QNAP Systems - QDA-A2AR - QNAP QDA-A2AR DAS Storage System - 2 x HDD Supported - 2 x SSD Supported - Serial ATA/600

Very nice drive caddy for a NAS that allows two SSD drives to be added, either as separate drives or as a hardware-level raid1 single drive. I am using it as a R/W SSD cache in a QNAP NAS and it significantly silences and speeds up the NAS.

I'm using these in a PC (DELL Precision T7810, refurbished off of Amazon) and replaced the delivered 1TB 3.5" SATA HDD using this unit and 2 Samsung 860 QVO 1TB Solid State Drive (MZ-76Q1T0B/AM) that are setup to use RAID 1.Since this was a "clean" rebuild, it was easy to install the SSDs in the unit, set it for the initial straight through (so NOT RAID 0, RAID 1, or JBOD), turned on the system, when I was able to get to BIOS SETUP and see the device and apparently both disks; I shut down again, and changed the DIP switches to RAID 1, and booted again. On the 2nd boot with RAID 1 set, BIOS SETUP showed the QNAP RAID devices only. From there it was an easy task to use ACRONIS to Duplicate the original 1TB SATA HDD with the installation source to the new RAID 1 SSD set.Runs like a champ.Since I'm not using straight through, RAID 0, or JBOD, I can't comment on those, but in this scenario, I expect RAID 0 to work similarly.I will probably buy more of these to address concerns with disk redundancy, where I want to solve that with RAID 1.

My case has very limited space and I could only originally put two drives in my computer. I had to choose between two 3.5 or 2 2.5. instead of building a whole new computer I bought this and it works amazing data limits are restricted to SATA speeds however that is not an issue for me. I patched all the firmware on my Samsung ssds which are known to have bad firmware and then I installed them into these qnap bays. And I set them to RAID 0 to distribute the load between them and show them as one volume so I don't have a hundred letters of drive locations. And I'm aware that there is a risk involved with data loss however the data that I would lose is not important. I did not install Windows on this. I use it as a steam library drive.

I had very high hopes for this device/adapter and REALLY wanted for it to work, but I ended up dumping it because :1. it is VERY finicky to configure if you want anything other than RAID 1 (mirroring). one would assume it would take a simple configuration of the on-board DIP switches but it ends up being a tedious process of power-cycling the NAS and switching it between different modes before ending up with the desired state;2. despite it being a QNAP product, it has almost NO SUPPORT in the QNAP OS when used in their devices (in my case TS-873). it does not show the SMART data from the individual drives inside the device and on some of the screens it actually shows the drives as MISSING altogether. bottom line it gets you the same exact support you'd get if you used a non-QNAP enclosure (which are cheaper)

Very good product, but new release of QTS doesn't support jbod mode of it (only raid 1 or 0).I want to mount in it 2 of 4tb ssd's and have 8 tb ssd-storage at one slot of NAS, now it not possible (only on previous releases of QTS).

Uses its internal chip for Raid 0 or 1 or JBOD, does not use QNAP's raid so only seen as 1 drive by QNAP no matter what. QNAP does recognize the individual drives for statistics and SMART however. Crucial SSD's radi 1 get around 355 MB/s sequential read.

Got this for running VMs on VMware ESXI and Proxmox since there is no way to backup or mirror your drives within these types of operating systems. There is no way to do mirroring in software so you have to have a hardware based raid device which this is. Raid 1 and 0 modes work without issue (just make sure you re-format the drive when changing modes). I doubt there is much performance increase for SSDs when running in raid 0 since you are still limited by the sata bus but it might boost 2.5 inch hard drive performance. As far as size goes it fits perfectly in different systems in any 3.5 inch drive bay. Screws are lined up perfectly unlike some other converters I have seen.

Power connector was not properly welded. The adapter last for less than a minute after I started moving data.This power connector also KILLED MY BRAND NEW SSD. Bravo!