There certainly has been interest expressed here both in people’s commentary as well as a poll (Hey Homelab Heroes – We Need Your Input!) in enterprise SSD support. I’m a bit surprised by Vikram’s response above based on that poll.
Unfortunately afaik there haven’t been any official, sponsored, or independent reviews or demos of The Beast yet, so it’s a bit unclear (at least to me) how modular that SSD area really is. I’m surprised the launch wasn’t accompanied by at least a demo by Zack or an overview by one of the influencers that go to their creator summit like Techno Tim. We probably need to wait for that, or someone here to buy one and post their experiences here.
I could be wrong, but I think with the HL15 it’s the same exact 3.5" drive backplane they use in the enterprise servers. I’m surprised if they created a backplane specifically for 7.5mm consumer SSDs for the beast rather than reusing one of the SSD backplanes already in use on one or more of the enterprise servers.
So are 15mm SSDs–an offramp or two further down that road; the enterprise is moving to EDSFF.