SATA and NVMe in one mirror?

[marekm]

To save the few onboard SATA ports in a Dell PowerEdge T130, I'm considering to use this adapter:

https://allegro.pl/oferta/adapter-nvme-msata-ssd-m-2-ngff-do-pci-e-3-0-x16-10868370528

which accepts up to 3 SSDs, each one different: M.2 PCIe NVMe, M.2 SATA, mSATA.

The adapter provides power for all three SSDs, connects PCIe to NVMe slot, and connects with two data cables to two single SATA ports on the motherboard (replacing the optical drive, and J_SATA_2) for mSATA and B-key M.2 slots. So, I could have one small mSATA SSD for boot (not mirrored unfortunately), two M.2 SSDs (one NVMe, one SATA) as a mirror, and still have 4 SATA ports (with the proper SFF-8087 cable) available for 3.5-inch HDDs. (NVMe is not bootable on the T130, at least that's what I've found looking at Dell forums - with one exception of Intel 750 NVMe SSD which someone reported to boot properly, but that model seems to be quite rare and expensive.)

Would it work reasonably well to mix NVMe and SATA SSDs (of roughly the same capacity) in the same mirror, or is it a bad idea? (I understand the speed will be sub-optimal, limited by the slower SATA.)

 

[Arwen]

It should work fine. I did the same in my new HP laptop, which had only 1 NVMe SSD bay. So I had to use the 2.5" SATA bay for the mirror. Yes, I use ZFS on my laptop, though it's obviously not TrueNAS, (it's Linux with ZFS).

I even use a 2TB 2.5" hard drive and a 1TB mSATA drive in my miniature media server. Mirroring a small part of each, with ZFS, for the OS. Then striping the rest with ZFS for media, (I have have multiple backups... so striping is acceptable in my case).

The nice thing about using ZFS, when I do get bad block errors on my media pool, (striped), it affects one or few files. Thus, a restore is just a copy of the affected file(s). Unlike some other RAID-0 schemes, which would likely need a full restore each and every time i get a bad block.