In Europe, we can handle 32A on a single plug, so I just use a powerstrip with the C14 connector, to extend my UPS.
I'm nowhere near pulling that, so I'm safe. I'm at ~3A continiously, so I have litterally no reason to worry. Plus all the powerstrips are in spec for the country I'm in, so that's another 'yay I'm good' thing.
The R740 should be able to boot from an NVMe drive (whether this is M.2 or U.2).
RAM speed support depends on the CPU. From the top of my head, the R630 doesn't go further than 2400MT/s, neither do more than threequarter of the CPUs that can work in that machine.
You can put in DDR4-4000 if you want, but the machine will downclock it to 2400, because it can't go much faster than that.
And why wouldn't you want to go with ECC REG? It's cheap, there is plenty of it and you can stuff in 3TB of it. Non-ECC can only go to 64GB I believe.
there is a very annoying squealing sound coming from near the processor.
Welcome to the world of capacitors and chokes.
Basicly: The power delivery to your CPU is the squeely bit.
M.2 to SATA ports are available. I've seen more people build with those. But I have no idea about compatibility though.
Never used such a thing myself either. I have no use for such an adapter.
Those modules use some weird memory though: so-dimm ECC
SO-DIMM ECC isn't weird though. It's been out there for a longer time than you might think. Some professional laptops (ZBooks, Precisions, ThinkPads) have support for these.
so can I just buy another two identical sticks?
Yes.
Do they have to be exactly the same
At least the same ranking (2Rx4), the same size and the same speed or faster.
And is 4x 16GB optimal configuration?
For one CPU, sure. For two CPUs, sure. It all depends in which slots you are sticking them. The proper RAM layout is on the inside of the lid. Check that for the proper installation of RAM.
for some reason ESXi just can't see it.
but it could be a fun proof of concept?
Having gigantic clusters of small ARM computers, has been around almost as long as ARM is on consumer hardware. Definitly since the very first Pi 1. Loads of people have constructed many different configurations with all kind of different hardware. Loads of people here even run K8s and other stuff on their ARM cluster.
Tell me why I shouldn't do this!
If you have no use for it, why bother? Only if you want to learn from it, it can be useful. But still, you really have to think about what you want to do with it.
Oh, and power reasons. If you're in the USA, and your power is cheap, then why not. If you're not so lucky with the powerbill, then just get one big system (x64 or ARM) and just run stuff on there.
Nope. You need to buy a seperate case for this and throw everything over.
ever since I put it in the server gives me a fatal error on bay 1 drive 0
Some SSDs cause this. Don't know for sure why, but all the Samsung consumer SSDs I've put in servers over the years, never triggered those warnings. Maybe for your next round of SSDs, stick with Samsung?
I did a BIOS power tune recently, and that shaved off 14 watts on idle.
So that's a thing you can also do.