We have received our first batch of 7.68TB Kingston SSD drives for deployment in some Dell PowerEdge R640 servers, which will be used to create a large storage pool.
The first job was to mount each of the drives in a caddy.
And then install them in the server.
These R640 servers are equipped with the Dell PERC H740P RAID controller. They support either hardware RAID 0,1,5,10,50 etc or Enhanced HBA mode.
In eHBA mode, the disks operate in a passthrough mode, presenting the raw disks to the OS, however each disk needs to be specifically selected in an additional step after enabling eHBA mode.
In RAID mode, one or more virtual disks need to be created to present the disks to the OS. Preconfigured profiles are available to complete this step easily.
We will run these with a ZFS file system, so need to decide on whether we want to use the hardware RAID features or follow the advice on Wikipedia on the Avoidance of hardware RAID controllers. Online opinion is divided. My summary is that hardware RAID will be easier to manage when a disk fails, but ZFS on the raw disks will have some integrity advantages.