I would like to have a raid 1 + hotspare or better if possible a raid 10 + hotspare….. actually I have 12 of such disks to arrange …..
About the motherboard what’s the better choose?
Thanks
Most backplanes/chassis you'll find on the used market only support NVMe drives in some of the bays, but not all. Typically you get 2 or 4 NVMe-capable bays. A 1U chassis realistically limits you to 10 2.5" bays anyway, so it's unlikely you'd be able to use all 10. If you have such a system, I'd recommend just getting a motherboard with however many NVMe connectors you need built-in - for example, the H12SSL-NT gives you 2 x8 connectors for 4 drives in total.
If you want more drives, expect to pay more for the chassis/backplane, and you'll need cards for it. The tricky part is figuring out which redriver, retimer, or switch card you need. Generally a redriver or retimer will be cheaper than a switch, but that's when you need to make sure that your specific combination of MB+card is going to work. In general, hotplugging PCIe devices is not something you should expect to "just work" - you should use a validated setup.
HBAs (e.g. Broadcom 9400) are also an option. Despite the fact that I couldn't get the sideband signal working with my non-expander backplane, the nice part is that you don't have to worry about any of the aforementioned issues, because they disguise your NVMe drives as SAS. Thus you get perfect hotplugging and all that on just about any host hardware, because it doesn't have to insert the drives into your system's PCIe topology. The downside is that they are by far the most expensive - $250-300 for the 16i card (4 drives), and you also need their special U.2 cable which is another $80 or so for each pair of drives. Thus, you're looking at $400+ for 4 drives.
You can go the opposite way instead. Buy a full system that has NVMe support, and then you don't need to worry about compatibility.
