I am looking into building a new NAS to replace my aging current one. I want to go self-built with focus on low power consumption and silence. It will run FreeBSD on bare-metal. Data disks are planned to be SSD with ZFS.

With this, I am looking for a mainboard with these properties:

  • Onboard low power CPU with passive cooler (no fan)
  • Min 4 SATA ports for the data SSDs
  • Min 1 M.2 slot for the IS
  • IPMI, this will be headless, even for initial config

Any ideas? Thanks very much!

  • @aucubin@lemmy.aucubin.deEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    I’m using a SuperMicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F for my NAS.

    It takes like 20-30W with 4 3.5" SATA HDDs and one M2 SSD installed. It has IPMI and I’m running it with FreeBSD 13.2, works like a charm. You just need to be aware that you need to adjust the SATA ports in the bios in order to use all 4 of them, by default only 2 SATA ports and the SAS interface will be enabled.

    The temps are fine on the cpu without fan - I only have three fans in front of the drives.

  • @variants_of_concern
    1•1 year ago

    I got a SUPERMICRO MBD-M11SDV-8CT-LN4F-O Mini ITX to run my unRAID server for a while, it was pretty nice in a node 304 case, eventually I needed more space when I started hosting Plex and needed video transcoding. I didn’t have my friend 3d print me a fan holder that sat over the heatsink because it got pretty toasty