I have three WD160EDGZ-11B2DA0 disks that I’m going to shuck once they’re done testing, and I’m looking for a motherboard to go with them. This is purely for storage; I won’t be running Plex or anything, so I don’t care about video transcoding, just storage perf.
This will go in my home office, which already gets pretty warm with all the hardware running in there, so I want to minimize power consumption. This will be replacing my current mini-NAS (a J5040-ITX with a single 8TB IronWolf, ~15W total) and my wife’s nine year old Synology DS1511+ (with 5 x 3TB, ~30W total), so while I’d love it to be in the 15W range, up to 50W total including disks, case fans etc would be acceptable.
Other wishlist items are ECC and 10GBe, and the ability to expand to at least two more drives in future.
I like the look of the Supermicro X10SDV-4C-TLN2F, which STH measured (2015) idling at 25W when configured with 128GB DDR4 and 8 SSDs. It looks like I should be able to mount this in an ordinary PC case, and cool it with ordinary fans.
I like this board and I snagged a few of the active cooled ones off the bay.
additional highlights
superdom if you want to use that.
superdom power socket if you want to have two superdoms.
x16 slot bifurcates with the latest/last BIOS and I think x8x4x4 is interesting.
esp if you want to use all the lanes - look at bifurcation risers search c_payne riser
there are a reasonable number of pwm fan connectors.
some things to be aware of:
the stock sm active cooler is anemic. You’ll thermal throttle if you push the cpu hard.
There’s a thread in the STH forums on simple mod improvements that can be made to cool the
cpu better.
If you use sata0 port you will rob an x1 lane from the m.2 slot making it x3.
RTFM - especially for which power plugs to use. TLDR:
don’t use what looks like a CPU power plug if you are using the ATX 24 plug - the power plugs are either/or.
the molex is only used when powering drives off the motherboard, e.g. superdoms
I’m building a for fun mini itx chassis NAS based on this board with 18 9.5mm 2.5" hot swap bays: 2 sata only, 16 sas3/sata, a u.2 drive under the covers and a pair of m.2 110mm slots. You can really do a lot with this motherboard.