When faced with the need to add storage to an old server, Gregory Gibson, a tech writer and IT specialist, decided to repurpose a 512 GB NVMe SSD that had been gathering dust in his drawer. The server, built with an old Xeon E3-1225 v3 processor and two SATA SSDs, was in need of a storage upgrade. Instead of replacing the entire motherboard, which would have been costly and time-consuming, Gregory opted for a more affordable solution: a cheap PCIe-to-M.2 adapter. This adapter allowed him to install the NVMe SSD, which provided a significant performance boost to his virtual machines (VMs). The adapter, the MHQJRH Dual M.2 PCIe Adapter, supports one NVMe SSD and one SATA M.2 SSD, with the NVMe drive using PCIe 3.0 x4. The adapter's only drawback was that only one of its two M.2 slots could accommodate an NVMe drive, necessitating a separate SATA data cable for the other slot. Despite this limitation, the adapter proved to be a cost-effective solution for Gregory's needs. The server's Proxmox virtualization platform recognized the NVMe drive immediately, with the device appearing as /dev/nvme0n1 and having a capacity of 476.9 GiB. Gregory then created an LVM-thin storage pool named 'vm-nvme' to house the new NVMe drive, which added 501.74 GB of storage to the system. To ensure the Windows 11 VM was successfully moved to the NVMe drive, Gregory shut down the VM, copied its files to the new storage, and then restarted the VM, which recognized the new drive and began functioning as expected. This guide not only demonstrates how to integrate a decade-old NVMe SSD into an old server but also highlights the importance of choosing the right hardware for cost-effective upgrades and the benefits of using affordable solutions for performance improvements. The MHQJRH Dual M.2 PCIe Adapter proved to be a versatile and cost-effective solution for Gregory's server upgrade project.
