He original poster was looking at Ebay for a source for this equipment to save (a lot of) money probably. The drives in the server are connected to a PERC6i. You'll have to buy a PERC6E (i = internal (drives), E = external (drives)). A PERC6E plus an MD1000 shouldn't run very much, and this raid controller supports non-Dell drives just fine (which could save money). I would still recommend to go with enterprise class drives, but you can pick those up 'retail' for a lot less than Dell branded enterprise drives.
Hi, sorry for being ignorant, but bare with me. Previously in small business I have seen/used tapes and usb drives as daily backups for one and two week rotation. Works, but it is messy and slow. I was thinking of using say a powervault md3000 with 15 1tb sata drives, each drive being avail as a drive letter, and have backup program do a backup to a different drive letter each day for two weeks. Am I way off here? I have a r710 with a perc 6 doing raid 1+0. Running windows 2008r2 core hosting about 6 odd VM's. All critical data resides within a single VHD. I like suggestions of older equipment I can purchase from online auctions sites, as that is how I built the r710. My understanding is that using a HBA card on the r710 to a das will be a faster backup than over a network or usb interface, thus my interest. Thanks for your time.
New to enterprise storage, what powervault DAS solution do I need?