Got one of these bad boys coming (i7 8700). Planning to add 2x3.5in 10tb HDDs and upgrade ram to 64GB. Excited to get to work on it - heard a lot of good things about this rig.
Hopefully someone can answer these for me:
- On HP’s spec sheet it says the max HDD size is 2TB. Do I need to do anything to the BIOS to allow bigger drives?
- I’ve heard it’s possible to add a third 3.5in HDD in the DVD drive bay. Can anyone confirm? Do you need a bay adapter or whatever?
- Planning to run TrueNas in a Proxmox VM to manage the HDDs, either RAID 0 or 1. Do I need a PCIe HBA card?
- Any other tips or tricks?
Disclaimer: I’ve not used that exact machine but have worked with similar Lenovo/Dell stuff.
Set mode to UEFI and/or GPT possibly. Some very old BIOS may simply refuse to boot off a drive that big while some may work as long as the boot stuff is in the first 2TB.
Often these form factors have a SATA plug for a DVD drive. Be aware that this one is usually only SATA 2 at best so slower than SATA 3 (only 3Gbps vs 6Gbps) and often only SATA 1 (1.5GBps) in fact given DVDs need significantly less than that. Not technically a huge limiting factor in anything but bursts and saturating the cache as mechanical hard drives are going to tend to struggle to get much above 300Mbps sustained write anyways but a consideration. I wouldn’t put a RAID drive on it if possible as RAID drives should be on SATA adapters of matching speeds.
You can use a bay adapter and you can set the drive directly bare on the surface but it may induce vibrations and in theory for mechanical drives could shorten the life of the drive in addition to being annoyingly noisy. An SSD located there wouldn’t have this problem as it’s safe to set the SATA ones on a bare surface. Though if the SSD is getting heavy regular use you might consider still investing in some sort of heat solution like an aluminum dock for 2.5" drive to place it in and set that there.
As far as if you really want to set a 3.5" spinning disk HDD there without paying for a dock, at least put rubber between it and the metal of the case. Either little rubber standoffs or a flat rubber pad. This may induce heat issues but should solve the vibration one at least.
You can of course buy a PCIe SATA or SCSI card and connect to that to get higher speeds.
The other questions I’ll leave to other people. Technically hardware RAID tends to come with lots of problems for home lab setups and software at the host OS tends to be more recommended as easier to recover with and less prone to various problems.