OpenMetal Large v5 Drive Bay Capacity

Q: How many drive bays does the OpenMetal Large v5 support?

The Large v5 chassis supports 10 total drive bays — 2 are populated by default with 6.4 TB Micron 7500 MAX NVMe drives (12.8 TB raw), leaving 8 expansion bays available, separate from the dedicated boot drive pair.

See Large v5 specs

Boot storage and data storage are kept on separate physical drive pools, an OpenMetal design decision that carries forward from the Large v4. Two 960 GB SSDs serve as the dedicated OS drives in RAID 1, completely isolated from the 10-bay data NVMe array. This means OS-level I/O (logging, package management, system monitoring) never contends with application data I/O on the Micron 7500 MAX drives. The 8 unpopulated data bays leave room for additional 6.4 TB or 12.8 TB Micron 7500 MAX drives, taking the data tier to approximately 64 TB raw NVMe per server at the high end.

The 10-bay chassis is a meaningful step up from the Large v4’s 6-bay design. For workloads that previously needed to be split across multiple Large v4 servers (or that pushed customers toward the Storage Server tier prematurely), the v5 keeps storage growth on the same compute node — preserving NUMA locality, avoiding the operational complexity of additional servers, and keeping the cost model simpler. Examples that benefit: blockchain archive nodes growing past 12 TB, PostgreSQL deployments with large write-ahead-log and table-space footprints, and ClickHouse columnar storage tiers.

Drive expansion is a customer-initiated upgrade. Contact OpenMetal to add drives to a deployed Large v5; for new orders, configure the target drive count up front so the server ships fully populated. All data drives are Micron 7500 MAX or the equivalent 7450 MAX in some configurations; both are 3 DWPD endurance class with 5-year warranties and PCIe Gen4 connectivity to the chassis backplane.