For a server computer that is going to serve virtual machines it is best to have as much hard drive storage space as possible, in that way, you can store many virtual machines and have the ability to take as many snapshots of the virtual machines as needed. For our project, we ultimately will go with a separate storage area network to meet our storage needs, however that is part of another project. So in the meantime, we decided to go with what we could afford on our limited budget. We decided to purchase four 7200 rpm, SATA hard drives, one terabyte each in storage capacity. We will probably seek to put the drives in some kind of software RAID array, either a RAID 1, RAID 5 or RAID 6. Since our motherboard supports SAS we could have gone with a SAS to SATA solution. Other faster and more expensive options could have been to purchase a hardware RAID array card or even a SCSI controller card and SCSI hard drives.
Currently, SATA CD/DVD drives are your best bet for optical drives, since IDE interfaces are disappearing from motherboards. Many motherboards including the server motherboard in our project do however still have an IDE drive that would support an older optical drive or hard drive.
In this video we secure the optical drives and the hard drives into the server case. The drives are installed prior to the CPUs and cooling units so there is less obstruction and therefore easier to install within the case.