Some time ago I replaced my custom pfSense router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra. That left me with a Lenovo Tiny PC sitting on the shelf with no real purpose. Instead of relying on an old external HDD for storage, I liked the idea of turning the M720q into a small NAS.

My first idea was to connect a few HDDs directly, but that would mean keeping the drives outside the M720q with messy cabling. Then I started wondering: could this be an SSD-only NAS, and how many drives can actually fit inside a Lenovo M720q Tiny?

Parts

• PCIe riser card – already had
• Ugreen PCIe NVMe adapter (link to Amazon)
• 2× Patriot P320 2TB NVMe SSDs
• Existing SATA SSD for the OS

Putting it all together

Out of the box the M720q supports one NVMe SSD and one SATA SSD. By using a PCIe riser with an NVMe adapter, there is just enough space to add a second NVMe drive, giving a total of three SSDs.

The SATA SSD ended up resting on top of the NVMe drive without its original enclosure, so airflow is probably optimistic - but everything fits and the case still closes.

I installed TrueNAS Scale. The two NVMe drives are configured as a mirrored ZFS pool, with the SATA SSD used only for the OS.

Planned usage:

• NFS shares for my Proxmox node
• Samba shares for local file storage
• Time Machine backups for my MacBook