My work is getting rid of some very nice 8tb nvme u.2 drives. replacing them with much bigger ones and they’re letting us (the IT team) spit the drives between us. I have a dell740 XD ssf at home (also a previous work donation) but it only has sata/sas backplane. It came with only 2 drives since it used shared storage. I want to know if it is possible to have a mix of sata/nvme drives in this server if I replace the backplane.
My other question, I think nvme drives do not use RAID controller, what is the best way to present the drives to VMs/esxi?
The R740xd SFF is a mess inside.
There are multiple backplane options and cards that attach to the backplane that all change how they function, with about 12 official supported configurations (including the 3.5", midplane, and rear-bay variants).
Your backplane itself may already support a set number of NVME drives, or even be tri-mode outright, with the correct cards attached and correct expanders connected (Dell calls the PCIE interface cards expanders).
If you don’t want to fuck with it and only have a couple drives to attach, PCIE cards with U.2 mounts are cheap and easy. It’s easy to find single-drive and two-drive cards. Icydock also makes (expensive) cards that turn a PCIE slot into a U.2 drive bay, though hot-swap may not be supported in many cases.