Your Server Has 24 محرك الخلجان. Three Are Wasted on Boot Drives. Here Is How to Fix That.
Walk through any data center and count the 2.5-inch front-panel bays occupied by 240 GB SATA SSDs acting as ESXi boot volumes. In a 12-server cluster, that is 36 drive bays — roughly $15,000 worth of storage slots — devoted to operating system binaries that rarely change and consume less than 32 غيغابايت. The Dell BOSS-N1 solves this by moving the boot drives to a dedicated PCIe card with dual hot-pluggable M.2 NVMe SSDs, freeing every front-panel bay for data storage.
المواصفات الفنية
| معامل | تخصيص |
|---|---|
| نموذج | Dell BOSS-N1 (Boot Optimized Storage Solution, Monolithic) |
| Interface | PCIe 4.0 x2 (host), dual M.2 NVMe slots (internal) |
| Drive Support | 2x M.2 2280 محركات أقراص NVMe SSD (80مم), hot-pluggable from rear of server |
| Pre-Installed Capacity Options | 2x 240 غيغابايت, 2x 480 غيغابايت, or 2x 960 GB M.2 NVMe SSDs |
| RAID Support | غارة 1 (hardware mirror) via BOSS controller — transparent to OS |
| عامل الشكل | Half-height, half-length (HHHL) PCIe card |
| إدارة | iDRAC9 integrated — drive health, RAID status, predictive failure alerts |
| Hot-Plug | Yes — both M.2 drives accessible from rear panel, replace without powering down |
| دعم نظام التشغيل | VMware ESXI 7.0 U3+, 8.0+ | Windows Server 2019/2022/2025 | RHEL 8.6+/9.x | SLES 15 SP4+ | أوبونتو 20.04/22.04/24.04 |
| قوة | ~6W typical (both drives active) |
| Physical | 168 x 69 مم (standard LP PCIe card) |
| Compatible Platforms | PowerEdge R660, R760, R770, R7715, R860, R960, XE9680 (16th Gen) |
| ضمان | 3-year (with server) |
Why the BOSS-N1 Beats Front-Panel Boot Drives
| Factor | 2x 240GB SATA SSD in Front Bays | BOSS-N1 with 2x 480GB M.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Front-panel bays consumed | 2 | 0 (internal card) |
| Capacity usable for boot | 240 غيغابايت (غارة 1) | 480 غيغابايت (غارة 1, hardware) |
| Hot-plug replaceable | Yes (front bay, but requires removing bezel) | Yes (rear panel, tool-less) |
| I/O speed | SATA 6 جيجابت / ثانية (~550 MB/s) | NVMe PCIe 4.0 (~3,500 MB/s) |
| Boot time (إسكسي 8.0) | ~45 seconds | ~20 seconds |
| iDRAC monitoring | Standard drive health | BOSS-specific health, RAID status, predictive failure |
| PCIe slot consumption | 0 | 1 (PCIe x2, uses few lanes) |
The ROI on Freeing Two Drive Bays
Two 2.5-inch front-panel bays repurposed from boot to data storage can hold 2x 7.68 TB NVMe SSDs — delivering 13.8 TB of usable RAID 10 data storage per server. In a 12-node vSAN cluster, that is an incremental 165 TB of data storage without adding a single server. The BOSS-N1 itself costs roughly the same as two 240 GB SATA SSDs. The ROI is not in the BOSS card — it is in the 15 TB of storage capacity that the BOSS card unlocks by freeing the front bays.
Compatible Server Platforms — Check Before Ordering
The BOSS-N1 is available on all Dell PowerEdge 16th Gen servers (R660, R760, R770, R7715, R860, R960, XE9680). It occupies a dedicated internal PCIe slot on most platforms — on the R660 and R760, it does not consume a general-purpose PCIe expansion slot. On the R770, verify that the internal slot is available if the server is configured with other internal PCIe devices. Not compatible with 14th Gen (R640, R740) or 15th Gen (R650, R750) — those use BOSS-S2 (SATA-based, non-NVMe).
Source Through Xincuan
We ship Dell PowerEdge servers with BOSS-N1 pre-installed and configured. Factory-direct pricing, 3-year warranty, and global shipping.
