Hi, I'm Xlup, and I'm from Italy
I've read all this thread and is very interesting so I just registered on the forum to have you opinion about a configuration I'm thinking about...
I've a (not too) old server, that is an Ibm X3650 M3, loaded with 8 disks....
A couple of 192Gb sas (actually in raid 1 for system volume), and six 1tb nl-sas (actually in raid 5 for data) ...
I've inserted in the server a pci-e ssd (kingston predator) and it works perfectly, performance is great.
So the question is: how to increase speed on the data disks keeping as much space as I can?
I'm thinking about using a tier in simple mode using pci-e ssd and the 5tb vd (maybe 4 if I keep 1 hot spare)...
This way the data on hd is protected (raid 5 for my usage is enough)
My question is: what happens if the SSD fails?... is the system smart enough to take out the ssd tier and keep running on the hd tier?
Maybe I could insert a second pcie ssd in the tier...
The ideal could be to have the ssd tier mirrored and the hd tier simple (raid is in hardware) but it's not possible.... leaving a pci-e ssd as hot spare seems to me really a waste of resources...
Another idea would be create a mirrored volume on the two ssd, create a vhd on this volume, and use that vhd as ssd tier and keeping the hd tier on the raid 5 vd.... I don't know how much overhead this could take into game.....
What do you think about it? :-D
Ciao!
Xlup