alt Hacker NewsWhat makes a motherboard a NAS motherboard, precisely? I've got a decent Mini-ITX sitting around and I've been contemplating setting up/getting a NAS. Would be nice if I could re-use what I already have and save some money.
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nickdothutton • today at 2:29 PM
For me, ECC RAM, large enough number of SATA ports, ability to run rest of my software stack well enough (in my case FBSD and ZFS).
Technically any motherboard can become a NAS, but there are desirable features.
- low idle power consumption since your NAS will be sitting doing nothing most of the time - pretty much any desktop MB will do
- fast networking, 1gbe means ~100MB/s transfers, nicer to have 10gbe. Limited benefits beyond 10gbe in practice.
- enough PCIe lanes to connect enough drives. HDD of course but nice to have a separate fast SSD array plus SSD caching. You might also want a SAS HBA if you are looking enterprise drives or SSDs (and even for SATA SSD you will get a better performance via a HBA than through the motherboard). Some people also want a graphic card for video transcoding
- ECC memory
- IPMI - once you start using it it becomes hard to give up. Allows you to manage the server remotely even when switched off, and access the BIOS via a web interface. Allows you to keep the server headless (i.e. not have to go plug a screen to understand why the server is taking so long to reboot).
I'd say a good candidate for a NAS motherboard would be something like a supermicro X11SSH-LN4F, you can find used ones pretty cheap on ebay.