What all is needed to convert R740 to NVMe bays?

[5mall5nail5]

Hey all - I have 4 Dell R740s that are the lame 8 x 3.5" drive bay models. I use them as hypervisors as I have a SC847 still with a bunch of SM863 disks for dedicated storage. Was thinking of making one of the R740s an NVMe chassis and moving TrueNAS to that. Is it easy to buy the necessary parts for NVMe chassis or would I be better off finding an entire empty R740 and moving all my stuff over? How much of the parts are common?

Thanks!

 

[Chriggel]

This is not possible. There were no R740 configurations with a NVMe chassis. This was exclusive to the R740xd in the 14th Gen Dell Intel servers. Dell only offered 16x2.5" SAS/SATA and 8x.3.5" SAS/SATA configurations for the R740. You have to use the rear risers of the R740 to add NVMe storage.

 

[cptcrunch]

Not sure this applies to the R740s, but this is what I did for my R720xd. I had purchased an ex-google search appliance with 26x2.5" drives. I wanted the LFF model, so I purchased a barebones chassis for a R720XD LFF that came with a backplane. I was able to swap everything over to the LFF version from the SFF version. The motherboard, cables, power supplies, shrouds, fans, everything transferred. The only different I found between the two chassis was chassis itself, LFF vs SFF, and the backplane. You may want to look at it from that perspective, move everything you have, but you need a new chassis that supports nvmes and backplane.