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The original was posted on /r/homelab by /u/Bane-o-foolishness on 2023-08-30 22:06:56+00:00.

Hello All: I’ve got a Dell XPS 8940 with 128G RAM. It runs well enough but I need a bunch of fairly fast internal storage as I’m in the middle of standing up multiple VMware Workstation VMs for some memory, CPU, and I/O hungry apps. I’ve got a 1T M2 for my boot drive and a few year old 2.5T 3.5" HDD drive for my work volume. In addition to the server VMs, I want to be able to run a couple of workstation VMs to do 802.1X auth testing. Clearly my poor old HDD is sweating trying to keep up with things so I’d like to update my storage a bit. Some things I’ve considered:

• Using a pair of M2 sticks with a 2.5" SATA adapter to have RAID 1. The downside is that I’d be wasting 1/2 the space. Also this would cost a fair amount for a pair of 2G M2s.
• Using a trio of 2.5" HDDs with a PCI x4 RAID controller and a RAID 3 configuration. This worries me a bit as my system came with an Nvidia 3060 that gobbles up a fair amount of juice. I considered removing it but the term “patricide” comes to mind.

I’m not excessively fond of external RAID as I’m trying to get some serious performance out of this. With all of my competing goals, what would any of you recommend?