Decent NAS

[Cooners]

Can somebody please recommend some hardware to get a NAS setup please?
I don't want a pre-built one and want to keep the cost as low as possible (My whole Proxmox cluster is on old mini PC's I picked up for peanuts and the 24 port network switch I rescued for the dump!!!).
I'd like to have 6 SATA ports minimum (for expandability) and at least 2 10Gbs ethernet ports (not bothered if its standard network ports of SFP+) so it either needs both of these, one built in and a spare PCI-E
My two Elitebooks don't have enough Sata ports and don't have any PCI-E slots and my M270q does have the PCI-E slot but still has only one SATA port so I can't get both a Nic and HBA on that either.
I'm currently running Open Media Vault on a Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB Drive but having that hold all my data and my proxmox backups making me nervous especially as my family want me to backup there photos (I'm not doing that without a good backup solution in place). I still have everything import backed up on onedrive too for now at least.
I've looked at ITX boards but they don't have enough SATA or PCI-E slots either.
I've even thought of a HP microserver (I used to have one) but not sure if they are man enough these days.
What i'm thinking is some sort of low powered motherboard running something like a 8th or 9th Gen i5...say a 8500T and thats about it. I'm not too bothered about the case as I can just knock something up in Fusion if I have too thb.
Ideally I'd like to run TrueNAS for now but I have got one eye on setting up a CEPH cluster in the future.

 

[Demon]

Cheapest way if oyu want low power / 10Gbe (at least 1) and 6 SATA is get one of the cheap Chinese ITX motherboards, e.g.

You will always compromise somewhere with PCIe lanes, or CPU cores, or power etc..

The N100 is fairly decent for the money, or pay £250ish for a N305 board with similar specs..

What is the use case for 10Gbe? It's an odd mix for SATA/CPU/Low power, I just thought it prudent to check that 2.5Gbe isn't more than adequate and opens up more options without needing add-in cards.. although you can get m.2 -> 10Gbe NICs, so can add another one that way!

 

[jigger]

Cheapest way if oyu want low power / 10Gbe (at least 1) and 6 SATA is get one of the cheap Chinese ITX motherboards, e.g.

You will always compromise somewhere with PCIe lanes, or CPU cores, or power etc..

The N100 is fairly decent for the money, or pay £250ish for a N305 board with similar specs..

What is the use case for 10Gbe? It's an odd mix for SATA/CPU/Low power, I just thought it prudent to check that 2.5Gbe isn't more than adequate and opens up more options without needing add-in cards.. although you can get m.2 -> 10Gbe NICs, so can add another one that way!

I’m not sure Id trust something like that on a network.

 

[jigger]

I’d probably look at AM4 ASRock rack with a Ryzen Pro chip, or a Xeon E-3 variant Skylake onwards with C chipset. Both offer proper ECC support. The GE and L CPU varieties of each are very low power but still offer high performance.