Small Biz Storage

[p0lish]

Hi all, looking for some advice on storage options for our small office. Below is some details.

• 5-10 employees working off server at a time. Mainly excel/word/viewing photos/payroll software.
• 24U rack with plenty of room.
• Currently have Dell r330 with 4 hard drive bays (H330 internal sata backplane). 2 bays are free, 2 bays came preinstalled with the OS (500GB Raid 1 - Windows Server 2012 R2)
• Attached to r330 is a dell perc 5/e raid card, which is connected to a Dell MD1000 array.
• All data is currently on a Raid 5 array consisting of 5 2TB drives in the MD1000 (7.3TB Usable). There is a 2nd array of 5 1TB drives that is used to store backups. (2.7TB usable)
• Currently have 2.4TB free of 7.27TB

The items taking up the most space is photos of past/current projects. No large videos are stored. Performance is good for the most part. No one complains or thinks it's slow. Everyone is hard wired gigabit. We have offsite backup that uploads every night and an external 8tb onsite.

I'm mainly wondering if i can ditch the MD1000 and put in a couple enterprise 12TB drives in RAID 1 directly in the R330 server. Will this be a big performance hit? Should i upgrade to a newer external array? At home i run Unraid but that's for media storage with shucked 8tb drives. Flexible on budget to a point.

Thanks for any guidance/suggestions!

 

[Zedicus]

yes, the H330 is probably in RAID mode and that is fine for mirrors. the server will do exactly what you want. the ONLY caveat is it MIGHT give drive warnings on non-dell branded drives. slot in something you have laying around just as a drive compatibility test.