AR180 F1 - Looking for recommendation of hard drives can only support

russellharrower

I just purchased AR180 F1, and I am looking for some basic information regrading the hard drives. The manual said the AR180 F1 can only support

1. Up to 24TB SATA HDD(2TB3.5"x12HDDs) 
2. Up to 7.2TB SAS(600GB3.5”x12HDDs)

But it does not tell mw which drives I should go and purchase. I am also wondering if it could "technically" take say a 10TB 3.5 SATA hard drive and use that.

The reason I ask is if I based the document - https://static.acer.com/up/Resource/Acer/Servers/Rack/AR180_F1/Docs/20111104/acerAR180%20F1%20spec%20long%20v2.5.pdf

It was made in 2010 and in 2009 the largest hard drive according to Google was a 2TB SATA hard drive. So is this just their documentation limit or is this a real limit?

[Edited the thread to add the issue detail]

JackE

Yes, you should be able to use a single larger capacity drive if it's converted from MBR partitioning to GPT partitioning to overcome MBR's 2TB partition size limit. 3.5" SATA3 drives up to about 20TB capacities are readily available for about $400usd.

billsey

Yes, though it's also determined by your OS choice. Remember that older OSes might not support UEFI boot which requires GPT drives, while the old OSes use MBR and have the 2TB partition limit. What are yiou running on it? I believe it originally was intended to run with Windows Server 2008.

russellharrower

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/comment/1163594#Comment_1163594

I was looking at either using VMware ESXI (have not use that before) or Proxmox (Which I have used)

The idea is I need two/three containers:

First Container - Docker Server (NGINX Proxy Manager, Docker App 1, Docker App 2, Docker App 3)

Second Container - File Server (OwnCloud)

Third Container - PowerDNS (but technically this can run in a docker container)

JackE

WinServer12 might be a better fit for this old iron. Have no clue if recent vintages of the two mentioned would even install.

billsey

Then it's going to depend on your budget... The last pair of servers I built are running Windows Server, but things will be the same with the other OSes. I found 6TB SAS drives really cheap on the secondary market and installed eight of them on each machine. It was pretty cost effective and I have lots of storage for my home now. I use one to do backups on the other... The numbers they gave you were based on drive availability at the time, not on limits to the technology. I believe your true limits right now are closer to 12x20TB.