HP Z6 G4, Firmware RAID 1 for NVMe drives.

[GSBear]

I loved the RAID firmware with the Z420 workstations.  Now that Microsoft requires new hardware to run Windows 11 (uugh), I am looking at the Z6 G4 workstaions.  I'm told I need a $200 VROC card to allow the firmware RAID to set up a mirror with NVMe drives.  Supposedly, if I use Intel NVMe drives the VROC card is free.

Why is HP making is so difficult to use a different type of drive for RAID, Sata drives apparently work as they always have.

What hardware do I need to add to be able to set up a bootable mirror with NVMe drives?  My intention is to mirror my system drive with two 1TB NVMe drives, and mirror my data drive with two 4TB sata drives.

I have been using firmware RAID to set up mirrors for both my system drives, and my data drives for years.  What are other people doing to provide redundancy on the system drives with this VROC nonsense?

Thanks much.

[DGroves]

if you don't need the fastest possible xfer speeds then a older used pci-e raid card will be the cheapest route and it will be faster and offer more options than the Intel VROC solution

the AMD ASR-71605 (w/cache module) or ASR-8805 using a "PASSTHROUGH" type cable will be cheaper

these cards while slower than the LSI based raid cards support raid and JBOD and allows a SATA drive to be swapped between the ASR card any motherboard's SATA ports

both ASR cards have win 10/11/Linux/Unix driver support

here's a eBay listing for the 71605  card w/cache module battery, and the forward SATA/SAS cables for 55.00

the ASR-8805 is faster than the 71605 and has better SSD support

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196478515388?_skw=asr-71605+forward+cable&itmmeta=01JZAZYSYH1EXRS5SY456BKJF...