Well, i see different challenges here.
- The R730 goes EOS three years ago. So not all Disks from 3 years ago are available as a today Customer kit which Dell can sell you. This have nothing to do with spare parts as replacements for customers which have a support contract
- Find out which SSD was supportet for today vSAN and the "old" R730. I do the same as depping suggest by lurking in the Ready Node specs for Dell Servers because you can see what they have used for cache/buffer as well as for the capacity drives. Often you can see TBW values as same as vendor codes like "PM85x, s4510" so you can identify the Disk and check if its available and how much is costs. This is the way as i use for our self build vSAN cluster. Problem is that the most rescent Ready Node PDF doesnt contain R730 any more. So check for an old PDF or try the new one and check later if the Disk is compatible in the R730.
As a Dell Partner i can see more infos on the OSC as the John Doe Customer on the Premierpage. But you should consult your local dell sales prep. - About using non $Vendor disks in major Vendor servers like HP,Dell and the others, because everthing is possible
- Can work
- Can work until you perform a FW Upgrade on the Server/HBA
- Can work but you see orange warning in server monitoring about unsupported parts
- Partially working (Disk goes into power saving mode and server HBA thinks WTF? and drop the drive)
- Vendors doesnt sell disk trays alone... you have to buy Chinese clones instead(not that problem
) - Hard times to perform FW updates
4. Investing "money" in servers which are half of their live time isnt that easy to argument all the time
If you the guy who stands 24/7 in front your servers with a Eprom burner and serial cable in the hand and philipps screwdriver between your tooth's you can think about using non $vendor stuff in your major brand server but if youre only visiting your server once a year to check if its there dont do it.
In the past there was a support max. size for the cache/buffer device. In a AFA config only the writes are buffered so it depends on the amount of writes how large the disk should be. Instead of using a large cache disk and 7 capacity drives you should go for 2 diskgroup with a smaller cache device and 4 capacity drives each. The cache device isnt use as a Read Cache!
The HBA330 supports both SATA and SAS.
We use the 960GB and 1.92TB Read Intensive/or mixed used cheap SATA SSDs from Dell in our Poweredge servers and they are on the HCL. In the older ones the cache device is a Intel DC P3600 and in the newer its a Write Intensive 400GB SAS SSD.
Regards,
Joerg