mSATA + NAS case: Is it possible?

I got the NAS perk to get rid of my current backup box. I would also like to use an mSATA drive for LXC servers. Is this possible, or does the slot configuration mean it is one or the other?

It is possible, but you have to get rid of one of the Wi-Fi cards. The mSATA drive have to be installed in the center-most slot, the other two are free to be used for SATA controller and a Wi-Fi card.

Why would I need an mSATA drive when I have the NAS case with an HDD in it? Wouldn’t you be able to partition the NAS drive so to have a small portion of it available for anything such as LXC servers. Not that I know what it all requires for such servers or what it is exactly… :smirk: just thinking out loud here.

There is probably use case when you use slow, but big, disks for your NAS and you want fast drive for your LXC containers. If you can miss one wifi card, then it can be done.

But if you don’t really require fast drive (you are not hosting service requiring fast nonlinear data operations like compilation server, which is probably not the case) then using external drives even in RAID can be enough. I would suggest use of Btrfs and its subvolumes to separate LXC from for example backup or network shared data.

I’m doing it for speed and simple data segmentation. I could go partition crazy, but these drives being backup-only (unlike my ESXi server with PCIe pass-through to a ZFS storage platform) I’d rather keep it simple with a single-partition mirror strictly for backup. The OpenHab home automation platform I’m moving onto this also has a history of not liking slower drives, so I’m hoping to appease it.