Motherboard recommendations mATM / M-ITX

TrueNAS General
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I am about to build my first NAS, and need to find a good motherboard for my build.
I’ve decided to use the Jonsbo N4 case, which limits my options to mATX and M-ITX boards.

My requirements are:

  • mATX or M-ITX

  • minimum 6x SATA ports

  • 1x M.2 nvme slot

  • minimum 32GB max memory (preferably with ECC support)

  • at least one 2.5Gbps ethernet port, ideally 10Gbps

  • under 300 EUR

  • available in EU

I’ve been looking at a couple no-name boards with N100 and N355 chips, which seems like a good fit. But I have no idea about the quality and reliability of those.

Any recommendations or suggestions are very welcome!

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I think that “no-name” pretty much defines the expectations here…

You’re one year late to grab a Gigabyte MC12-LE0, which would have been a great fit, with a card for the NIC.
The second best choice is an AsRock Rack E3C246D4U2-2T from eBay. DDR4 ECC UDIMM price could become an issue.
Or try finding a suitable second-hand X10SDV; second-hand DDR4 RDIMM hopefully will not dry up.
Other than these, you won’t find a motherboard with a good 10G NIC built-in in the target price range. Better rely on an add-on if necessary.

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Only 1Gbps NIC and no ECC – Pro Q670M-C-CSM｜Motherboards｜ASUS Global. Sub €200. Buy any NIC you want with the remaining €100.

Probably not the best option overall. I’ve been using it for proxmox for about a year – so far, so good.

Also, intel vPro (in case you find it desirable) requires support from the CPU. And AIUI, it’s a very poor replacement for IPMI. Never used it myself.

4

Well, it’s just a wording. Truenas doesn’t work well with any NIC.

5

Checks all your blocks. Up to 128 GB ECC RAM. And IPMI.

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This looks promising. Does this board support booting from the m.2 slot though?

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There is another thread about this. It may be quirky about which m.2 drives as well, per old threads.

It seemed like a waste of the m.2. I boot from S0 and the pool is on S1-5. My m.2 is for vm and apps.

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Problem is I need all 6 SATA ports for my two pools (4x6TB HDD RAIDZ1 + 2x500GB SSD mirror for fast IOPS for apps and metadata)

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It does.

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10

Unless you already have the HDDs, I’d think about a 2x12TB mirror the first pool, a 1x8 or 12 backup pool. Cheaper than 4 6’s at the moment.

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Pretty much any board designed in the last ten years should… And all boards mentioned in this thread do.

For a storage server, SATA ports are much more valuable than M.2. Especially in mini-ITX format where there’s only one slot for all expansion needs.

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Three problems:

  • 12TB drives are usually much higher RPM, and I’m going for as low noise as possible with this build.
  • Doing it this way limits my options to expand the pool in the future, right?
  • I also lose roughly 5TB of effective storage space compared to doing 4x6TB RAIDZ1

Appreciate the feedback though!

13

So 4x6TB Z1 is 18TB storage. You want to limit that to 9TB,ish. Just at the moment, if you buy easystores on Amazon and shuck them, that is $640. If you lose 1, If you lose 1 drive, you are ok, but run to Amazon to get a replacement. If you lose 2 drives, you lose all.

But 2 18’s would be $600. and give you the same 9TB,ish. But two drives rather than 4 is less power and heat. If you lose one drive, you are okay, and run to Amazon to replace it. If you lose two, you lose all.

Your backup doesn’t need to obey the 50% rule, and you don’t need to backup everything. You don’t need to have redundancy in the backup. So a 12tb USB external would work for $230 less the $40 you saved, so $190 more. And you don’t need to run it except for the backup, so no heat, no power, and you still have a SATA port for the unimportant boot and another left over.

Now look at the perfectly capable X10 at $250. The math suggested to me that fewer, bigger drives was the way to go for a home lab.

(PS, also, I’m not using the PCIe slot, so I have a $12 card there for my boot in one of my servers.

14

I think we’re solving different problems:

  • The “50% rule” isn’t really a thing anymore
    That was advice from older ZFS versions when performance dropped sharply as pools filled up. On modern TrueNAS, staying under ~80% is perfectly fine. So I don’t need to size the pool around a 9TB limit.

  • RAIDZ1 is enough for me
    I don’t see the risk of losing two drives at the same time especially high when I only have 4 drives in total. If I had a VDEV with 10+ drives I would probably go Z2. If/when I do lose one drive, I can worst case just power off the NAS while I run to the store to get a replacement.

  • My target capacity is much higher
    I’m aiming for ~13–16TiB usable for media + PBS backups. A 2-disk mirror (even with 12–18TB drives) just doesn’t give me enough space.

  • Noise is a priority
    Most 12–18TB drives are 7200rpm. I’m deliberately going with quiet 5400rpm NAS drives since this machine will run in my living area.

  • Expansion strategy matters
    With a 4-disk RAIDZ1 vdev I can replace drives one by one with larger ones later and expand the pool gradually. I know I need to replace all drives before the VDEV expands, but I am still able to spread out the cost more. A mirror doesn’t give me the same flexibility.

  • Not sure why you mention USB storage
    TrueNAS CORE doesn’t even support USB drives for ZFS pools, and I’m building a 24/7 NAS, not an offline backup rig. So the USB suggestion doesn’t really fit what I’m doing.

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  • “50% rule” is still a thing if you’re doing iSCSI. For bulk storage, 80% is a safe limit…
  • …so a 2-way mirror of 20 TB drives provides the capacity you want. And 18-20 TB is the current sweet spot for €/TB.
  • If noise is a concern, use as few drives as possible. 7200 rpm helium drives may well be quieter than 6 TB air-filled drives, and 2 is better than 4 noise-wise. 5400 rpm are dead anyway: You will NOT expand by going for larger 5400 rpm drives.

???
Replace drives, the vdev expands. It’s more flexible than raidz, as there are only two drives to replace rather than three or more.

TrueNAS, in any version, supports USB drives. It is strongly advised NOT to use USB for drives in arrays, but @elorimer was referring to using a single USB drive as external backup, which does work well enough (with obvious caveats about redundancy).

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Board supports 5 m.2 nvme drives if you use a 4x4x4x4 bifurcating pcie adapter in the 16x slot.

I’d suggest an 8x4x4 though, and then you can add a low profile Arc GPU for transcoding if you want.