I’m trying to consolidate down and get everything at home running on a single machine. I know it’s not ideal, but I’m going to run ESXI as the hypervisor, and TrueNAS and EVE-NG as VM’s. I’m on a Dell P7910 with 2x E5-2699v4’s and 128G of RAM. I was going to flash the HBA to IT mode and pass some drives through for TrueNAS, but then I ran into a question… can you pass through individual drives, or does it have to be the whole PCI slot?

I’ve got an LSI 3008 (aka 9300-8i), with four 3.5" slots and four 2.5" slots. I’ve also got the Dell NVME PCI card with four slots on it (no drives for it yet). For the place where I’m running into trouble is what to put in those slots…

For the 3.5" slots, I’ve got either four 4TB WD Red SATA drives or four Exos 4TB SAS drives. I’m assuming the SAS drives would be a better choice? 12Gbps and 7200RPM vs 6Gbps and 5400. For the 2.5" slots, I’ve got either four 1TB no-name-brand SSD’s or four 500MB SAS 6Gbps 7200RPM drives.

I would love if there was a way to pass individual drives through, so I could use the bigger drives in TrueNAS with maybe two of the SSD’s for cache, and leave the other two for a datastore on ESXI. My fear is it’s an all-or-nothing answer, though?

Originally posted by u/rarick123 on Reddit.com/r/homelab

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