4 ms·

I rigged mine to boot off an SSD wedged into the "CD Drive" bay at the top. Cheapy connector to power it off the CD power connector and a SATA cable and it work

I rigged mine to boot off an SSD wedged into the "CD Drive" bay at the top. Cheapy connector to power it off the CD power connector and a SATA cable and it works great. There's an option in the BIOS to swap the disk controller to a dumb version, which works much better for me (I use ZFS anyway so any built-in RAID stuff just gets in the way), and that picks up the SSD and lets you set it as a boot drive. I might think about rejigging my setup soon to use that SSD as an L2ARC cache and instead boot off a pair of USB sticks. 16GB of RAM max on the Gen8 is a bit of a pain with ZFS, so that might be a sensible evolution before I eventually look to get a newer model :)

krylon 8y ago
I considered that option, but as far as I could find out, that would force the SATA controller in to RAID mode, making it impossible for ZFS (I use ZFS, too) to get at the SMART data from the disks. My server runs FreeBSD, and I have restricted the ZFS ARC to 8GB, so I have some RAM left for the other stuff, performance has been okay for me. Then again, a) a home network with about half a dozen client devices is not that big a challenge, and b) due to a combination of laziness and stupidity, my home network still is 100MBit, so I do not have to worry about any bottlenecks on the server. ;-)