Help finalizing my storage (small all-in-one)

[Clickinaway]

Currently have my hypervisor booting off a small SSD drive using one of the mobo's SATA III channels. I'll do my best to keep this as concise as possible, thanks to everyone for all the great advice on here. I have 6 hotswap SATA bays to fill. I plan to use 2 2TB WD Red's RAID1 simply to store music on...population of these drives will be done mostly all at once, but other collections to be added along the way.
The other 4 drives I want to run in RAID 10 and will be used for VM's, a small RDBMS, and other geospatial data. I had thought about using WD blacks or REs for this. The ~1.8TB i'd get from 4 TB drives is a little overkill, but the price margins from 500gb to 1TB appear to be small. Questions:

• Suggestions for 1TB drives for the 4 disc RAID 10 array in the ~$100 range?
• At the end of this I'll need a controller with support for the 6 drives, and I'm considering just using one of the LSI rebrands like the IBM ServeRAID M1015. Any good alternates or current deals for about the $100 range?

I have some crappy WD greens in there right now just to have something to play with, but if I don't get this thing up and running soon, my ADHD is gonna catch up real quick. Shoot, I'm already contemplating selling the whole thing so I can get a C6100 XS23-TY3! I got a ton of rack space here...hmm...anyone want to by some barely burned in equipment?

 

[_Gea]

There is no real alternative to a IBM 1015 in that price range
With little effort you get what you really want: the LSI 9211 in IT mode - just with a reflash

If your VMs are quite small, consider an SSD mirror instead a Raid-10 from disks
NewerSSDs are much faster

 

[Clickinaway]

Gea, thanks.

A few things: IT mode is no-RAID...ergo no RAID 10. I'm aware of the various flash methods from STH.

While I'd love to be able to support an SSD array a few problems arise there:

• The additional cost of an 2.5" adaptor to 3.5" SATA hotswap
• size: the geospatial data does have a chance to get large

I had originally thought about a similar set-up to what you were talking about which would leave me with a 3 tiered storage setup: SSD for OS/Hypervisor (should be mirrored for redudancy, but I may clone it or end up getting a USB that will work for Hyper-V 2012 and starting over again with Hyper-V Server 2012 R2); SSD for base VM's, WD Reds for deep storage. It's that middle area that has me concerned...how much 'active'/edited data I'll be looking at to provision size accordingly.

I'm still hung-up on your statement about IT mode being 'getting what you really want'. I'm still a bit concerned with performance and Storage Spaces, and this is why I had opted for hardware RAID.

I'm all ears though.

EDIT:
Gea, BTW, this is where i'm basing my info on on other similar LSI card options:
http://www.servethehome.com/lsi-sas-2008-raid-controller-hba-information/

 

[_Gea]

As the person who introduced the all-in-one idea years ago I possibly made too much presumptions

All-In-One=
A server where you can run any OS (from BSD over OSX and Solaris to Windows) at its best
including a storage server with barebone comparable reliability and performance.

This is usually ESXi as hypervisor (no other supports that OS's and is comparable small),
paired with a ZFS Solarish storage server and other VMs on ZFS via NFS.

In such a case, Raid (Mirror, Raid-10 or Raid-Z) and storage is delivered via ZFS
and a raidless HBA controller is what you want.

 

[Clickinaway]

Ok, thanks for the clarity in the definition....now I follow you.

Perhaps I should have said stand-alone/one-box deployment?

Any further thoughts on the drive selection?

 

[_Gea]

Avoid slow "green" disks and use any current 24/7 disks with warranty >=2 years
With hardwareraid, prefer TLER disks, with softwareraid like ZFS use any.