this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025

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MiniITX for NAS (lemmy.nowsci.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

You're not going to find an mITX board with these stats. They just don't exist. Particularly 8 SATA ports is a stretch. You may be able to find as many as 6, but not 8. If you need the extra SATA ports you can sacrafice one of the M.2 4x slots for a bifurcating SATA controller, which would allow you to add an additional 4 SATA ports--so you would have 10 SATA ports total.

Additionally, you say you want NVMe storage and "SATA for SSD" which is highly confusing. What exactly do you mean by this? Do you mean M.2 NVMe slots for NVMe SSDs? If that is the case are you looking for an mITX board with 4 NVMe slots? Because frankly, they don't exist in mITX. I've never seen one and would be very surprised to see one.

Seeing 10Gb LAN and 2.5GB in the same board is pretty rare, too. If you have 10Gb LAN why do you also need 2.5Gb? 2x 2.5Gb I've seen. But a mix if 10Gb and 2.5Gb? Never seen that.

Quite frankly, you want the power, support, and room of a non mITX board in an mITX form-factor and it's not going to work out for you. It's like those pyramids with "networking," "expansion," and "RAM." Then you get to choose 2. lol.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Requirement is mITX for the rack. Seeing other responses, you can see there are reasonable options available.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 weeks ago

You.. You do know.. This is Lemmy.. Right? So does everyone else 😅

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I am looking for the same right now. So if you find it, tell me please.

8 SATA is quite a lot. I would rather like to have even more :) because here's my old raidz gang of disks and there comes my new...

I have seen some offers on Aliexpress with ITX boards but I don't trust them.

Maybe it is better with a normal board and an expansion adapter?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I'm looking for 10 😆 8 spinners and 2 2.5" SSDs for cache. I've had good luck with AliExpress boards. I'm about to set up a miniPC cluster from them, too.

Options that aren't perfect for me but might be for you:

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807101632310.html

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256808231013677.html

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807579724357.html

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

miniPC cluster

Thank you! You got me thinking here. Maybe several minis are better than one fat new ryzen with so many cores on an ATX board? But the mini's fans are usually ugly loud when doing some real work.

I need to read actual benchmarks and then compare...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yea, I realized how quick a Ryzen 5825u is at 15w. Just loaded 2 with 2x 1TB drives and 64GB RAM. Will be running mail server/DNS/VPN/Samba AD replicated across them, plus a bunch of other single services.

Happy to keep you posted as I go. I'll probably end up de-casing them in a 10" rack.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I have some 2.5GbE USB dongles, so they do exist...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I wouldn't go smaller than microATX, and even then I kinda regret not going ATX in mine... Unless you absolutely need to use whatever enclosure you're looking at... I say keep shopping and find the space for something bigger... It'll just end up being less wasted effort when you run into a problem that an extra PCI slot could solve

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X570D4I-2T#Specifications

This is about as close as you’re going to get. I have one of these and they’re a pain in the for memory and cooler compatibility, but once you navigate that, it’s rock solid.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Very interesting. What cooler do you use?

Edit: Also looks like there are a bunch of 35W AM4s, so not terrible there, either.

Edit 2: Oddly enough I have this https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/B550I-AORUS-PRO-AX-10#kf in my gaming PC which might for the bill if I were to upgrade there (also AM4). Would need to use the PCIe x16 for network and/or sata.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

You either have to use the two very specific coolers that Asrock recommends or you have to mildly modify the motherboard. Once you do, you will realize the mounting bracket is for an Intel board.

I did the mod and run a Noctua tower with the LGA bracket adapter.