My work is getting rid of some very nice 8tb nvme u.2 drives. replacing them with much bigger ones and they’re letting us (the IT team) spit the drives between us. I have a dell740 XD ssf at home (also a previous work donation) but it only has sata/sas backplane. It came with only 2 drives since it used shared storage. I want to know if it is possible to have a mix of sata/nvme drives in this server if I replace the backplane.

My other question, I think nvme drives do not use RAID controller, what is the best way to present the drives to VMs/esxi?