smakme7757
Golden Member
Hi all,
These are the drive i currently have at my disposal and installed as stand alone drives in ESXi
2x 640GB WD Black 32mb cache 7200RPM
1x 1.5TB WD Black 64mb cache 7200RPM
If i manage to move my old windows install via P2V to ESXi i'll have a single 180GB SSD as well (50% atm). The SSD is bound to it's install due to some work applications i can't risk loosing the activation for, so i'm going to test that out.
So at the moment i have 4 VMs on my ESXi server, they are distributed over the 3 disks listed above. Everything seems to be working ok, but it's no secret that i'm not really using my drives all the effectively.
I've had a look around and it seems i can get an Adaptec 2805 (on the Vmware hcl) for a decent price, but the drives i have at the moment are WD black drives which are no good for raid. This, in turn would force me to buy a new set of disks. So i would have to shell out for a raid card and 4 to 6 disks to run an RAID 1+0 or RAID 5 array. That would be awesome, but it's also a little expensive.
So i'm wondering if maybe buying 2x 256 Samsung 830 SSDs (which would be around the price of just the raid card) would be a decent storage solution. Then i could create seperate datastores with the left over disks as storage drives.
I'm not really all that good with storage, so maybe there is something i havn't thought about? Any suggestions.
I might add in that this was build with spare parts, so they parts were not purchased with a server in mind. However for the sake of the thread - My server:
2600K
32GB RAM
GA-P67A-UD7-B3 (Dual NIC)
TX750 PSU
Geforce 210
Everything works in ESXi 5.1.
These are the drive i currently have at my disposal and installed as stand alone drives in ESXi
2x 640GB WD Black 32mb cache 7200RPM
1x 1.5TB WD Black 64mb cache 7200RPM
If i manage to move my old windows install via P2V to ESXi i'll have a single 180GB SSD as well (50% atm). The SSD is bound to it's install due to some work applications i can't risk loosing the activation for, so i'm going to test that out.
So at the moment i have 4 VMs on my ESXi server, they are distributed over the 3 disks listed above. Everything seems to be working ok, but it's no secret that i'm not really using my drives all the effectively.
I've had a look around and it seems i can get an Adaptec 2805 (on the Vmware hcl) for a decent price, but the drives i have at the moment are WD black drives which are no good for raid. This, in turn would force me to buy a new set of disks. So i would have to shell out for a raid card and 4 to 6 disks to run an RAID 1+0 or RAID 5 array. That would be awesome, but it's also a little expensive.
So i'm wondering if maybe buying 2x 256 Samsung 830 SSDs (which would be around the price of just the raid card) would be a decent storage solution. Then i could create seperate datastores with the left over disks as storage drives.
I'm not really all that good with storage, so maybe there is something i havn't thought about? Any suggestions.
I might add in that this was build with spare parts, so they parts were not purchased with a server in mind. However for the sake of the thread - My server:
2600K
32GB RAM
GA-P67A-UD7-B3 (Dual NIC)
TX750 PSU
Geforce 210
Everything works in ESXi 5.1.
Last edited:
