You have a SATA controller connected to the Node 3. You can check on your own 🙂
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clearloop
08/08/2023, 4:43 PMThanks, I’ll give it a test run.