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?
I know im pushing things, but with expansions via m.2 and mini pcie slots there are plenty of options. With a PCIE x16 slot, it gets even easier, but not with low-power CPUs (that I can find, anyway).
As for the SATA, the plan is to use two nvme system drives, and two 2.5" SATA SSDs as ZFS cache. Thus the two SATA ssd ports. They’re important to separate out because they’ll require higher pcie bandwidth than the spinning disks. I.E. the PCIe 1x slot on a board in my other comment could accommodate a couple of spinners @250Mb/s, but not the two cache drives.
IMO you’re approaching this very wrongly. You’re not looking for an mITX board. You want the performance and expansion of a thread-ripper board, for cheap, and in a small form factor–and it doesn’t exist. No matter what you end up doing you will have to compromise in the mITX form factor.
Additionally, mITX x16 slots aren’t always 16 lanes of PCIe. To save on space, or to compete with other manufactures, many of them are PCIe 3.0/4.0 x16 at 8x speed. Many boards that are full speed are expensive. They start at around $200. Which runs you into another problem. The number of PCIe lanes is limited by both the board and the CPU. mITX boards are designed for low power systems. They’re don’t have an infinite number of PCIe lanes. Usually about 16 for mITX boards… So if you have an 2x M.2 at 4x speeds, your x16 slot is limited to 8 PCIe lanes even if it has a full 16 lanes available to it, but the way that you’re using it you’re paying a premium for hardware you can’t fully utilize. Which means even if you do use a PCIe x16 to SATA bifurcating adapter, the most you can use is 8 additional drives at 1x speed each.
Not to mention the power limitations of your mITX motherboard. You need a minimum of 25W per HDD for peak power consumption, otherwise your rig will be unstable during heavy load. That means you need a minimum of 200W just for your hard drives, not including your motherboard, CPU, onboard graphics, etc. So likely between a 350-400w mITX power supply which can be a little hard to find for mITX boards sometimes.
Frankly speaking there are a significant number of issues with what you want to build and how you’re going about doing it. There’s no advantage of doing an mITX build for what you need outside of size. Everything else about mITX for you is a limitation.
Requirement is mITX for the rack. Seeing other responses, you can see there are reasonable options available.
You’re not understanding what I’m saying. You’re going to spend $2,000 on premium hardware because it’s designed for a small form factor and to be power efficient, and it’s still not going to meet all of your wish-list requirements…
The sensible choice is to upgrade your rack so you can use non-mITX boards and equipment and only spend $1,500 on equipment and actually meet your wish-list requirements.
It’s an easy choice, if you ask me.
I understand you haven’t looked at what’s out there and the pricing. I can make one of those boards linked, with PCIe expansions, work for ~ $250.
My 5 year old gaming mITX even gets most of the way there.
I build these professionally. For a living… Say what you want, but you’re going to end up buying hardware you can’t fully utilize at a premium. Period.
You… You do know… This is Lemmy… Right? So does everyone else 😅