I am building a new small [primarily] storage server, to try out all the new Windows Server 2012 (and R2) features (Storage Spaces, ReFS, Deduplication etc). The motherboard has 6 SATA ports and the case room for 4 HDDs and 2 SSD, so that looks like a good idea, but …
SS has lots of features that exploit SSDs, but the boot/system disk can’t be included and I would like the OS mirrored! So what is the best option for setting this up?
1) 2x SSD hardware RAID + 4x HDD in a SS pool (so no SSDs for SS)
2) Somehow partition the SSDs and RAIS the system partition and add the rest to the pool (which I don’t think is possible)
3) Not RAID the OS etc and add the other SSD to the pool (not very robust)
Any thoughts or other options I have missed?
-- David