10
Dell Boss N1 questions
(self.homelab)
Having used Dell BOSS S1 cards even in other Dell servers, there is firmware integration limitations to be seen. Even an R730 won't fully tolerate an R740's BOSS - those I've only seen work in the R740 and higher. The control interface for the S1 (and presumably S2) cards is integrated into a menu system in Dell's BIOS and iDRAC.
I know specifically for the BOSS-S1, there's a Startech board that has a similar form factor and uses the same SATA RAID chipset, but without the Dell firmware. That Startech board works in non-Dell servers and workstations and has mostly the same features as the S1. (I 100% used my laptop's eGPU to set them up a few times. It also definitely causes Windows to BSOD a few times because it doesn't know how to eject an entire disk controller, but that's also entirely my fault). The Startech controller has not really given me any major problems once I got it up, and has run in my R730s with near 100% uptime for a few months now.
You may look to see if Startech has an NVMe version now to find a counterpart for the BOSS-N1 - I haven't checked recently.
Something else to consider is what your RAID array will actually be doing: M.2 SATA may be fast enough to be a boot disk, while your "real" data array uses SAS or NVMe to get to the CPU. You can even elect to use something fancier like Ceph or ZFS to handle the real data disks without a hardware RAID card. If you're just booting the server hypervisor and maybe a low level agent VM or two and the real data is on another array, that Startech card may be for you. (You just need FreeDOS to re flash it to EFI mode)