Got suggested to me too and looked really interesting. But had no space to fit it so I went the Pico PSU route.
Extremely expensive and, if based on QLC drive, very unreliable.
That would work absolutely fine.
Most 6 port cards are x2 and cut down to be x1. Also 8 port SATA controllers aren’t that common. You’ll need to look into HBAs to get 8 ports.
Yeah, 2.5Gbit runs totally fine off of 1 line of PCIe 3.0.
Can confirm it’s supported and working.
Oh I’ve known about HDPLEX for some time, that 250w unit seems like it’s perfect, all I have to do is swap out the included extension that comes with the N3 case and mount the PSU somewhere even if it’s with Velcro or something. Cheaper than a quality SFX PSU and gives me more space for an alternative MB from Asrock Rack that is a Deep ITX board.
I actually built a super small NAS for use by a friend in an RV, used one of this;
And it ran off of the 12v of the RV systems and acted like a cellular modem, WI-FI router, and NAS that ran a Plex server. Small library, only like ~5TB, used 4x 2TB SSDs in a RAID 5. This was some years ago, I think skylake?
P.S. useful part;
https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/M2M-M2B
It’s pretty great and I bet I’m gonna get one sooner or later if I end up building another small NAS with 3.5" HDDs.
If it helps clearing up some space for a better board by all means go for it!
Perfect for a router to get a fallback internet connection!
Still have to source a M.2 B key cellular card but yes, those cards assume the HOST just has a SIM slot, with that adapter board you can add cellular to anything with a M Key M.2
Better is somewhat subjective, the idle power would be MUCH higher at a TDP of 65w (Ryzen 5000 Pro) and higher price as ~$300 for just the MB… But the PCI-e, RAM ECC, and Ethernet desires would all be rectified.
That’s a whole other beast, no contest. Though if you went Ryzen 5000 Pro you’ll lose all the encoding and decoding capability of the Intel iGPU.
Well no, there are Ryzen 5000 pro G chips, but none of them have AV1 which makes me sad…
There also don’t seem to be any small form factor (single slot, preferably half height) DGPUs out there right now that have AV1 either…
I’ve said for a LONG time that Intel needs to make an M.2 Quicksync transcode card or such. Would be a great product for actually a lot of users…
Quicksync gains them a Lot of CPU sales from the competition. It is one of the only reasons for intel on lower power machines/htpc/media devices
True, but it would also open the AMD market to Intel hardware, and to potentially repeat customers for say NAS owners, I think it would be very enticing to just replace even a $100 M.2 card when a new standard comes out then to have to potentially replace the core system, which Intel does not even get all of anyways…
Not to mention the ability to have FAST transcoding on ARM SOCs
but I digress
It would for sure be nice.
On the thread topic, I thought B+M keyed cards, worked in both M and also B keyed sockets, but at reduced speeds?
I have an ssd with B+M key, and it works fine in a regular M.2 M socket
But, I would like to be corrected.
Thst is seperate to motherboards restricting which device can be plugged in, as happens with wifi cards all the time
Yes
Well I have not gotten a single reply from about 4 different places that sell the 8x Sata board and have been totally ghosted, However I have come to the conclusion that the assumed topology of the first 4 Sata is from the controller and the last 4 Sata is from a port multiplier to be correct. I get this from an alliexpress review of the board that states that the later 4 ports do not work without a driver install and also work at a reduced speed especially when hit at the same time.
So I will be going with the 6x Sata M key and 2x Sata E key solution, Now I just need to find that Asus Prime N100I-D D4 board ANYWHERE… Anyone have any idea why it’s not listed like anywhere? I find it strange that I can find may reviews of the board but literally no where to buy it…
Well I think this is my final build, found a different case that is more “NAS” like that is smaller and I think better.
well never mind, that Asrock board does not have PCI-e to the M.2 E Key, Guess it was a good thing I did a lookover of the manual… UUUUUGH stupid CNVi… guess I’ll just wait for that Asus Board some more…
The N100M has two PCIe and 2 SATA instead, could you use that instead?
Need 9 Sata, 8 HDD, 1 Boot… that would just be 8 Sata ports… So I would have to use a PCI-e 1x riser and a PCIe board for 1 Sata port…
Unfortunately, I seem to be running into the issue of it’s almost workable… as an example I have also considered the new Minisforum BD770i Motherboard, which does not have a single onboard Sata port, and none of these Sata cards are bootable… I really would like to keep the PCI-e slot open for down-the-road upgrades, Ethernet, so on…
If you get an ASM1166 PCIe card, then you have 6 + 2 internal SATA ports for disks, 1 M.2 for boot, and one PCIe left, for example for a faster network card.
If that’s okay for you, to use an NVMe instead of SATA for a boot drive.
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