HDD/SDD support for Intel W480

[parthmanair]

Hello,

I hope your loved ones are safe and healthy.

I have a Dell Precision 3440 SFF workstation. It has Intel W480 chipset with Intel Xeon W 1290 processor. As per Dell it can have following HDD configurations (from what I am interested in):

A. 1 x M.2 PCIe SSD with - 1 x 3.5 HDD.
B. 1 x M.2 PCIe SSD with - 2 x 2.5 HDDs.

I wanted to know if mix drive types:
A. 1 x M.2 PCIe SSD with - 1 x 3.5’ HDD and 1 x 2.5’ SSD
OR
B. 1 x M.2 PCIe SSD with - 2 x 2.5’ SSDs

I am running VMWare ESXi on the workstaion and getting an enterprise grade SSD is expensive. Hence I want to use HDD (NAS grade, which I had lying around) and one additional 2.5’ SSD for the IOPS. As the number of VMs grow latency is eating into my work, I agree mistakes have been made, I am trying to best salvage from this. I purchased the machine 5 years warranty 3 months back :D. I have even connected a NAS (Synology) using iSCSI to put few machines on the NAS. I have one M.2 SSD which I use to mount partitions from as opposed to using it as a boot devices since it is not enterprise grade.

Thank you.

PS: Pardon me but the forum isn’t allowing me to write links.

[wertigon]

B is perfectly acceptable, there is no difference compatibility wise with a 2.5" SSD and a 2.5" HDD. The HDD might be a smidge higher than the SSD, from the OS point of view the two are identical in (more or less) every conceivable way.

A, however, most probably is not, since the 3.5" HDD most probably covers both 2.5" slots. This is quite a common technique in smaller builds.