Upside:
Relatively inexpensive if you can get a good deal and they aren't too terribly old (the two I got are from 2019).
Downsides:
It only supports four drives up front that you can swap out without taking the side panel off (I knew that going in from pictures I saw)
It only supports one additional HDD internally and it would be mounted in the 5.25" bay, which needs an additional adapter.
If the front flex bays have been converted to use NVMe, you cannot use a mechanical HDD or a 2.5" SSD in those slots, it must be a NVMe using their special carrier cards. So there is another additional component you would need to purchase.
The front SD card slot shows as a HDD and I have been unable to get the system to stop reporting it as a storage device, I only figured it out by putting an SD card in the slot and now HexOS reports it there with the storage of the SD card even when the SD isn't inserted. It persists after restarts.
Supposedly the PCIe slots are capable of bifurcation but there's no clear setting in the BIOS about it, so hopefully when I get a PCIe to NVMe carrier card it will be able to recognize the four additional SSDs I want to populate it with.
Hopefully this post saves someone that may be looking at one of these machines to use for their system from the same headaches I have run into. I'm excited to get started on my journey with HexOS, just a matter of fixing the front backplane to accept HDDs instead of NVMe and getting the drives I want to use. 4 drives will be plenty for my needs for the time being, but I know others might feel too limited by that.
