Following on from What will I do with those 2 x 1TB drives?, I received a fantastic suggestion from Mike Gerdts. Do more bifurcation.
Buy an ASUS HYPER M.2 X16 GEN 4 CARD and put 4x NVMe devices on each one. I can be adding 8 more storage devices to the chassis.
I see posts from people using this card in a Dell R730xd – The host in question is a Dell R730. I’ve posted on Serve The Home to see if anyone is already using them.
I opened the chassis this afternoon to measure. The physical space seems to be there: these cards are 27cm long.
In this photo, two PCIe cards (in slots 4 and 6) hold 1x Intel 450 GB 2.5″ SSD each. Those two devices make up the zroot for this host (that’s the ZFS root file system; that’s where the OS is installed).
Those are the slots into which the ASUS cards would go. zroot would need to transfer to NVMe devices.
This shows the three half-height(?) adaptors. On the right are 2x PCIe adaptors with 1 x 1TB and 1x 4TB NVMe each (see Moving a zpool to new devices – after the syncoid copy – oh wait, zfs replace).
On the left is a fiber NIC – I use that to get a 10G connection to the host. I could remove that and use an ethernet cable instead. That would allow me to add two more NVMe devices. In fact, I’m sure all slots can handle two NVMe devices. In my head, that would 16 NVMe devices in this host. That’s just wild.
For now, I wait and evaluate. I hope to make purchases by the end of this coming week. That should allow gear to arrive in time for the Thanksgiving period.
