so my server parts came in finally. the hba lsi card and the two eight terabyte hgst hard drives. i quickly set up the hardware. first i removed the full size pcie bracket and replaced it with the included low profile bracket. i removed the lid and made space for the hba card. i then opened the package of the breaker cables. then i opened the hard drives and placed them in the system. the mounting screws were delayed, so those are not coming in until later. for now the hard drives will have to lay in their cages.

i plugged in the sata cables and the power cables. i had to reroute the ssd as it was in the way, so i moved it to under the hdd tray. it fit since that was were the slim optical drive was. the cabling took a bit of finessing, but i was able to get it to work. upon first power on after upgrading, it failed to boot. the light on my switch was yellow and the ethernet jack kept going in and out. i was scared at first, but i realized that secure boot was causing the issues. i took the server to the basement tv and hooked it up with a keyboard and mouse, booted just fine into the bios. turned off secure boot and successfully booted into proxmox. turned off the server, turned back on secure boot, and then placed it back into storage room.

i did a brief check in the proxmox gui and both the hard drives showed up and passed smart tests. which i am glad it did, and the drives also come with a five year warranty, so we will see how long they last. i got two so that i can run a raid one configuration with zfs. i then configured the truenas vm to have the pcie lsi card passed through to it, upon power on, it recognized the two drives just fine. i setup a mirrored storage pool with zfs so that i can have redundant storage. i setup an smb share for windows access and access from my phone. i also setup an nfs share so i can access it from proxmox backup server.

here is a photo of the “finished” server for now: