I’m looking to buy some 20tb drives to upgrade my NAS. It currently hosts a 12x3tb striped mirror setup on Truenas Scale plugged into a NetApp DS4246 24 bay. It is backed up elsewhere.
With how large HDDs and even SSDs are getting I would only need a mirrored 20tb pair to cover my current data and have quite a bit of open space left yet. (Like double) Eventually it will grow though. My backup uses a Rosewill case with 15bays. It seems ridiculous to only put two drives in a 24bay shelf. Even if I use another Rosewill case and put 14 drives in it, in a striped mirror setup that is 140tb.
Is it worth using the extra power of the shelf vs just a Rosewill case and some lsi cards? I wouldn’t even need the lsi cards just yet. I’m contemplating selling the shelf and current drives and replacing it with 4 20tb. A mirror on the main setup and a mirror on the backup in two Rosewill cases. I do realize I lose the redundant power supplies.
(I realize that people in the data hoarder category are in a different situation but I don’t plan on having 140tb of data in the near future.)
Another reason not mentioned for having more disks is IOPs
For when you need performance along with the space.
If you need IOPS, you need SSDs. The days of getting IOPS from multiple hard disks have been over for a decade.
Ha, no.
SSD arrays absolutely have there place and I have deployed many for clients. But it is not the only performance solution. Like others have said capacity / performance planning is a must to know what you need and what you will need.
Hard drives are for capacity. SSD’s are for performance. This has been settled for a number of years, and is why you see multiple levels of caching in front of any modern enterprise storage system.