Dell PowerEdge T110 II

[Vrozaksen]

Hello! I got my PE T110 II for 125€ (I go pick up it tomorrow) with Intel Xeon E3-1240 V2 and 16GB DDR3.

Now I'm thinking about storage now. I readed almost whole forum about this server and i know i can fit here 6x 3,5 HDDs, but i want to have:

1x 120GB SSD for Boot (Maybe mSATA SSD? Can I use it?)
2x 500GB SSD (Mirror) for Jails/VMs (Maybe PCI-E Adapter for 2x M.2 SATA SSD?)
3, 4 or 6 HDDs (RAIDZ1/RAIDZ2) for Data (I don't know i can use 8TB or higher drives??)

Second (or maybe 4th question is about SATA controller, alot of people here are saying i will need an LSI or something, but some says PERC H200 is enough and can be flashed to IT, that's magic for me and still i don't know there is an built in on my unit)

Greetings!

 

[rvassar]

Dell T110 II's are nice units. It may already come with a LSI card. The PERC controllers of that generation are re-branded LSI units with custom firmware. You may just need to do an IT flash and run with it.

 

[HoneyBadger]

The T110-ii only has four internal 3.5" bays - you can use bay adapters for the two 5.25" bays to fit two more drives though, but be mindful of airflow and temperatures.

The motherboard has 5 SATA ports, with the sixth being an eSATA on the back panel. If you want to use SATA M.2 SSDs, you'll still need to connect them back to a controller somehow.

No built-in mSATA or M.2 slots on the board. There are dual USB 2.0 ports though, so you could use a USB-to-SATA adapter there. I'm uncertain if it can boot from NVMe, although it does have a UEFI firmware if I recall correctly. I've always booted mine in BIOS mode though.

If you do want to pack it full of drives, I'd suggest using the H200 (which can easily be reflashed to an LSI 9211-8i) for the four "main bays" up front, then the remaining SATA ports could be used as 2 for the upper 5.25" bays, two more for a dual/triple M.2 card (2x SATA with 1x NVMe on the back is a popular setup) and one last SATA slot for the boot device.