A step-by-step walkthrough of installing 256GB NVMe drives in the M.2 slot of HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini machines. My Proxmox nodes will boot from the new drives, letting the existing SSDs — whose SMART reporting is unreliable — run ZFS with scrubbing for data integrity. I cover opening the case, removing the drive cage to reach the M.2 slots, seating the drive, and reassembly, along with a note that M.2 mounting screws typically need to be ordered separately...
A short walkthrough of replacing my dead hard drive with a 2.5-inch SSD in my 2012 Intel MacBook Pro that had sat in a drawer for three years. I cover removing the bottom cover, disconnecting the SATA plug, transferring the mounting lugs with a torx driver, and reassembling, along with a few practical notes like the angled case screws and a packing-tape fix for the pull tab...
Worried about internal temperatures in a stack of HP Elitedesk nodes running Proxmox, and wanting a before-and-after comparison for a planned NVMe upgrade, I set up logging of PCH, CPU, and SSD temperatures. The readings come from the /sys/class/hwmon/ tree, with a drivetemp kernel module needed for the SSD; a shell script appends them to a CSV every five minutes via cron. The collected data is graphed, including during a CPU stress test...
After reading up on Proxmox’s storage setup, I check the Wearout percentages of the SSDs in my second-hand HP Elitedesk nodes and find one no-name drive reporting 100% wearout despite passing its SMART health check. I examine the drive’s SMART attributes, attempt a short SMART test that gets aborted, and consider buying new SSDs ahead of a planned move to a high-availability cluster with NAS, Ceph, or ZFS storage...
I walk through upgrading the RAM in my HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Desktop Mini from 16GB to 32GB. I cover the tool-free disassembly, including the captive screw, sliding case lid, and tilting the fan aside to reach the SODIMMs, along with the RAM specs required (1.2V DDR4-2133MHz, PC4-17000) and the SK Hynix modules I used...
