I have a Dell R730 (not the XD) and my goal is to boot off internal drives, leaving the front 2.5" bays free for data. In the past, with an R720, I did this with PCIe hot swap cards. I realize now, that I should have opened up the chassis and checked for possible power and data connections before posting. Despite that, here goes.
If you've already done that, I'd like to hear more. Otherwise, contingent upon finding a power source for my SSDs, I'm planning on getting a couple of StarTech S25SLOTR adapters. I have already tried NVMe drives in a PCIe adaptor, but wasn't able to get them to show up in the boot menu.
EDIT: I just found these cards, which do not require cables. ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB839SP-B SATA Hot Swap Removable Frame for PCIe 2.0 x1 Slot - if they work, yea, they are pricy, it removes the need to find power and data. These will be boot drives, so the need for speed is not so great.
EDIT 2023-02-13 : those ICY DOCK adaptors work. Here's one of them under FreeBSD 13.1:
Thank you.
If you've already done that, I'd like to hear more. Otherwise, contingent upon finding a power source for my SSDs, I'm planning on getting a couple of StarTech S25SLOTR adapters. I have already tried NVMe drives in a PCIe adaptor, but wasn't able to get them to show up in the boot menu.
EDIT: I just found these cards, which do not require cables. ICY DOCK ToughArmor MB839SP-B SATA Hot Swap Removable Frame for PCIe 2.0 x1 Slot - if they work, yea, they are pricy, it removes the need to find power and data. These will be boot drives, so the need for speed is not so great.
EDIT 2023-02-13 : those ICY DOCK adaptors work. Here's one of them under FreeBSD 13.1:
Code:
ada0 at ahcich1 bus 0 scbus1 target 0 lun 0
ada0: <INTEL SSDSC2BB480G6K G201CS01> ACS-2 ATA SATA 3.x device
ada0: Serial Number [redacted]
ada0: 600.000MB/s transfers (SATA 3.x, UDMA6, PIO 512bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 457862MB (937703088 512 byte sectors)
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