These arrived just recently and I can’t wait for the weekend to test them out. I purchased a second hand Dell 7820 with a xeon gold 6132 and found that there are no nvme slots nor a U.2 backplane installed.
The nvme issue is easily solved with a pcie adapter card. What excited me though is that even if there was no U.2 backplane, there’s a pair of sff-8643 ports on the motherboard. So all I needed are some sff-8643 to sff-8369 cables (I’ve already plugged them in so no pictures right now since the machine is currently on and running my work vms) as well as these U.2 to nvme adapters.
With those sff-8643 ports I basically get 8 pcie lanes worth of bandwidth earmarked for storage; with the adapters I can use nvme (which I have quite a few) instead of purchasing more expensive sas drives (not like I don’t want to get one of those Intel optane ssd sas drives, but splurging on them right now isn’t very wise).
I’ll probably use them as a zfs mirror to store proxmoz disk images. Right now everything (i.e. operating system, isos, disk images, lxc templates etc) are on the same single nvme drive and while everything is still fine, the lack of redundancy means the downtime inconvenience is huge.
