Hi,
I just picked up 18 drives from *Dell R730XD Intel DC S3710 MLC 400GB SSD 2.5 6Gb/s SATA III Wrnty AUG 2020 @ $150. I just wanted to let others know as I was monitoring the number of drives sold over the weekend and noticed none had been sold, so I though this was now the time to get a better price as (at least in part) the market may be saturated the seller seeing not as many people are buying. So, if you have been on the fence you may be able to get a bit better price.
As to the scenario...the plan is to use 16 drives as a Storage Spaces cache for 8x3tb WD Reds. The 16 drives will be on their own controller in either RAID 5 (with a few spares) or RAID 6, I needing to experiment a bit. The current plan is for the WD Reds b in a mirrored (RAID 10)array, as I expect the WD drives to be my primary storage.
Because of the way Storage Spaces works each set of drives will look like a single drive to the OS being configured through the controller, which will allow me to pull this off. For the SSD drives I'm using an Adaptec 71605 controller (got cheap on ebay), for the hard drives I'll be using the onboard LSI 3008 controller for RAID 10.
The use case is somewhat mixed. I have some other cheap servers that will/are being used for VMs but because I have some 4oGbe network cards (ConnectX-3, also got cheap on ebay) for the most part I want those other machines to use the primary server (iSCSI) as a storage server having minimal storage on each of the other servers. The only exception is to have enough storage on one of the other servers as a backup.
So, the bottom line:
* To get full bandwidth out of the network cards (and VMs) without storage being the bottleneck, hence the cache.
* Want a long term solution. In my view I will not be able to get this type of storage and protection using NVMe at least for several more years, in reality would like at least a 5 year (perhaps 10) solution just being able to make a few upgrades along the way.
* SSD drives with write protection and high durability (perhaps even considering resale)
* Run VMs on all servers, including the "converged" server.
* Do it at the lowest price I can. of course.
Just in case anyone wants to know...
I just picked up 18 drives from *Dell R730XD Intel DC S3710 MLC 400GB SSD 2.5 6Gb/s SATA III Wrnty AUG 2020 @ $150. I just wanted to let others know as I was monitoring the number of drives sold over the weekend and noticed none had been sold, so I though this was now the time to get a better price as (at least in part) the market may be saturated the seller seeing not as many people are buying. So, if you have been on the fence you may be able to get a bit better price.
As to the scenario...the plan is to use 16 drives as a Storage Spaces cache for 8x3tb WD Reds. The 16 drives will be on their own controller in either RAID 5 (with a few spares) or RAID 6, I needing to experiment a bit. The current plan is for the WD Reds b in a mirrored (RAID 10)array, as I expect the WD drives to be my primary storage.
Because of the way Storage Spaces works each set of drives will look like a single drive to the OS being configured through the controller, which will allow me to pull this off. For the SSD drives I'm using an Adaptec 71605 controller (got cheap on ebay), for the hard drives I'll be using the onboard LSI 3008 controller for RAID 10.
The use case is somewhat mixed. I have some other cheap servers that will/are being used for VMs but because I have some 4oGbe network cards (ConnectX-3, also got cheap on ebay) for the most part I want those other machines to use the primary server (iSCSI) as a storage server having minimal storage on each of the other servers. The only exception is to have enough storage on one of the other servers as a backup.
So, the bottom line:
* To get full bandwidth out of the network cards (and VMs) without storage being the bottleneck, hence the cache.
* Want a long term solution. In my view I will not be able to get this type of storage and protection using NVMe at least for several more years, in reality would like at least a 5 year (perhaps 10) solution just being able to make a few upgrades along the way.
* SSD drives with write protection and high durability (perhaps even considering resale)
* Run VMs on all servers, including the "converged" server.
* Do it at the lowest price I can. of course.
Just in case anyone wants to know...
Last edited:
