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Building cheap SAN storage for home lab VMware ESXi - Part 1


I was thinking to build cheap SAN storage for home lab VMware ESXi share storage. My target to build is compact and budget is less than 200 SGD. When I was digging information from Google and nothing satisfied me. So I have decided to use my old HP dc7900 SFF desktop as SAN storage. That PC was bought around $80 SGD during auction from my company last 2 years ago.  As you know SFF can only put maximum 2 x 3.5" HDD internally.
I have idea to utilize CDRom drive space and replace with those 2.5" 4 bay hot swap HDD Cage.  I found Monoprice 10058 5.25" to 4x2.5" SAS/SATA 6Gb/s hot-swap Aluminum HDD Cage w/key from eBay and purchased with 35 USD. This HDD Cage support up to 12mm 2.5" HDD so it can install SAS HDD as well. Initially I have intended to purchased 6 bay or 8 pay but they only support 9mm and 7mm thin HDD.



RAID card
My purose is to use as SAN storage. So I was also looking for cheap RAID card. After searching a few information, most of LSI RAID are above $70 USD so I have decided to go with HP Smart Array P410 with 512MB  cache with battery backup.

The cost is only $30.50 USD which is 2 to 3 times cheaper than other brands in the market. It support RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, 60. There is also pros and cons for this card, For RAID 6 and 60 you need to buy additional license. For me I'm building RAID 0 to get the highest performance. There will be another 3.5" 1TB SATA HDD internally for backup purpose.

The maximum capacity of 2.5" SATA HDD in the market is 1TB and I just need performance that's why I choose RAID 0.  And the good news is I don't need to buy 4 x 2.5" SATA HDD for SAN storage. There are a few 146GB SAS HDD lying around and I decided to use them as SAN storage.
After setup the picture is below.






To be continued Part 2.
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