Custom90gt

It really depends on what you want to do. The system itself is just for serving files and such right? If you want to use different sized hard drives and don't mind spending a little money on an OS, Unraid is the perfect option for you. The only bummer about unraid now is that they switched their licensing up a little bit and with the Starter version you only get updates for a year (vs lifetime in the past). Having said that, it's usually not an issue if you're not using other options in Unraid such as virtual machines etc. The starter version is $49 and would let you use both SSDs as scratch disks since unraid is installed on a USB drive. Otherwise you can still use TrueNAS with your drives, but you would be limited by the smallest hard drive (eg if you had two 18TB drives and a 10TB, you would only effectively have 3x10TB drives for the pool).

TrueNAS only allows for ZFS as the filesystem I believe. That means you should use all the same sized drives otherwise you'll be limited to the smallest size.

Remind me what OS you were thinking about using? Unraid would be perfect for you, but it's an additional cost. You could do whatever sized drives you want. Are you wanting some redundancy with your files?

Interesting idea, I haven't seen those adapters before. Out of curiosity, are you just going for those so you can divide your drives up? You can always go with a 2.5" SSD and partition the drive, it would probably be quite a bit cheaper than ordering m.2 SATA SSDs. I thought you were looking for some bigger mechanical HDDs for storage? I think the biggest m.2 sata SSD I've seen are 4TB, but would be cheaper to buy a 8TB 2.5".

What about using a SATA ssd that is plugged in to the esata port on the unit? It will boot off that and you can leave the internal drive bays for the spinners with lots of space for your photos.

Hah ditto here. Moved to Montana and have had a bunch of things come up so no real time to even spend on the computer even if I wanted to. We are in the process of buying a house, so at least I get to look forward to the networking and setting up the real server again. And when then 50 series comes out, I am going to put my 4070 ti super in the server and make it a steam stream box for fun.

Sorry I never saw this. Can you explain exactly what is happening? You are installing TrueNas onto the SSD that's connected via PCIe? It sees the drive and installs the OS but then the machine itself will not boot onto it? Maybe the bios doesn't support booting on nvme?

Maybe try turning on the GPU monitoring application to see what is using your GPU. I think you use the following: Please follow the instruction below: Right click on the desktop and select [NVIDIA Control Panel]. Select [View] or [Desktop] (the option varies by driver version) in the tool bar then check [Display GPU Activity Icon] In Windows taskbar, mouse over the "GPU Activity" icon to check the list. That should let you see what is using your GPU. Normally it is something silly like firefox or chrome...

I run a Lenovo M720q with a riser card and a 10-gb Intel X550-T2 network card for my Opnsense router. What is your real goal with this project? Most systems aren't going to be able to use 40gb networking. You're never going to find 2x PCIe slots (but you can convert a M.2 slot into one). About the best you're going to be able to do is a mini-itx build, even then you'd be hard pressed to meet your specs. Trust me, I'd love to have my cake and eat it too; but there are compromises with form factor.

Yeah I can get into the bios with my 13700k, and I did the flashback bios. My big worry is that it has some sort of check to ensure it's a "genuine" Asus bios or something like that. I need to figure out how to edit .cap files I suppose.

Another random question for the group. I'm not even sure this is possible anymore, but can you still modify and flash a bios to newer Asus intel platforms? Here's a summary of my issue. I purchased an intel 13900T QS for my new server build but it won't post in my Pro WS W680-ACE. It will post fine in my Asus Z690-i with bios 2403. I have tried flashing the older versions of the W680 bios but it still doesn't post. The board is good because it posts with my 13700k. I'd love to be able to get the cpu microcode from the z690 bios and create a modified w680 bios. The goal was to have a low power server with the 13900t.

@Mr. Fox or anyone else have any recommendations on some cheap 48GB DDR5 sticks (preferably without the heat spreaders) for a new backup server? My mediasmart backup server just bit the dust so I'm going to build an ITX LGA 1700 system.

Did you ever figure this out?

Ahh can you post the model numbers for the SSD and the PCIE adapter?

Won't see one of the HDDs in Bios? do you have the latest bios installed?