Building dedicated Veeam box; have Qs about storage strategy

[cparker4486]

Hi there,

I'm finally getting the opportunity to build a dedicated Veeam box. It will act as the primary proxy/target with the purpose of being fast enough to do SureBackup. It will have just enough storage for a little growth and a few restore points (copies being sent to one device onsite and one offsite.)

I'm looking at a Dell R630 with a PERC H330 controller. Dell's pricing on SSDs is outrageous (for my budget) so I'm left with either forgoing the whole thing and upgrading an old server or finding compatible off-the-shelf SSDs for the R630.

As I'm aware, Dell doesn't publish a hardware compatibility list for their RAID controllers so I'll need to figure out what works, and what doesn't, myself.

Does anyone know specifically which SSDs are compatible with the Perc H330 controller? Or, in general, what does your experience tell you should work? I presume that any high-quality Samsung or Intel drive will be compatible but it'd be great to have a little more confidence.

edit:

As an alternative to the above, I've also been thinking about purchasing from SuperMicro. From what I can tell they are less restrictive on what hardware (storage) they are compatible with. Anyone have experience with them?

edit 2:

I've got to stop submitting this before I'm actually done...

The other piece of this is whether I should utilize the HW RAID controller for the SSD storage drive or let Windows do it with Storage Spaces. I've been hearing great things about Storage Spaces especially with Server 2012 R2 (and upcoming 2016.)

Hopefully this is the last edit.