Going kind of crazy thinking about the options. I’m ultimately trying to get a stable media server running on my 4B (no transcoding) and I think I’m having power issues.
I had an externally powered NVMe enclosure but I stopped using it mainly because the enclosure wouldn’t turn itself back on after a power surge. I switched to a 2.5 SSD with an unpowered adapter cable but occasionally the drive gets disconnected (guessing it’s power issues). I would like to use the NVMe drives since I can easily fit the SSD into my desktop (ran out of NVMe slots). It would also be good if I had a solution that supported hardware RAID 1.
You don’t want hardware raid. Add a powered (by a wall power supply) USB hub. If you want to keep using NVMe drives and mirror them, use ZFS for that. If you’d like to get more storage, get a USB direct attached storage (DAS) box like the ones from Terramaster and stick some disks in it. Those don’t need powered USB hub since they have that built-in. You’d still use ZFS to get your redundancy between disks. Later you can move the box to a different Pi or another computer.
This is a hone media server, that will stream TV shows at a few megabits/sec? Is super fast transfer important for that? I would have expected to use an externally powered SATA hard drive, for capacity and economy.
