toebert

I believe the fact that it comes up as a “slot” is positive. SATA m.2 connectors don’t show up under slots, they come under “connector"s with type SATA.

The key doesn’t correspond to capability. It’s about the connector’s physical shape. i.e. which side is the lil notch on. B has a notch on the right, M on the left. B & M have a notch on both sides and therefore fits into either connector, but it is limited to PCIex2/SATA speed (i’d guess this won’t matter to you as pciex2 is around 16gbps). It also doesn’t mean the length would fit, that’ll be a number like 2230, 2280 etc.

You’d have to check the manual for the motherboard to see if it specifies, but if it’s labelled m.2 PCIe it should work I think. If it only said SATA then it would not work.

You can try dmidecode --type slot on Linux, it should list them as available and presumably specify the type to be PCI express.

I think ultimately you’ll only know when you try, but these may give you some confidence.

I think there is no comprehensive guide because people have varying opinions on what’s “best”. IMO the “best” for everyone is the way that they understand how things work and are comfortable to manage it, regardless of how good or bad someone else says that is.

My recommendation is to just accept you will not get it right first time, you’ll eventually face the issues and limitations of whatever way you picked and have to either rebuild or adapt.

Personally, I’d say choose a starting path of do you want to learn about the various technologies and have maximum potential (and, problems to solve) or do you just want to get some of the common apps running and don’t care how as long as they run and be limited by what’s available, but with much fewer issues. Path 1 is following the docker/proxmox path and it may take a lot of reading and watching YouTube tutorials before you get somewhere, path 2 is aiming for something like casaOS or similar and probably watching their getting started will get you results faster but if something breaks or is not available, you may get stuck.

Last, pick 1 thing that’s your goal and work on getting that there. There is no right order, but the more popular something is the more resources there will there be. https://selfh.st/apps/ is a great resource for finding things. Jellyfin is actually pretty easy to start with and gives you some good paths forward around it (e.g. start with you manually getting your media in the right place, then you can work on adding other apps that will do it for you). I’d advise to avoid self hosting email, it’s rather difficult.