I bought a 2 bay NAS and I plan to flash it with the TrueNAS operating system. As I was reading the installation instructions I came across a section that said one of the 2 drives will have to contain the boot/UEFI partition, and can therefore be used for nothing else. Am I reading this correctly? I have 2 4TB HDDs that I plan on using in both bays and I’ll have to use the entirety of one of those bays just to hold a small boot partition and nothing else?
There are also 4 slots available for M.2 NVMe SSDs so I’m looking at using a small SSD for my boot partition there if this is true. My apologies if this is a dumb question as I’m kind of new to this stuff.
Not sure about TrueNAS, but with any other OS (for example: https://www.openmediavault.org/ ) it should be no problem to use the m2 slot for booting the OS.
Some old bios systems do not allow to boot from NVME though, but I doubt that is the case here if it has NVME slots build in. But on an old system where I added a NVME pci-e extension card I had to put
/booton an USB pen drive and then it could boot the rest of/normally from the NVME SSD.You could look into adding some more small m2 SSDs and use them as bcache for the HDDs.