Hi all,

I’ve been thinking about picking up an N150 or 5825U MiniITX board for a NAS, but I’m wondering if there are better options given my requirements.

  • At least 2x 2.5Gb LAN
  • A 10Gb LAN, or 2.5Gb if not
  • 2x NVME
  • 8x SATA for spinning disks
  • 2x SATA for SSDs
  • MiniITX is required for the 10" rack
  • 64+ Gigs of RAM (ZFS cache) (This is not possible on an N150)

The problem I’m running into with the boards I’ve looked at is PCIe lanes, and not having ways to expand the sata or network ports without stealing from NVME.

I’ve started to look at boards with PCIe 4.0x16 slots and risers/splitters for expansion, but then I can’t find low power CPUs for them.

Thoughts?

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    12 days ago

    Yeah you’re almost certainly not going to get all that on mITX. At a minimum, you’re already going to be using the pcie slot for additional SATA ports, because you’ll probably only get four on board. And you’ll probably have only one NVMe slot on board, two if you’re really lucky. And hopefully not just an M.2 SATA port that’s shared with one of the actual SATA ports.

    You could get away with USB adapters for additional network ports, but I don’t know if they make anything faster than gigabit. You can probably get away with one port and doing multi-homing or whatever in software.

      • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comOPEnglish
        1·
        11 days ago

        Yea, the 2.5Gb is the easy part these days. Just posted a link to one with 4 of them. Or another with 2x + 1x 10Gb.

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comOPEnglish
      1·
      11 days ago

      I’m guessing you haven’t seen many newer NAS boards. Almost all of them have multiple full nvme, multi-wan in combos of 2.5 and 10Gb, etc.