The small business I work for is migrating over to an S2D cluster. Most of the environment we're going to run on SSD, however we do have a sizable portion of data that is rarely accessed but does need to be accessible on demand. I was thinking we could save a decent amount of money without sacrificing much performance by throwing in some HDDs for an HDD storage tier.
However, the problem I'm running into is there doesn't seem to be any Enterprise "value" grade HDDs in a 2.5" form factor. Something like a WD Gold or Seagate Exos is a really good value per GB in 3.5" for data where performance isn't
a huge factor, but similar drives in 2.5" are $200-300 per TB, which is very close to the cost of a SATA SSD. The only one I could find is a WD red, which I do use in my home lab and they perform pretty well relative to small business needs, I get like
600MB/s write to them with 8 columns (though maybe that will degrade a bit as data becomes less sequential?), but they're not certified in Windows Server Catalog and they're a NAS drive and don't look like they're designed for a production file server in mind,
even if the production file server has very low usage.
Are there any low cost\low performance enterprise grade HDDs out there in 2.5", or should I abandon the idea of an HDD tier unless we decide to get a server with 3.5" bays?