Hi, I am looking for some advice on expanding storage in my W2K16 server.
I have a Supermicro SC846 (SATA2 drives SAS2 backplane) with an Adaptec 81605ZQ, populated with 16 x 4TB drives in RAID6 for media, 2 x 4TB drives as spares, 4 x SSD's in RAID5 for VM images, and 2 x SSD drives shared for a RAID1 boot volume and the Adpatec MaxCache.
That means I am all out of slots in the chassis and controller, so how do I expand storage?
Other than expansion, I could also switch to Storage Spaces Direct (I will stay with W2K16), and get more drive flexibility, especially in light of RAID6 with large, e.g. 12TB, drives?
I could replace each of the 4TB drives one by one, rebuild in between with larger drives, then expand the RAID6 volume once all drives are larger. But, this will require that I replace all 16 drives plus the 2 spares, and rebuild them one by one. It will take a long time, and will cost the price of 18 new drives.
I could move my VM workload to one of my other servers, freeing up 4 free slots that used to be the 4 x SSD RAID5 volume, I could take the chance and drop the 2 spares, and I could boot from an internal SSD drive, freeing up 8 slots. I could then fill the 8 slots with e.g. 12TB drives in RAID6 (or storage spaces), giving me enough space to copy the data, and then bring back the VM and boot disks, leaving space for expansion.
I could buy one of the newer SC846's or SC836's (bigger drives means fewer slots needed) with a 12gbps backplane, and then build a new server, maybe using a motherboard with a built in LSI 3008, copy the data over, and decommission the old. New faster hardware, but that is not very economical, since I don't need more speed, I just need more space.
Any suggestions, gotcha's or risks?
I have a Supermicro SC846 (SATA2 drives SAS2 backplane) with an Adaptec 81605ZQ, populated with 16 x 4TB drives in RAID6 for media, 2 x 4TB drives as spares, 4 x SSD's in RAID5 for VM images, and 2 x SSD drives shared for a RAID1 boot volume and the Adpatec MaxCache.
That means I am all out of slots in the chassis and controller, so how do I expand storage?
Other than expansion, I could also switch to Storage Spaces Direct (I will stay with W2K16), and get more drive flexibility, especially in light of RAID6 with large, e.g. 12TB, drives?
I could replace each of the 4TB drives one by one, rebuild in between with larger drives, then expand the RAID6 volume once all drives are larger. But, this will require that I replace all 16 drives plus the 2 spares, and rebuild them one by one. It will take a long time, and will cost the price of 18 new drives.
I could move my VM workload to one of my other servers, freeing up 4 free slots that used to be the 4 x SSD RAID5 volume, I could take the chance and drop the 2 spares, and I could boot from an internal SSD drive, freeing up 8 slots. I could then fill the 8 slots with e.g. 12TB drives in RAID6 (or storage spaces), giving me enough space to copy the data, and then bring back the VM and boot disks, leaving space for expansion.
I could buy one of the newer SC846's or SC836's (bigger drives means fewer slots needed) with a 12gbps backplane, and then build a new server, maybe using a motherboard with a built in LSI 3008, copy the data over, and decommission the old. New faster hardware, but that is not very economical, since I don't need more speed, I just need more space.
Any suggestions, gotcha's or risks?