This time, our job was much easier than considering motherboard constraints. This time, drives determine most of our decision.
Hot-swappable hard drives are slightly larger than their standard brethren, due to the swap enclosure. Yet cases exist than can hold up to 24 hot-swap drives across the front when stacked vertically. If we need that many storage devices, we save space by taking advantage of cases that can accommodate them. We also need to remember to reserve two drives for the operating system in a RAID-1, separate from our PostgreSQL storage. We can't diagnose problems on a server that can't boot.
Some cases reserve mounts inside, or at the rear, for operating-system drives. They are harder to replace, but make more ...
