History: I put my NAS build on hold because of money constraints and a lot of bad luck with the hardware I purchased for it. This was like 8 months ago. Now I want to finish it but still need a Motherboard, a CPU, and (possibly) some RAM.
Currently: I am looking to make this thing last a long time and am willing to pay about $400 total. I am going to use it as a media server and a backup for all my important files, pics, vids, and music, computer backups and images. I'm not entirely sure if my budget can adequately do all these things, but am willing to pay more to get something that does it well at a reasonable price.
I hate ASROCK so please don't suggest ANY AssRock boards (I've had bad luck with every mobo I ever bought from them, so no thanks).
Is that 400 for the whole NAS? You can kind of make it there, what you'd really want is a way more expensive build with an...
No clue if other companies make a board like it, seriously though there's nothing inherently wrong with ASrock, I just got an AM3+ ASrock board and it's solid
There's the basic AM1 NAS, board only has 4 sata ports, the case supports up to 8 3.5" drives if I remember right
I have had way to many problems with multiple ASRock motherboards. No way I'm going to buy another one. Not only did I have problems with it, but when I contacted them, they pretty much said "sorry, ask your seller."
Moving on. I have my HDD's, power supply, and the Node 304. It has to be a Mini ITX form factor. I have 16GB DDR3L memory but am willing to get whatever the board can take (even ECC RAM) up to 16GB. If I don't need the RAM (which depends on the motherboard), I just need a motherboard and CPU. I'm also leaning towards Intel over AMD due to the lower power consumption.
The problem you will have is that there are no reasonable boards that have a ton of SATA I/O; Some full fledged desktop boards (a.k.a. workstation) have a lot, but they are X99 or Z170 (rare), the rest has ~ 4 SATA ports only so you will need a host bus adapter; For a respectable NAS tough, you will want ECC which than brings us back to server boards; I have been looking myself for a while in the past 3 months and I have not found any solution consisting of a Motherboard, Xeon, ECC Ram, and a HBA that was even near 400 USD (not even near 400€ to be honest)
A respectable HBA alone sets you back ~300 bucks =/ and a somewhat server grade motherboard from supermicro is another 200-300 and there is still no Xeon and no ram on it sadly.
Despite all the shit I heard I in the end went with (YES I read your title and post) the C2750 from your hated manufacturer ... and so far *knocking on wood * it is stable.
Mini ITX form factor
that just made it even worse....
Well thats what PCPartpicker spits out for Intel with DDR3 and at least 6 SATA ports: Click here
PS: I removed the "Z" from ideas in the title of your post
I went through all of your criteria and came up with this solution.
The closest board to somewhat suit your needs is the Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F which is going to set you back by 900 bucks. The next best solution is the Asus MAXIMUS-VIII-IMPACT which costs you about $240 (without cpu). With CPU you are looking at more than $500.
On the subject of "bad boards": I had issues with AOpen, Supermicro, Asus, ASRock, MSi, EVGA (at least a friend had, I had to help) and Gigabyte. Currently I am using an ASRock 970 Extreme3 R2.0
unless you need like super duper high bandwidth for your NAS, id just go with a raspberry pi. Power consumption wise, and easy of setting up, its really one of the easiest solutions you'll find. Down side is the USB lanes are sortta redicules constructed in its architechture so even if you insert a gigabit USB NIC it will run at max 15-20mb/s. But it is stable as hell, and price to performance, no x86_64 architechture could ever come close for such a simple task. Aswell the community behind it is just redicules compared to anything you'll find which runs M$ atleast.
Since you won't accept an ASRock board, look into some embedded solutions. BCM, Axiomtek, Kontron, or Jetway. Of those, Jetway sells their boards boxed and ready, here's a decent one on eBay:
The price will fit your budget a bit better and should still do what you need.
Also for an AMD option:
Supports eTrinity mobile APUs (R series, not 4000/5000 as originally written. So R-464L, R-460H, R-272F, R-268D). I/O for days.
yes kind of what i meant with it being redicules constructed. If you can settle with the performance of 1-2 times the performance of 100m/b for your home network, and even if so you'd have abit of fluctuation in MB/s transferred since the cpu has a bunch of overhead, it is da thang, if you want the fastest of the fastest and are willing to shell out. Dont bother. Im currently rocking a NAS running at approx 11mb/s without a GB netadapter. But if i plug in a GB adapter i get like max 14-15mb/s, cause of the USB bus being on the same bus as the ethernet bus. Not to mention the limitations of the arm CPU. My point being again, if you want gigabit speeds, dont bother. If you want a backup drive where speed doesn't matter, its cheap and ez.