Is it possible to set up two NVMe ssd in a raid 1 fashion?

[anedjai]

Budget (including currency): at most £160

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Virtual Machines (One for gaming, Lots for programming) which will be on a Linux OS.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

M.2 SSD [Crucial P5 1TB] & Motherboard [Asus ROG B450-F Gaming II]

 

I want to get the Crucial P5  I also want to have storage for backing up everything in case something breaks or I do something irreversible (important because I'm still somewhat a noob with linux). I figure you just stick two of the P5s into the motherboard then after that I have no clue. I would be having Manjaro as my host OS then the virtual machines and really just want one SSD for regular usage and another SSD for backing up. Also, would it be better just to have one M.2 for regular usage then just get a 2.5" SSD for back-up use?

 

Is the RAID 1 with two M.2 SSDs possible and how could I go about doing it?

 

Lots of questions I know, but I've been looking all over and still end up stuck. Thank you so much for your help.

 

[Bad5ector]

RAID 1 isn't a backup. RAID anything isn't a backup. 

 

To answer your question. Yes you can RAID NVME drives. But it won't do what you are looking to do.

 

If you make a mistake on one drive, there is no going to the other drive and retrieve a backup. RAID at least will not provide you with this. RAID 1 will have the two drives act as one drive. Data copied to the RAID 1 array will be copied to both drives at the same time. If one of those drives were to fail, you could keep on working because everything would still be on the other drive. If you make a "mistake" on the RAID 1 array, ie: delete a file you didn't want to delete. It will be deleted from both drives.

[Eigenvektor]

RAID protects against hardware failure. If a disk fails, the system can continue working. It is not a backup.

 

If you want an actual backup, you need two independet drives. Then you need to copy the data from one drive to the other periodically. Ideally with some form or versioning, so you can retrieve the last n versions of each file. Ideally this is automated through software.

 

For Linux you can have a look at rsnapshot, as a simple backup solution.

[slowy]

You could for instance make an OS partition and data partition on your NVME and take regular iso snapshots of your OS partition to another hard drive. You could do it by "hand", or use a bit of a more "user friendly" tool.

 

Just make sure you test the recovery