So I just got a Dell Poweredge T320 for free however it does not have any drives. What are your recommendations about places where I can buy some? It supports:
- Four 3.5 inch hot-swappable hard drives
- Eight 2.5 inch hot-swappable hard drives Thx!
You’ll want to learn the difference between SAS and SATA connectors. You can very probably use either. 3.5 inch is the “standard” size, while 2.5 inch was more popular for laptops. However, in the interest of density, servers started accepting 2.5 inch drives to fit more drives per rack.
You can get great deals on used sas drives on ebay, but if you don’t know how to monitor s.m.a.r.t. data / rebuild a zfs array, that can be very very risky. You need to be able to survive concurrent disk failures.
Honestly your best bet is brand new western digital or seagate drives. Buy them on amazon, but double check that the seller is legit. That’s it.
Thx! It takes sas drives, forgot to meantion. Do you recommend 2.5 inch drives or stay with the 3.5 inch ones?
I recommend 3.5s - they’ll be a little cheaper and a little more readily available. It’s also worth noting that sata drives can plug into your SAS controller, so you can use any and all 3.5” drives that you can find :)
Thx!
Get some ssds for the 2.5 inch drive bays to use for vm storage or something and the 3.5 inch drives for bulk storage.
