Not sure where to put this, but here goes. I have a LGA2011ish build, but with the S2600CP2J, dual E5-2680v2, 128GB Ram, LSI SAS 9211-8i in a Phantek Enthoo Pro Full Tower with a EVGA SuperNova 1000 G3 and Nvidia 1060 3GB. I’m running server 2016 datacenter with hyper-v that has around 11 VMs.
I’m using all 8 of the SATA ports on the SAS card, 6x10TB WD HDD and 2x1TB SSD (Cache and VMs), I have a 1TB SSD (OS) and 10TB HDD on the 2 on board SATA 3 ports. I also have 2 Blu Ray drives. With all that the case is full and the power supply is running out of power connectors. I’m using drivepool to aggregate all the drives and provide duplication. I also have a drivepool for 4 drives connected to a USB box, and yet another USB hdd, both for VM and Client backups (Veeam) because USB2 is sloooow. I’ve tried a couple USB3 cards with no luck.
The end goal is to have a second server so I can move VMs between the 2, but I can’t afford that right now. I could start a NAS build to host the VMs, and maybe move the bulk of my storage over. My problem with a NAS running some sort of raid, is the chance of losing all your data. That’s why I’m using drivepool. I am backing up important things like pictures using CrashPlan. What do you guys and gals think?