ok so i just got a new to me r720 xd to redo my old truenas server.
i just realized that i shouldn’t use a usbstick for the os. but that brings some problems to how i was going to set it up, because all my drive bays are spoken for. i had some m.2 250 ssds i thought i could use on a pci adapters but didn’t realize the dell won’t boot from it.
i would really like to use the servers internal usb, any one know of a usb that would adapt x2 m.2 so i can have redundancy? or a better idea
Personally I wouldn’t trust many of the USB to dual m.2 adapters out there for a primary boot disk. Even if you have two drives, you still would have only one USB controller on the adapter…also for those “RAID” USB adapters you would be trusting the adapter to mirror your disks for you.
Alternatively the dual SD card adapter offered on the R720 will work with the 720XD. However it will give problems with SD cards over 32GB. Seems like the option was primarily intended for an OS that loaded into memory like ESXI. Also whether or not you want to bother with SD cards is up to you.
Do you have the flex bay option by chance?
My recommendation would definitely be FlexBay It gives you two 2.5” disks and connects to the backplane or alternatively you can use a separate HBA or RAID adapter.
I do have the flex bay, my plan was to use those for a ssd mirror for vms.
For the last 10 years ive run freenas on one of those usb header to 2 flash drives, im pretty sure at the time that was a recommended way of doing it.
Ill probably just get some small ssds for the flex bay and use some mvme on a pci adapter for the vms
Any suggestions for size/type of ssd for boot drive
I believe the decision to drop the flash drive recommendation was a result of cheap flash drives, not a problem with USB itself. Any single drive m.2 to USB adapter should work quite nicely, I would think.
Does it have an optical drive?
Get a laptop 2.5 SATA optical drive caddy and a SATA SSD
M.2 is a waste for trunas boot drive
A USB to m.2 is probably as prone to failure as a flash drive would
If you have an open full-size PCIE slot, there are PCIE to 2.5 SATA adapters out there. I use one of these.
Yeah i already said i tried that. But you cant boot from pci in the dell server
With the capacity of drives i wish you could use the rest of your os drive for a pool
That is what I do. Since I have the LFF 720XD, I use the main backplane for large spinning drives, flexbay to boot from then NvME for fast VM storage. It sucks that that gen dell doesn’t support bifercation but still has a good amount of PCIe slots to put single NvME adapters in.
The R720XD does not have an optical drive and the onboard SATA controller is unfortunately disabled…