This is an old HP dl360p i got for 20 bucks from my country's equivalent of craigslist. There are several problems with this machine, the most pressing being storage.
It's pretty cheap to get the best in class CPUs this thing can take off of aliexpress, and getting DDR3 ECC isn't exactly that hard either.
But upgrading the storage, has been a pain in my ass. It only takes 2.5 inch drives, and is currently filled with 9 SAS drives that are all ancient and tiny.
So far, here are the best ideas i've been able to come up with:
1) Fill it with the cheapest 2.5 inch SSDs in RAID5, and pray to god that they don't all fail at the same time (unlikely)
2) Fill it with cheap seagate barracuda laptop drives and pray to god that they only fail one at a time, but not in like a month (slightly better than option 1)
3) This is so far the best idea i've had. Take all the internal drives out, maybe use 2 SATA SSDs in RAID1 as a boot drive, and use some SATA/SAS extention cables to connect some cheap 3.5 inch drives to the internal drive ports. The only thing i'd be worried about is being able to power all the big drives off of the internal backplane. I could custom print an external drive cage and just mount it under the server in my IKEA Lack Rack Enterpriseā¢ (as pictured below). One benefit would be increased airflow, due to there not being a bunch of drives in the way. If i can do this without it throttling my transfer speeds or something else stupid. I'm going to.
I want to avoid using an HBA and a powered external drive cage, because i'm trying to pull this off on a broke college student budget, and every dollar and watt counts.
Any Ideas?
It's pretty cheap to get the best in class CPUs this thing can take off of aliexpress, and getting DDR3 ECC isn't exactly that hard either.
But upgrading the storage, has been a pain in my ass. It only takes 2.5 inch drives, and is currently filled with 9 SAS drives that are all ancient and tiny.
So far, here are the best ideas i've been able to come up with:
1) Fill it with the cheapest 2.5 inch SSDs in RAID5, and pray to god that they don't all fail at the same time (unlikely)
2) Fill it with cheap seagate barracuda laptop drives and pray to god that they only fail one at a time, but not in like a month (slightly better than option 1)
3) This is so far the best idea i've had. Take all the internal drives out, maybe use 2 SATA SSDs in RAID1 as a boot drive, and use some SATA/SAS extention cables to connect some cheap 3.5 inch drives to the internal drive ports. The only thing i'd be worried about is being able to power all the big drives off of the internal backplane. I could custom print an external drive cage and just mount it under the server in my IKEA Lack Rack Enterpriseā¢ (as pictured below). One benefit would be increased airflow, due to there not being a bunch of drives in the way. If i can do this without it throttling my transfer speeds or something else stupid. I'm going to.
I want to avoid using an HBA and a powered external drive cage, because i'm trying to pull this off on a broke college student budget, and every dollar and watt counts.
Any Ideas?
- Description
- Upgrading Storage on an SFF only 1U enterprise box without mortgaging my kidney or firstborn child.
