I’ll skip the pictures for now but…
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I have a Dell Optiplex 3060 Micro which I use as a NAS (for now; I also plan to use it as a main media center). It doesn’t have a lot of slots inside since it’s very small: a WiFi card slot, a SATA III slot and a NVMe M.2 slot (PCIe v3 x4, e.g. maximum 2000MB/s read/write).
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I made it a challenge to stuff it with as much storage as I can. For now though it uses two external HDDs through dedicated USB 3.0 ports, one at 6TB and one at 3TB, “merged” together in a single “disk” of almost 9TB.
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I removed the machine’s WiFi card and cable and antenna.
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This freed up a specific M.2 slot – with an A+E key.
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I bought a convertor from A+E key to M key (which is used in SATA III M.2 form SSDs, i.e. they cap at 580MB/s maximum). 7 EUR.
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Bought a small Chinese M key SSD (250GB) and installed it on the former WiFi slot through the adapter, just for a test. This costed me 35 EUR.
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Voila! Now I have an extra SSD in my server, even if that one in particular maxes out at 320 MB/s read and 210 MB/s write. Still quite good and still a little faster than most good HDDs. Thinking of replacing it with a 2TB one in the future.
Next steps:
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Buy a convertor from a single SATA III slot to a dual mSATA box.
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Put 2x 2TB mSATA SSDs there and use them with ZFS in a mirror setup. This will be the main place for me to backup photos, code, and anything non-huge. Speeds per device would never exceed 290 MB/s but the combined speed of 580 MB/s should be quite fine unless I move to 10GbE local network and actually want to saturate it – and even if I do that, this configuration will still saturate 50% of the bandwidth!
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Eventually, buy a proper NVMe SSD that caps at about 2000 MB/s transfer and also put that in the dedicated slot. BIG PROBLEM: so far I can’t find a single NVMe 2280 bed that converts to dual 2230 or 2242 beds. I would like to put 2 independent SSDs there for redundancy because I am not sure I want to entrust data to a singular non-mirrored device in a NAS. Anybody has any links for that?
All in all, I found love for tinkering with physical machines in the last several months and even if my first steps were very hesitant, I had zero problems almost completely disassembling my mini server and putting it back together (it was a little challenging to put the 32GB of RAM in but I succeeded just fine).
And I plan to keep doing that. My gaming machine has an amazing case that allows for like 12x 3.5" HDDs and 4x 2.5" SSDs / HDDs so eventually, when I decide to replace the gaming machine, I’ll reuse the case for a proper bigger server.