New server for primary school advice please

[mavhc]

Ah - is this in relation to using individual drives via Windows' Storage Spaces rather than using hardware RAID? We tried it (made each driver its own RAID 0 array) on our HP DL360 Gen8 with integrated RAID controller, then created a Storage Spaces drive out of them - performance was terrible. I think you need a proper HBA card that presents individual drives to Windows, not a RAID card.

 

Or ZFS, same issue.

 

Can you just swap out the silly hp raid lite card for an HBA and use the existing cabling etc?

[dhicks]

Can you just swap out the silly hp raid lite card for an HBA and use the existing cabling etc?

 

Hmm - good question. The included RAID card does mean we can use a RAID-1 array for the boot volume, I'm not sure if we could add an HBA card and re-use existing cables for a proportion of the front-of-case disk caddies. We've now gone and attached a QNAP storage server to act as the main chunk of storage for this server, the extra drive slots are simply an added bonus.

[mavhc]

My current plan is 3 SSDs on the 3 SATA ports

[ictgoodpractice]

I've always been a fan of HP. We have an HP ML350p Gen 8. It's 5 years old so no plans to replace it for at least another two years yet.

What's wrong with yours that makes you want to replace it?

 

If you speak to a reputable supplier and tell them your requirements they should be able to suggest what spec you should consider to make sure you get the longest life out of it. Then post their suggestions on here for us to pick apart!

 

How much memory do you have please?

[hallb15]

How much memory do you have please?

96GB which is plenty for the 4 VMs we run on it.