A client needed about 28 TB of fast, reliable storage on a dedicated server. Hard drives were too slow for their workload, and public cloud storage at that scale was too expensive. We designed a custom SSD RAID solution.
The build
We used Supermicro BigTwin hardware with dual Intel Xeon processors (E5 or Xeon Gold, depending on the CPU requirements). Each node supports up to six 2.5” drive bays. We populated them with six 7.68 TB Samsung SSDs in RAID6.
RAID6 stripes data across all six drives with dual parity, meaning two drives can fail simultaneously without data loss. Usable capacity is about 28 TB from 46 TB of raw SSD. Read performance is excellent because the controller stripes reads across all drives.
Why SSD RAID over HDD RAID
SSDs have no moving parts, so they’re more reliable and much faster for random I/O. For workloads like databases, large datasets with random access patterns, or applications that need consistent low-latency I/O, SSD RAID is transformative. The difference between SSD and HDD RAID for database queries can be 10x or more.
Cost vs public cloud
The total cost of this build was significantly less than equivalent storage on AWS, Azure, or GCP, especially for sustained workloads. Public cloud storage is priced per GB per month plus I/O charges, which adds up quickly at 28 TB. A dedicated server with fixed pricing is far more predictable.
If you need high-capacity SSD storage on a dedicated server, contact us for a custom quote. We can design storage layouts for any workload.