Cisco C240-M3 drives AND tray/caddies - Help my storage

[whitey]

No worries, I've spoke my peace on recommended drives, those are all I use, no experience w/ Samsung SSD's thus far but a few have tempted me, I forget models when there were some insane deals that hit on them (480 or 960 GB models, hell I forget, it dried up).

GL on testing.

EDIT: On the 319TB on a S3700 topic, ask for a Intel ssd toolkit screenshot of the drives health (bet it's 95-98% life remaining maybe higher), that's always a good place to start but no 319TB does not alarm me for that type of HET nand but you can often find lower usage devices.

 

[whitey]

You should probably open another thread if you continue to seek build advise instead of in the FS forums but this DID just list.

HGST Hitachi 800Gb 2.5" SAS 12Gb eMLC SSD Hard Drive SSD1600MM - 12G - NEW PULL

Maybe offer $275-300 each and see what you get, I got 4 of them 6 months or so ago for $250 each but that was a helluva deal. They are new as well, IBM branded but there should be no issues w/ them in any array.

 

[Harry P. Nyce]

You guys are just so so great. Thank you for going out of your way, holding my hand and being super patient with a neophyte homelabber. It's hard to determine the proper path when I'm unsure of the potential options.

The intent is to: continue booting ESXi from internal USB. SSDs (x2) in RAID1 array for VMs, then the 600GB Seagate (x3) Savvio 10K.5 SAS drives for less important local storage.

Would love to eventually learn about storage tiers, but those are longer term plans. Have a few (x3) new 8TB WD Reds I'd been purchasing each time a $179 sale hit for other media storage, so hoping the aforementioned is plenty to get going... But so much to learn. Thank you, immensely for helping to nudge that process along, ever so slightly. Hardware compatibility has been elusive.

 

[Harry P. Nyce]

I checked the compatibility list for those nice drives, but didn't find mine on either HBA or RAID Controller lists. I have the LSI 9266-8i -- is that limiting due to it only being PCIe 2.0? I've been happy with it thus far. I know my documentation says it supports 12Gbps SAS drives.

http://www.hgst.com/avl/src_front/compatibility.php?mode=product_pdf&pid=578&lang=en

 

[Harry P. Nyce]

Refused 275 offer, but accepted a pair at 295. Checked my controller's documentation and it had 12Gbps Samsung 1635 SAS disk on the list, but not these. Will keep researching them, thanks!!

 

[whitey]

I wouldn't worry about it, they are gonna work. What are you intentions for storage platform? I don't have much HW RAID experience, that being said if you did intend to do a single node vSphere setup w/ a ZFS-ish all-in-one storage appliance/VM the requirement is for a HBA not a raid ctrl. If you wanna just use the HW ctrl for a raid1 config nothing bad w/ starting there as well but for a ZFS based shared storage AIO config where you will present out ZFS datasets via iSCSI/NFS back to your hypervisor you really want the HBA LSI 2008 for 6GBPS LSI 3008 for 12Gbps.

If this is not your plans/goals then my apologies, think we picked up bits and pieces of a build thread here on what originated as looking for caddies/memory so we had better put the squash on this one here and open a new thread in the 'DIY Server and Workstation Builds' sub-forum.

 

[Harry P. Nyce]

Thanks for the continued guidance, shared expertise and advice / pro-tips. Have been meaning to compose a storage oriented post in the proper location.

EDIT: Ended up paying a bit of a premium to just get a couple (2) trays for when those terrific SSDs you recommended arrive.

 

[Harry P. Nyce]

Bit the bullet, ended up purchasing a couple of these, to get me started: 800-35052-01 Cisco UCS C220 C240 C460 M2/M3/M4 SAS/SATA 2.5'' Hard Drive Tray | eBay