New installer trying to understand hardware

TrueNAS General
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Hello all, new installer here. I am trying to understand more about the hardware in my Dell Power edge R420. I am new to the server world and have mainly been a gamer/data hoarder for the past 10 years. My plan is to use this server with Truenas Scale for home backups, Plex, and see what I can integrate with home assistant.

CPU(s): Intel Zeon E5-2407 (probably will upgrade in the future)
RAM: 32GB (16GB/CPU, DDR3 ECC, more sticks on the way already)
HDD’s: 4 -4TB SAS Dell drives (6TB drives are in the mail headed to me now)
(ETA): currently have the latest stable version of TrueNas Scale installed

I understand I have to flash the raid card to IT mode (figured that out after install and launch when I tried to create storage pools and I had no drives available), so I’m working my way through that, but from my research it seems that it’s possible to install an LSI 9300 HBA and run a boot drive off of that card, is that info accurate? I don’t particularly want to lose one of my 3.5" SAS drives to be a boot drive if possible.

Also, is it recommended to use Cache SSD’s in the system? I have a handful of Samsung Evo 1TB SATA SSD’s that i don’t have a home for and thought this may be a good use for them.

I apologize if these questions have been asked before and answered, I did some googling around but between my lack of knowledge and some of the terms used I didn’t find a whole lot of info.

Based off of a few youtube videos I assumed that it is possible to run a boot drive off of the LSI PCIE add on card and I have one on the way as well as the cables necessary to connect SATA drives to the card, and a modular PSU to power the SSD(s) if I’m able to configure boot and cache drives in that manner.

I appreciate any and all assistance, my brother in law has the same server I do and we will be building his the same as mine once I have mine operational.

Thank you,
Jake

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Does your server have one or two CPUs installed? You may not need the computing power of two Xeons but the second CPU is usually needed for all PCIe slots to work. I’ve done this mistake with a Supermicro server once (and only once). Please check your documentation.

Cache SSD drives are usually not needed in systems of your size.

For booting I often use a PCIe M.2 card with one or two SSDs. Your system might be too old to boot from NVMe directly, but there are also solutions for SATA SSDs.

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My server has both CPU sockets populated, with the cost of the components I wanted to run a little “overkill” and err on the side of performance.
I appreciate the heads up on that though, if it had been an issue it probably would’ve taken some reading on my end to figure out.

Good to know, I will plan on not having a cache drive.

Sounds like a plan, unless it causes an issue I think I will plan on running the LSI card with the SATA cable attached, as I believe I will end up using the other port on the HBA to connect a JBOD for more storage. I have over 20TB of storage in my current desktop (and I’m not even using it for a plex server) so I’m sure I will need more than the 4 drives in the future once I can play with TrueNas and get it setup fully.

I appreciate the input!