Expanding Server Storage

[ITGURU]

Currently have an ML350 G6 Server of which all 8 bays are populated with 300GB sas Drives. Been a VERY reliable system with only 1 drive failure in 4 and a half years and no other issues. Was looking to increase the drives to the 600GB version but read reviews online that reliability isn't great - I purchased some drives and the 1st 2 NEW drives I got (from different suppliers) failed within minutes of being in an array so not going down that route as has put me off!

 

Anyone know what the best option would be to expand the storage on this server? It's a home personal server with critical data and looked at either getting a MSA with 2.5" bays in and a raid card , or ditching the server and getting a new GEN with 16 bays.

 

Looking for cheapest option for better capacity storage.

 

Also thought about getting a Microserver and raiding 2 x 2TB WD Enterprise drives with a spare, and using it as an iSCSI target, however they're not hot swappable drives and don't know how reliable the enterprise WD drives are despite having a 5 year warranty.

 

Looking for opinions...

 

thanks.

[3s-gtech]

One of ICT Direct's HP storage servers may be a good plan. They're cheap, same gen as you have, but 25 storage bays. We use them as flexible Hyper-V hosts with DAS. You could swap the disks over, and maybe see if they'll PX for the old one? Warranty too!

[ITGURU]

One of ICT Direct's HP storage servers may be a good plan. They're cheap, same gen as you have, but 25 storage bays. We use them as flexible Hyper-V hosts with DAS. You could swap the disks over, and maybe see if they'll PX for the old one? Warranty too!

 

Is this the kind of thing?

HP ProLiant DL180 G6 Storage Server Twin Quad Core 2.26GHz Xeon E5520 12GB RAM | eBay

[3s-gtech]

That's the one. They can be specced with hexa core Xeons, lots of RAM, twin PSUs, etc etc. They need an extra NIC card too. Many of the parts from your ML350 should fit if that suits. Just an idea, anyway. I'm sure others will recommend some alternatives, but this may be the cheapest option.

[zag]

I'd be looking at SSD drives these days, if you really want to use such small drives its actually quite cheap.

 

Inherently by design, if you use more drives, then there is more chance to fail. So its always best to use less drives with larger space in my opinion.

 

To have even a single drive fail in 4 years is unacceptable to me, even if it is RAIDed.

 

There is better, more reliable technology out there these days. Especially for centralized server storage.

[3s-gtech]

I'd agree in part - we have a mix of SSD and HDD in our hosts. Things like the RDP server is on SSD so the staff get a better experience closer to their classroom PCs. No harm in mixing them up, either using Storage Spaces or separate arrays.

[ITGURU]

That's the one. They can be specced with hexa core Xeons, lots of RAM, twin PSUs, etc etc. They need an extra NIC card too. Many of the parts from your ML350 should fit if that suits. Just an idea, anyway. I'm sure others will recommend some alternatives, but this may be the cheapest option.

 

I've been looking at these today and the DL180 G6 seems so cheap! Spec'd the same as my tower it's way cheaper and looks like the parts from my ML350 G6 all work with the DL180 G6

 

Thanks everyone for your advice, was looking for the additional 8 bay cage but couldn't get from anywhere.

 

Does anyone have one of these DL180 G6 servers and able to tell me what the idle/average power consumption is?

Edited November 5, 2015 by ITGURU