I’m wondering what the best (cheap) option is to have as much storage as possible. I have two DL380 g7 servers with one running lemmy, npm, wireguard and busy getting nextcloud and jellyfin installed. The other one is to run a Proxmox cluster. Just for fun tbh. Amd if needed spare parts. I only have a few tb of storage. Problem is that these have a 2.5 inch harddrive. So expensive drives. Is it a good idea to just buy more drives which will cost me more in the long run i guess… Or should i go for a dedicated storage server with 3.5 drives…
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Usually, the larger the drive, the less $ per GB. 16 and 18 TB drives for example would be where you would want to aim for if you’re starting out fresh.
If you want to mix and match what you already have, unRaid is an option that does that well.
If you want storage I would go for 3.5“ drives. Cheaper than 2.5“ and you‘ll find bigger capacities, so even with just a few slots it‘s easy to get plenty of Terrabytes.
Yeah, you can run a SATA & power extender cable (
or reroute the existing one unlessit’s just a connector soldered to the MoBo) out of the bay and affix a 3.5" drive elsewhere in the box or outside of it.
If you are using SAS drives, then you can save a lot by buying them used.
Never had the balls to do it myself, but from what I understand it not really an issue if you test the drives before use. You can check the SMART states of the drive, it will tell you how many hours of use the drive has.
Gen7s are pretty old. You might run the numbers on the cost of equipment versus power and find that it’s more cost-effective, or at least similar, to upgrade to something newer that also has 3.5" drives.
If you want to avoid SMR performance penalties, the 1TB HGST Travelstar 7K1000 HTE721010A9E630 is one of the biggest CMR 2.5" drives I’ve found, and it’s 7200rpm and rated for 24/7 operation to boot.
BTRFS + Seagate SMR seems to work well in my experience, especially if used like a WORM drive. No 24/7 rating, but 5TB per drive
could try finding a cheap jbod
Jbod. I had to search that :D I have jbod laying around. But I’m not sure if they would survive 24/7 needs…
Why? They are built for datacenter environment, with the right drives for high density storage they should be just as fine as in a regular server.
Consumer external hard drive enclosures may offer a JBOD mode, I had one from Icy Box for a few days, the transfer rates were good but the little fan didn’t cool the hard drives well enough while accessing them. Ended up buying a Define R5 instead
Great to know! Thanks!
Ceph is excellent as a distributed storage solution - but should really have 4 machines with 2 or more drives each to reach a good level of redundancy - which is a bit much for most people on this sub.
One nice feature is it deals with heterogeneous drives well, like if you need to buy a bunch of used ones on eBay for cheap.
Probably not a good solution for your case because of the footprint - but good to be aware of it.
Get a dedicated NAS server with 3.5" drives for bulk storage. Used SAS drives on eBay are pretty cheap. Use iSCSI or NFS shares mounted to your bulk data directories for Nextcloud and Jellyfin. Buy some SSDs for local storage on the DL380 servers and use those as system disks for your VMs.
You could install Proxmox Backup Server on one of your nodes and backup the VM disks on SSD pool to the NAS and have a backup then.
