Hi there,
With the release of the new 8TB Seagate hard drives (yes I know Seagate) I've decided to get rid of my 2 HP Microservers filled with 4TB drives and have splashed out on a U-NAS NSC800 8 bay NAS box from the states, although it's shipped from China I believe.
It's a proper NAS style case for a DIY setup and takes Mini-ITX boards, obviously it's got 8 bays so I need 8 SATA ports (RAID add in card not an option as I'll be using the PCI-E slot for a DVB-S2 satellite card). I know after much searchingf the only Mini-ITX board around that has 8 SATA ports is the all in one type with a built in Atom style processor. Not happy with that kind of performance and so will be transplanting my 4970T I purchased a while ago for my next NAS build into it.
Back to the point though, I found out a what appears to not be widely known fact that you can use the WiFi module slot with a Mini PCI-E to 2 x SATA 6G adapter, the only place selling these in "half" form factor is a Chinese company so I've purchased one. This means I'll only need a board that has 6 SATA ports and a mini PCI-E slot that isn't shared with the SATA ports.
Virtually all Mini-PCI-E/SATA m2/PCI Express ports on these Mini-ITX motherboards are shared with 1-2 of the 6 SATA ports, except for one motherboard I've found which doesn't do this - or rather it does - but it doesn't share the built in WiFi slot so problem solved.
It's an ASRock Z97E-ITX/AC, strangely enough the exact board I used on my last HTPC build 6 months ago or so.
The only issue is that this board is extremely fully featured and I really have no need for anything apart from
People advised me against this board for a HTPC as it would suck a lot of power, however this turned out to be nonsense and it idles at 18watts and reaches 45wattes at full load, so power requirements really not a problem but with all the added stuff in a NAS box, well it just seems a bit pointless.
I was wondering if anyone could advise on motherboard that is much more spartan and focused less on featues, I doubt this will come to much but would appreciate some thoughts if such a board exists.
Also, must be intel 1150/similar chipset - I know there's an AMD board that has 8 SATA ports but I need a lot of processing power.
Many thanks indeed for reading
With the release of the new 8TB Seagate hard drives (yes I know Seagate) I've decided to get rid of my 2 HP Microservers filled with 4TB drives and have splashed out on a U-NAS NSC800 8 bay NAS box from the states, although it's shipped from China I believe.
It's a proper NAS style case for a DIY setup and takes Mini-ITX boards, obviously it's got 8 bays so I need 8 SATA ports (RAID add in card not an option as I'll be using the PCI-E slot for a DVB-S2 satellite card). I know after much searchingf the only Mini-ITX board around that has 8 SATA ports is the all in one type with a built in Atom style processor. Not happy with that kind of performance and so will be transplanting my 4970T I purchased a while ago for my next NAS build into it.
Back to the point though, I found out a what appears to not be widely known fact that you can use the WiFi module slot with a Mini PCI-E to 2 x SATA 6G adapter, the only place selling these in "half" form factor is a Chinese company so I've purchased one. This means I'll only need a board that has 6 SATA ports and a mini PCI-E slot that isn't shared with the SATA ports.
Virtually all Mini-PCI-E/SATA m2/PCI Express ports on these Mini-ITX motherboards are shared with 1-2 of the 6 SATA ports, except for one motherboard I've found which doesn't do this - or rather it does - but it doesn't share the built in WiFi slot so problem solved.
It's an ASRock Z97E-ITX/AC, strangely enough the exact board I used on my last HTPC build 6 months ago or so.
The only issue is that this board is extremely fully featured and I really have no need for anything apart from
- Intel onboard video support
- 6 SATA ports
- 1 WiFi module not shared with 6 SATA ports
People advised me against this board for a HTPC as it would suck a lot of power, however this turned out to be nonsense and it idles at 18watts and reaches 45wattes at full load, so power requirements really not a problem but with all the added stuff in a NAS box, well it just seems a bit pointless.
I was wondering if anyone could advise on motherboard that is much more spartan and focused less on featues, I doubt this will come to much but would appreciate some thoughts if such a board exists.
Also, must be intel 1150/similar chipset - I know there's an AMD board that has 8 SATA ports but I need a lot of processing power.
Many thanks indeed for reading
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