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!

  • globEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m afraid I don’t have any ideas for you, but please let us know what you end up going with. I’ve been running a FreeBSD NAS on an old HP N40L microserver for some time. 4 SATA drives in a ZFS pool plus a 5th for the OS. I also added a 10Gb NIC. It has been solid for years, but I’m starting to plan for the inevitable replacement.