I’ve been using a second hand Supermicro Mini-ITX board and Xeon E3-1268L v3 with 16GB of ECC memory and have had no complaint wrt performance: my usage is bulk storage (8x16TB RaidZ-2) over SMB shares for 1-2 concurrent users, without running any jails or plugins.
Unfortunately the system has been giving me trouble lately (getting a bunch of IPM errors about fan speed going below critical threshold asserting and de-asserting themselves. I’m pretty sure the fan itself - a Noctua - is actually fine), which, together with other annoyances (the IPMI is ancient and requires using Java to do remote display), is making me think of rebuilding on a more modern platform.
Looking around, I came across the ASRock N100DC-ITX, which is inexpensive, low power and fanless. It also seems to support ECC memory and I could use the M2 slot to run a 10Gbps NIC (I’d be reusing the boot SATA SSD)
Does anyone have experience with the platform? Does it work well with TrueNAS Crore?
Asus would need to provide appropriate updated firmware, and I don’t know if they have–if you were using the Supermicro board you said you were using, I know they have updated firmware available.
But to your actual question, the board you list can use ECC RAM, but not use the ECC features–that extra parity bit will just be ignored. It has a Realtek NIC onboard, which isn’t good, but it has a PCIe slot for you to put in a better one. The onboard sound and graphics aren’t needed, but aren’t likely to hurt anything.
My biggest concern is RAM–it supports a max of 32 GB, assuming you can find a single DDR4 DIMM that large (because there’s only one DIMM socket). That’s a little light for 96 TB of storage.
N100 is the low-end (former “Pentium”) variant of Alder Lake. CPU-wise it would be enough. But it does not have enough SATA ports and PCIe lanes to be useful as a ZFS NAS.
There is no NIC in M.2 form factor (Aquantia) which could be recommended for TrueNAS CORE.
