Thinking of virtualising my current WHS box onto a Hyper-V 2012 server so I can spin up VMs whenever I need to.
I am just stuck at which storage option I should go for.
Currently, the WHS box has an SSD as an OS drive and 3x3TB hard drives in a flex raid ("RAID 4", so 6TB usable space) array running snapshot RAID for media. The problem with flexraid is that it doesn't play too nice with Windows and stuff like shares are broken. Plus, if I am spinning up VMs, I want any VM to have access to the data pool (something I don't think I could do with flexraid, as I would need to install it on the hypervisor, which I don't think it supports).
On a bit of a budget so choices are pretty much down to:
1. Onboard Intel "FakeRAID" RAID 5
2. Onboard Intel "FakeRAID" RAID 10 (will need an additional disk)
3. Some cheap used hardware RAID controller off ebay
4. ???
#2 would probably seem like the obvious choice however I only have room for four 3.5" HDDs in the case, so by going with #2 I won't be able to add more drives without getting a bigger case.
The obvious choice for me was #1, but i have heard I should be avoiding RAID 5 on "FakeRAID" as it's horribly slow. FYI, the CPU is a Xeon E3 1230 v2 (i7 3770 equiv) if that'll make the parity calcs any faster.
One requirement which is a must is being able to expand the array with new disks without having to start from scratch.
Any advice welcomed :)!