I have one of those running Proxmox. Nice hardware. I would make the extra SATA drive into a pool and use it for non critical applications or even docker volumes. Just be sure to back it up regularly.
My advice would be to use a small 2.5" SATA SSD as a boot drive (because you can use an M.2 drive more usefully).
If you can find a 4TB 2230 NVMe drive, you could then have a 3x RAIDZ1 NVME SSD pool for 8TB of useable storage. Unfortunately I could only find 4TB in 2242 and 2TB in 2230. However you can buy 2230->2280 adapters which would allow this
Also, HP say the 2230 slot is for WLAN - you might want to double check that you can use it for NVME.
Yess, the 2230 is occupied by default but works for storage → in my case at least it does :).
The 2230 slot is only PCIe x1, wouldn’t that slow down my raid?
I thought I read somewhere that Raid Z1 isn’t recommended with big drives.
A x1 slot is well suited for boot, if you can find a cheap drive in 2230 size.
This is “RAID5 is dead” with respect to HDDs, especially those with an URE rate of 1E-14.
It doesn’t apply to SSDs with typical URE rate of 1E-17.
RAIDZ1
Yes - you can read it somewhere that RAIDZ1 is not recommended for large drives but this:
- Is based on lengthy resilver times for HDDs due to the stress of extensive mechanical seeks (and the risks of a 2nd HDD failing due to these), and applies less to NVMe which doesn’t do mechanical seeks.
- Only applies for 4+ HDDs.
- Only applies for 5+ HDDS <= 6-8TB.
2230 slot PCIe x1
According to this spec the 2230 port is PCIe 3 x1 and the 2280 slots are each PCIe 4 x4.
So you are right that the 2230 slot will be slower, and the RAIDZ array will effectively operate at the speed of the 2230. However, whether you will notice this is a different question. If you are running apps, then you will. If you are only doing NAS to it, then it will depend on whether other factors become a bottleneck such as your LAN speeds.
In the end it will come down to whether you are happy with 4TB useable, or would prefer to sacrifice a bit of speed for 8TB useable. (But remember an NVME on a PCIe 3 x1 is likely still to be a heck of a lot faster than a SATA HDD.)
Makes sense, Z1 would be sweet then.
For nas operations my bottleneck will definitely be the lan speed. Thing is, I will plan to run a few apps & it hurts a little to sacrifice the speed for storage that I most likely won’t use.
There is also a dgpu port that goes to 8x pcie. I tried to figure out if it’s possible to salvage this for storage but there is little to no information about this port online.
I don’t think that the mini has a discrete GPU slot.
