The smallest power little NAS that fulfills all the requirements

[Thinkcat]

Hello

I am looking for information on a mini-ITX board with some Atom or Xeon D in it, preferably passively cooled or silent active cooling. Six or eight SATA connectors, two 1 Gb or 10 Gb nics plus one for IPMI and support for any amount of ECC RAM from 16 GB to 128 GB. The thing would only be used for sharing files from one, two or three RAID1 pools to a few desktops, laptops and a small ESXi homelab.

In other words, a bare minimum NAS, low power and low noise. I am asking in case someone else has already done the research for this. If not, I will do the research and share what I've found out. Currently running a X10SLH-F with two little RAID1 pools and a 4-core Xeon but this could be better used elsewhere.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Check out my system in my signature. It runs silently, idles at 38W, and runs full tilt at 65W.

 

[Arwen]

Getting a Mini-ITX server board, (IPMI), with built in 10Gbps Ethernet or the desired 8 SATA connections, is a bit rare. You would almost have to use the single PCIe slot for either the 10Gbps Ethernet or expansion SATA / SAS connections, (because the board only have 4 or 6).

There is a resource doc on small foot print NAS that may help;

Can I please have a small footprint TrueNAS?

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. The NAS marketplace is filled with small appliance NAS devices, often built on an ARM device platform. These small devices, such as 2009’s...

www.truenas.com

Asrock Rack does make some Mini-ITX boards that do include builtin 10Gbps & >=6 SATA, but they are all AMD. All support 128GBs of memory. This first 3 are passively cooled;

ASRock Rack > EPYC3451D4I2-2T

www.asrockrack.com

ASRock Rack > EPYC3251D4I-2T

www.asrockrack.com

ASRock Rack > EPYC3101D4I-2T

www.asrockrack.com

ASRock Rack > X570D4I-2T

www.asrockrack.com

 

[Etorix]

I am looking for information on a mini-ITX board with some Atom or Xeon D in it, preferably passively cooled or silent active cooling. Six or eight SATA connectors, two 1 Gb or 10 Gb nics plus one for IPMI and support for any amount of ECC RAM from 16 GB to 128 GB.

Supermicro has lots of boards which fit this profile in the X10SDV (Xeon D-1500, typically 6 SATA, many have on-board 10 GbE from the SoC else there's a PCIe x16 slot ready for a nice SFP+ NIC) and A2SDi ranges (Atom C3000, 8-12 SATA, the most expensive ones have on-board 10 GbE, otherwise you'll have to do with the x4 slot—which is still enough for one 10G link). These take DDR4 RDIMM, which comes nicely cheap second-hand/refurbished.
The only issue is price… and scarcity on the second-hand market, especially this side of the Atlantic.

These boards expect some airflow. For silent cooling, the easiest way is to get a board with a "passive" cooler and slap a Noctua NF-A6x25 on top of it (secure with two strips of adhesive tape and call it a day, but do not omit the fan!).

For a minimal NAS, the older A1SAi or A1SRi series (Atom C2000) might do, but these are getting old.

 

[danb35]

I like the HPE MicroServer Gen10+, but it's only four bays, and doesn't do hot-swap. Otherwise, repurposing Intel-based QNAP hardware might be the best way to get a compact NAS.

 

[Thinkcat]

Thanks for all the input and suggestions. I am sorry I was confusing about the RAM requirement.

Starting with X10SDV-2C-TLN2F is there anything newer, comparable and more affordable? It has the 6 SATA connectors, dual 10 Gb Ethernet and support for the 16 GB or 32 GB of RAM I think I will need. The 10 Gb Ethernet is a nice to have. Everything else in my network is 1 Gb, but I could upgrade some parts of it to 10 Gb possibly maybe but not sure some time in the future.

But if there was a simple Atom board with 1) two cores, 2) IPMI, 3) two 1 Gb interfaces, 4) 6 SATA connectors and 5) room for 16 GB of RAM it would be all I need for this particular plan.

 

[Etorix]

A2SDi-2C-HLN4F: Atom ('A'), 2 cores ('2C'), IPMI ('F'), 4*1 GbE ('4LN'), 8 SATA, up to 32 GB UDIMM/128 GB RDIMM
With the help of Supermicro naming cheatsheet, one can almost work out the product designation from your requirement list.
I'm afraid, though, that "affordable" might not make it : It's 360 E around here, and, despite being older, a second-hand X10SDV board around the same price would be a better value.

 

[HarryMuscle]

I suggest looking into using a QNAP unit with TrueNAS Scale on it. It's almost impossible to beat the low power usage and small size of a custom made QNAP unit. Most people don't realize you can run other OS on most of these units.

Thanks,
Harry

 

[elvisimprsntr]

I've got 4 QNAPs (2 new, 2 used of evilBay) running TrueNAS CORE/SCALE and one running Proxmox VE. Not screamers by any means, but does the job.

 

[Thinkcat]

I suggest looking into using a QNAP unit with TrueNAS Scale on it.

Tell me if I am mistaken, but I took a quick look at the specs of a few of the smallest models and could not find any mention of ECC memory. I wish to include this in my "all the requirements".

 

[HarryMuscle]

Tell me if I am mistaken, but I took a quick look at the specs of a few of the smallest models and could not find any mention of ECC memory. I wish to include this in my "all the requirements".

The TS-X73A series supports ECC ram. It doesn't come with it but it supports it if you swap it out. That's just one I know about off the top of my head.

Thanks,
Harry