Ok, so you know what happens when you assume?

I should have gathered more information from this new client before assuming I knew what they needed. I shouldn't have assumed they knew what they were talking about

So it turns out my client has a Dell PowerEdge T320 with a backplane. What they told me were three drives are actually 6 drives in RAID 1 pairs. So the drive I was going to replace with (as the customer requested) a 2TB SSD for $300 would actually require 2 2TB drives if we want to keep the RAID (probably a good idea). This would be $600 just for the drives.

Once I finally got to the server I discovered all of this, and I also discovered they had no storage management capabilities, so I had to install Dell's OpenManage just to see what was going on and especially to see which drive was pulling what duties.

Naturally, this made me take a giant step back and reassess. What I thought was just a desktop in a closet serving some files looks to be a more legit setup. What would you folks suggest? Are consumer-level SSDs even appropriate for a server like this? Would they break any sort of warranty or Dell customer contract?

Also, would the users even see an advantage with these SSDs? One thing I completely spaced on was to check whether the drives (they had spares) were SAS drives or SATA. I gather SAS drives are pretty fast, so I'm not sure and SSD is going to give a ton more performance, especially if it all has to go through a gigabit connection.

ALSO, the customer is now talking about going to 4TB SSD drives, and now we're talking about $1500 in drives. I'm not even sure if the controller/OS are going to support drives that big. I don't know if this thing is on UEFI or not and isn't that the deciding factor? Can I check that without rebooting?

I'm spinning a bit here. I'm wondering if I shouldn't just have them order new drives from Dell and we'll either put in larger drives or convert the RAID 1 to a 5 and add drives as space requires...