Hard drive suggestions

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hellosky

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 28, 2010
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Which would be better for a ESXi home lab setup:

4 250GB WD Scorpio black drives (already own)

- OR -

2 500GB WD Caviar black drives (will need to purchase)

This home lab computer would be used for primarily learning more about microsoft server products, exchange, system center, etc. won't get a whole lot of usage but I also don't want them VMs to get extremely slow.

No RAID on this machine. No money for a hardware raid controller at this time.
 
More disk will help to relieve disk contention if you spread the right VMs across the 4 drives.
Exchange and System Center seem like the high IO VMs you'll have (or the backend DB they use).
 
To be honest, I doubt seriously that you would be able to tell a difference between them. Sure, spreading out a VM and its disks across several spindles is the "accepted" method. But unless your motherboard has 4 different controllers (one for each disk) I don't think it would make that much difference. Plus, it makes backing up a VM that much more complicated.

Now, having said all that, go for whichever disks spins the fastest and has the highest cache. But there again, you are probably just talking a few hundred ms differences. SSDs on the other hand are a whole different story....

Just my $.02 worth.
 
hellosky said:
Which would be better for a ESXi home lab setup:

4 250GB WD Scorpio black drives (already own)

- OR -

2 500GB WD Caviar black drives (will need to purchase)

This home lab computer would be used for primarily learning more about microsoft server products, exchange, system center, etc. won't get a whole lot of usage but I also don't want them VMs to get extremely slow.

No RAID on this machine. No money for a hardware raid controller at this time.
Click to expand...

Just my 2 cents but I'd say stick with the 4 x 250s. If its a home lab and cost is an issue then save yourself the cash and use what you have. If anything save you cash up and maybe look into getting a SAN or NAS later down the line when you want to learn about iSCSI or NAS based solutions.

Other's above my post have brought up much better technical reasons as well. As long as you spread your VMs across those 4 drives that should help to attain the best performance based on your config. I'm running a 1TB WD Black & a Maxtor 250GB drive in my home lab. So far i have 2 VMs running on the WD without a problem performance wise.
 
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