A customer has a PowerStore 3200T system with only base enclosure consisting of 15 SSD 1920 GB drives and wants to expand the available capacity. What is the most cost-effective drive addition from a raw and usable capacity perspective to achieve the result wanted by the customer?

The primary goal is the most cost-effective expansion of raw and usable capacity. PowerStore appliances allow for the addition of drives with different capacities into an existing system. Option B proposes adding six 3.84 TB NVMe SSDs, which provides 23.04 TB of raw capacity. This is double the capacity offered by Option A (11.52 TB). In storage hardware, larger capacity drives typically offer a lower cost-per-terabyte. Therefore, adding the 3.84 TB drives is the most cost-effective strategy to achieve the largest increase in available capacity. Option C is incorrect as SCM drives are intended for performance acceleration, not cost-effective capacity expansion.

A. While this is a valid expansion, adding drives of the same size provides significantly less capacity than option B, making it less cost-effective for the stated goal of maximizing capacity.
C. NVMe SCM drives are optimized for high performance and low latency, serving as a metadata tier. They offer low capacity at a very high cost, making them unsuitable for cost-effective capacity expansion.

1. Dell PowerStore: Hardware Information Guide (Page 11, "Drive rules"): This document explicitly states the rules for populating a PowerStore base enclosure. It confirms, "All drives in the base enclosure must be the same type and speed. Drives can be of different capacities." This rule directly supports the validity of adding 3.84 TB drives (Option B) to an appliance that already contains 1.92 TB drives.

2. Dell PowerStore: Best Practices Guide (Page 10, "Drives"): This guide clarifies the role of different drive types. It states, "SCM drives are used as a metadata tier to accelerate system-level functions such as deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning. SCM drives do not contribute to the user data capacity of the system." This directly invalidates Option C as a solution for expanding user capacity.

3. Dell PowerStore: Introduction to the Platform White Paper (Page 19, "Dynamic Resiliency Engine"): This document details the PowerStore storage architecture, including the Dynamic Resiliency Engine (DRE). It notes that when adding drives, they are added in packs, with a minimum of six drives required for an expansion. All options correctly adhere to this minimum requirement.