The one part that I neglected to fully research properly when I bought the Dell PowerEdge R610 Server was the pricing of the SAS 2.5 inch drives. So of course that’s going to be the part that comes back to bite me in the ass. And today, it did!
Today I found out the pricing on 2.5 inch SAS drives is crazy expensive the higher the capacity you try to go! I had originally planned on sourcing some 2TB drives, as those are the highest capacity available for my existing PERC (PowerEdge RAID Controller) 6/i, but those are $180 to $220 each! So I’ll need to research that further and see what my options are…
In the meantime, I’ve already found at least one solid option to help get this server off the ground!
A workaround that I can use is to pull the optical drive and hookup a 2.5 inch SSD to the cable instead. The system will recognize this as a boot drive and I can load Proxmox onto that. I’ll still need to get some drives for the backplane, but this will buy me some breathing room so I can take my time to find a good deal somewhere.