PCIe NVME adapter for Dell R520 (12th Gen Poweredge)

DeeJay-Mo · 24 Jul 2023 at 11:53

Picked up a R520 for next to nothing recently with a view to upgrading my home lab.
The 8x 3.5" bays are getting populated with 4TB sata drives, and I just tool delivery of a cheapo slim DVD to 2.5" sata drive adapter for a boot drive.
Now, I'm looking to fill the PCIe slots with SSDs. The following slots are available:
1* x16 half height, and 2* x8 full height (accommodates x16 cards but only x8 lanes)
There is a GPU in the remaining slot that gets passed through to my Plex VM for transcoding home movies for family members with crappy bandwidth.

I'm looking for comments and suggestions for how to fill these slots with storage. The Intel P3600 DC SSDs seem like they will work, but I'm wondering if there are any other (cheaper) options that I might consider.
These SSDs will mainly be used as a fast storage tier, for VMs. I'm planning to deploy a nested ESXi environment.

Any suggestions?

Donnie Fisher · 25 Jul 2023 at 11:34

Doesnt look like the R520 supports bifurcation, where the Asus hyper card thing would have allowed multiple nvme drives to slot in without too much fuss.

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DeeJay-Mo · 25 Jul 2023 at 15:46

Donnie Fisher said:
Doesnt look like the R520 supports bifurcation, where the Asus hyper card thing would have allowed multiple nvme drives to slot in without too much fuss.

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Yeah, it seems like it will be 1 SSD per PCIe slot, unless I'm ready to splash out for expensive adapters (which I'm not).

Right now this Corsair Force MP510 SSD looks like a decent option:

Corsair Force MP510 series 960GB NVMe PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive (CSSD-F960GBMP510B)

Order Corsair Force MP510 series 960GB NVMe PCIe M.2 Solid State Drive (CSSD-F960GBMP510B) now online and benefit from fast delivery.

www.overclockers.co.uk

I might try one out if/when I decide on a PCIe adapter (preferably one with a decent heatsink).