Dell R610 with Consumer SSD disks in RAID 10

[sahostking]

Hi

We have two old servers running Consumer Grade 1TB SSD disks for last year with no issues whatsoever. However we would like to put in Intel DC Enterprise SSDs now.

I'd like to know as its RAID 10 servers that if we remove one SSD and insert into its place a different SSD with same size but different brand. Say from Crucial MX500 1TB to Intel DC 960GB and it rebuilds. Will it rebuild successfully and can we continue doing so until all disks are replaced with Intel DC SSDs?

Is this a possible option or a dangerous one

 

[Vladimir Bulgaru]

Possible, but dangerous. It depends a lot on what are you using to create the RAID.

• Is it a hardware RAID, managed by the controller? If so, it is highly advisable to have at least 4 drives of the same model. In your case you're substituting 1TB drive with 960GB one and this may likely result in RAID rejecting it.
• Is it a software RAID, managed by ZFS? If yes, it should be possible to use it, but not the best option, since all will default to worst specs out of your drives.

I'd suggest you change your setup and use the Enterprise SSDs for OS and the consumer ones for VMs. This way you'd balance out the wear (OS can produce much more wear than VMs at times) and would not need to combine them into one RAID.

It's hard to give better advices not knowing the full setup. Can you clarify:

1. How many consumer SSDs are there per server (before and after the substitution with enterprise SSDs)?
2. How many enterprise SSDs you want to add per server?
3. What do you store on the drives?
4. What kind of VMs are there within Proxmox?
5. What are you planning to achieve with the substitution?

 

[sahostking]

Was hoping it would be possible.

Guess safer just to build new server with new disks, add it cluster and live migrate them across. then remove the old disks from other server and rebuild.

Better safe than sorry. Really want to get rid of those consumer disks

 

[Vladimir Bulgaru]

Totally agree!

Especially if you want to swap all the disks.