Seems like a waste of an m.2 slot to me. Especially with the scarcity of pcie in mini-ITX. You can always connect boot drive(s) to an internal or external usb (with some minor caveats).
Nah. There’s room for airflow between them, and the align perfectly with the front to back airflow of the node 304 case
This post is entirely my personal opinion,
Interesting build. Obviously, MiniITX has some intrinsic limitations just due to space constraints…but it frustrates the hell out of me so I try to avoid it in my homelab. I have a TrueNAS Mini thats the first party TrueNAS ITX machine. It duefully does its job as a backup of critical information…but I need a bigger tool for that job eventually…I wish I had more PCI Express there…
This post is mainly for those of you out there also considering a small form factor build.
I always found that from a bang for buck perspective hotrodding an older HP Elite 800 G2/3/4 or Optiplex or Lenovo corporate desktop…The SFF formfactor ones. For like $75 or less on eBay and Marketplace…
These are cast-off Windows 11 incompatible workstation class machines with plenty of life in the tank. Microsoft policy has had influence on the market for sure… but these things have always been good deals. This is how I started with TrueNAS… just with much older models lol.
Example search: Hp 800 G3 Sff for sale | eBay
The big deal here over ITX is that you get a full phat x16 slot, a 4x lane x8 slot, and you still get at least one m.2.
If you’re willing to boot off USB one of these adapters
and a cheap SATA SSD buys you the first m.2 slot for L2ARC. Any halfway decent consumer M.2 drive can serve the role for a 2 drive backing pool. If the particular model has 2 m.2 slots, the second one can be for SLOG. A cheapo x2 Optane from when Intel tried to accelerate hard drives would probably be great at this.
Example listing:
They usually have space for 2x 3.5" hard drives and at least 1x M.2, some have 2x. Grab a couple of those reman/off lease/refurb Seagate 22TiB drives floating around these days ($500), moar RAM ($50-$100), NVME, boot, faster cpu…
All in for >$1000 is attainable, and your biggest limitation is 3.5" bays, but you’ve put enough cache in front of it to smooth out some of the performance limitations there. Since you get QuickSync/Encode/Decode/GPU Compute for freee… that gives you the ability to add high speed networking on the x16 slot and additional NVME on the x8 (or x4) slot.
You can even be a crazy person like me and throw 4x NVME into a x16 carrier with a PLX chip and get 6 M.2s in one desktop class system…
and you’d even have mounting and room to throw some high-ish QLC SATA SSDs in place of the spinning 3.5" hard drives.
From $1000 to $5000 all in the same chassis… so you can grow into it over time…and its easy to get parts when you break something xD
Before I joined IX/TrueNAS, I wrote several articles on this topic over at ServeTheHome… but on the even smaller form factor ones. These are totally viable too.
With any of these systems here, you sacrifice IPMI and you sacrfice ECC in most cases (but not all!). But you end up with a by-the-spec motherboard thats not got all the wonky chipsets (Forum regulars will know what I mean) so you get really decent quality I/O, inside the chassis and out.
IMO it’s preferable to repurposing a gaming board, but I am guilty of doing that myself so I also get the recycling benefit.
Hope this helps someone.