Hi, first post here
I'm about to build a dedicated storage box at home, where I plan to run WS2016 w/ Storage Spaces as I've grown tired of FreeNAS because of my growing interest in Windows env.
For this build I've planned to use the following components:
- BitFenix Phenom M (mATX version, some modding to fit in all disks)
- SuperMicro X9SCM-F
- Intel Xeon E3-1240v2
- 32GB UDIMM ECC (whatever I can get my hands on for a fair price)
- 2x Intel DC S3500 480GB
- 6x 4TB WD Red 5400rpm
- Dell H310 (Flashed to LSI fw/IT Mode)
- 10GB SFP+ Mellanox card (Direct-attached to ESXi host)
Most of the data is cold storage as in file backups, media etc, and some semi-cold folder redirection stuff from client computers. But I'd also like to be able to run VMs (ESXi for now) from the storage as well. FYI: this is not a production environment but a home/home office.
I think I've read through quite a lot of information regarding SS now but it's not very clear to me whether I'm able to do 3 tiers, as most information on this matter is regarding S2D. I will not be able to do S2D as that requires 2+ nodes.
I've understood that running the storage pool in parity would give me quite an impact performance wise, but as I'd like to have a balance between performance, redundancy and available space that I might need to add NVMe drives.
Have anyone used an add-in PCIe-card to be able to utilize an M2 NVMe SSD in a similar environment? Anything that I need to know when doing this? Any recommended cards (EU)? Any recommended cheap M2 NVMe drives that would be suitable as write cache in what I've described? Would I need two M2 drives to be able to do this, or would one suffice?
Is there anything else that I should consider when building this hardware/configuring software?
Thank you!
/Seb
EDIT: updated specs
I'm about to build a dedicated storage box at home, where I plan to run WS2016 w/ Storage Spaces as I've grown tired of FreeNAS because of my growing interest in Windows env.
For this build I've planned to use the following components:
- BitFenix Phenom M (mATX version, some modding to fit in all disks)
- SuperMicro X9SCM-F
- Intel Xeon E3-1240v2
- 32GB UDIMM ECC (whatever I can get my hands on for a fair price)
- 2x Intel DC S3500 480GB
- 6x 4TB WD Red 5400rpm
- Dell H310 (Flashed to LSI fw/IT Mode)
- 10GB SFP+ Mellanox card (Direct-attached to ESXi host)
Most of the data is cold storage as in file backups, media etc, and some semi-cold folder redirection stuff from client computers. But I'd also like to be able to run VMs (ESXi for now) from the storage as well. FYI: this is not a production environment but a home/home office.
I think I've read through quite a lot of information regarding SS now but it's not very clear to me whether I'm able to do 3 tiers, as most information on this matter is regarding S2D. I will not be able to do S2D as that requires 2+ nodes.
I've understood that running the storage pool in parity would give me quite an impact performance wise, but as I'd like to have a balance between performance, redundancy and available space that I might need to add NVMe drives.
Have anyone used an add-in PCIe-card to be able to utilize an M2 NVMe SSD in a similar environment? Anything that I need to know when doing this? Any recommended cards (EU)? Any recommended cheap M2 NVMe drives that would be suitable as write cache in what I've described? Would I need two M2 drives to be able to do this, or would one suffice?
Is there anything else that I should consider when building this hardware/configuring software?
Thank you!
/Seb
EDIT: updated specs
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