One of our members picked up a server for a homelab recently. It was a good deal, an R730XD populated with a decent amount of RAM, two SSDs for OS boot, and eight spinny drives for storage. I helped set it up.
It was ready to party right out of the box, and we installed ESXi on it right away. But the server was outfitted with something I’ve never seen before.
So let’s count the drive bays on this monstrosity. 2x 2.5″ bays in the back (for the boot SSDs) — this is actually a great arrangement in my opinion, to keep them separate from the storage drives. On the front, two rows of four (or is it four columns of two?) totalling 8x 3.5″ drive bays. I like 3.5″ drives for storage, because you can fill it up with the 12Gbps high-capacity SAS drives, and they’re super-affordable.
What’s weird about that? Wait for it…
Above the 8x 3.5″ drive bays are 18x (!?!?!?!?!?) 1.8″ drive bays (?!?!?!?!?!?!). First of all, I’ve been doing this for a minute. What the fuck are 1.8″ drives? They must have gone obsolete as soon as they were released, because I’d never seen them before.
