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Your Server Has 24 Дисковые отсеки. 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 ГБ. 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.

Технические характеристики

Параметр	Спецификация
Модель	Dell BOSS-N1 (Boot Optimized Storage Solution, Monolithic)
Интерфейс	PCIe 4.0 х2 (хозяин), dual M.2 NVMe slots (внутренний)
Drive Support	2x M.2 2280 твердотельные накопители NVMe (80мм), hot-pluggable from rear of server
Pre-Installed Capacity Options	2Икс 240 ГБ, 2Икс 480 ГБ, or 2x 960 GB M.2 NVMe SSDs
Поддержка RAID	RAID 1 (hardware mirror) via BOSS controller — transparent to OS
Фактор формы	Half-height, полудлина (HHHL) PCIe card
Управление	iDRAC9 integrated — drive health, RAID status, predictive failure alerts
Hot-Plug	Yes — both M.2 drives accessible from rear panel, replace without powering down
Поддержка ОС	VMware ESXi 7.0 U3+, 8.0+ \| Windows Server 2019/2022/2025 \| RHEL 8.6+/9.x \| SLES 15 SP4+ \| Убунту 20.04/22.04/24.04
Власть	~6W typical (both drives active)
Physical	168 Икс 69 мм (standard LP PCIe card)
Compatible Platforms	PowerEdge R660, 760 рэндов, 770 рэндов, R7715, 860 рэндов, 960 рэндов, XE9680 (16th Gen)
Гарантия	3-год (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 ГБ (RAID 1)	480 ГБ (RAID 1, hardware)
Hot-plug replaceable	Да (front bay, but requires removing bezel)	Да (rear panel, tool-less)
I/O speed	САТА 6 Гбит/с (~550 MB/s)	NVMe PCIe 4.0 (~3,500 MB/s)
Boot time (ESXi 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 (660 рэндов, 760 рэндов, 770 рэндов, R7715, 860 рэндов, 960 рэндов, 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 (650 рэндов, 750 рэндов) — those use BOSS-S2 (SATA-based, non-NVMe).