I am trying to build a Truenas scale cluster I have three R520s but the issue is that all of the drive bays are filled with SAS drives that I intent to make part of the cluster. I don’t have any additional places to put drives in the systems. I don’t want to boot the nodes from USB as this project may eventually get used in a limited production role. I would like to get dual SD cards for the nodes but I may be limited to what I have on hand which led me to the netbooting idea. Is there a “for dummies” guide for running truenas from a share?
Negative, TrueNAS is an appliance OS.
It’s best installed on a small SSD, which will be more reliable than a USB or SD card, which typically have a limited number of write cycles before failing (ask me how I know).
If you’re going to be running TrueNAS in production, you then want something reliable instead of trying to cobble together a solution.
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A cursory look at R520 shows that there may be a slim optical drive bay slot on the chassis and at least one sata port on the board. Perhaps you could use an slim optical to ssd adapter to mount a drive in that position?
USB Drives are no longer a good option for TrueNas. I believe there was some kind of change made with respect to a log file relocation that occured a few versions back. The writes will kill a USB stick fast… Also ask me how I know…LOL
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I wonder if you can get a PCI card adaptor for a SATA or nvme drive?
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Given you are using end of life hardware, a bunch of USB to SATA adapters (10USD a pop) and some velcro tape will be your best option … The x20 Dell SD card readers were a bunch of crap anyways 
…
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I have an nvme to pcie adapter that I did try. The system recognizes it and you can actually do the install but it won’t boot from it.
That’s a shame, perhaps a SATA PCI + SSD will be more compatible?
For better compatibility, perhaps even get an LSI HBA card and gently place a boot SSD…somewhere?
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You may be able to use SATA dom. Try to find if there is a compatible SATA dom for DELL servers
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Unfortunately booting from NVME needs UEFI/firmware support (you are booting in UEFI mode right?). Alternatively you can put the bootloader on a USB stick and use the NVME as root, but I’m unsure if truenas supports this.
Possible alternatives:
A smaller M.2 SATA USB enclosure, some of these are smaller and only fit 2230 and 2242 drives.
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