I’m looking for an “appliance” that I can install my own 2.5" SAS 12GB SSD’s in. Preferably the OS would support JBOD. I have two HPE VMWare ESXi hosts each with (4) 3.84TB 12GB/s SAS SSD’s that are OEM for HPE by Samsung. The goal is to take these (8) drives out of the hosts and install them in an appliance to build an expandable shared storage array. When I say expandable, I need the option to add more of these 3.84TB 12GB/s SAS SSD’s as needed down the road. One solution I am considering is a cheap HPE DL380 24 2.5" bay server and use TrueNAS. But before I pull that trigger, I waned to know if anyone hads any better ideas.
Thanks in advance for any information anybody can share.
Depends on the budget and criticality. Have you looked at the synology systems that are purpose built for this and come sans disks, load your own.
Yes you can build your own nas out of a workstation/server, and for large data storage, low use systems, works like a dream. But if you need performance, a purpose driven array will come with performance options that will just be very hard to homebrew effectively.
That is a LOT of data to be considering JBOD and home brew NAS unless you have two and back it up frequently or the data just does not have value.
Dedicated appliances from IXSystems or Synology that support 2.5” SAS SSD’s are just too expensive. So I picked up a refurbished HPE DL380 Gen 10 with 26 bays for $600. The server has (2) 800W PSU and (2) HP high performance heat sinks.
I have a pair of Xeon 6140’s, (4) 16GB RDIMM’s and (2) HPE NC560SFP+ NIC’s from previous upgrades to go along with the (8) 3.84TB SAS SSD. So this should suit my needs very well.
The nice thing about the Gen 10 servers from HPE is the disks can run as hardware RAID or JBOD. The system can also boot from mirrored SATA M.2 SSD’s installed on the primary riser card. So that means there’s no storage overhead for the OS on the primary storage.
Thanks for everyone for their advice.
One last thing, after building I would start a very large single file transfer to it full bore, and watch the throughput. If your transfer speed graph starts forming a sawtooth, then the raid buffer is inadequate for your intended application. Many times I have seen someone build a high performance storage system and unless they threw money at the raid card, this ended up the case. Nutrition for cognition. So I am not sure what that system will have in it, but I would certainly check it, even if it advertises 12g throughput, real world results do not always match specs and may require a different controller to get the performance you may be expecting.