You can make RAID 0 volumes with only 1 drive.  The IDSDM is a PCI device that let's you add a pair of SD cards into the host, typically used for booting and for crash logging for ESXi. These are normally kept in a mirrored state, so only 1 SD card is really needed for that option. ESXi should support being installed to a USB, but I don't see an internal port on the motherboard diagram. If there's not an internal port, your drive would be exposed from the front or rear, so I wouldn't really recommend it.  The H700 should be an excellent controller choice.
Hallo community,I request for your assistance.Please forgive me if I ask a 'silly' question.I have a Dell PowerEdge R810 Server for my home lab and VMware ESXi 6.5.I would like to install six SSD drives 2.5 inch 500GB or 1TB each and take advantage of all six disks for my VMs.I need all disks running at 6Gbps. As far as I know I need to purchase the Dell H700 Perc RAID controller.At this point I don't need RAID configuration for safety/redundancy. I just need to take advantage of all disk space available for VMs.My question is how to configure the server, what kind of extra h/w to purchase, 'where' to install the esxi s/w (e.g. on a partition and leave the rest of the space for the datastore), in order to have as much space available for the datastores.I greatly appreciate your help.Thank you in advance.
Dell PowerEdge R810 Server SSD Configuration