Smallest/Efficient x86 board for SCALE to be used as a remote backup for single 16 TB drive

[Cytomax]

I am using SCALE
I have 1 pool called Volume using mirror
I have 1 pool called Backup

I would like to have another backup in a geographical different area

I am looking for the smallest most efficient x86 machine compatible with TrueNAS Scale that would support SATA to connect a 16TB spinning rust drive to it

The board shouldnt be bigger than the actual hard drive and hopefully comes with a case that i can install the board psu and drive together

I am hoping to mount this board to a wall but i can figure this part out with a trip to home depot

NIC doesnt need to be more than 1 gig

Any ideas?

[Cytomax]

I cant see where to edit the post so ill just reply to myself

i was thinking someone like an odroid but i am open to w/e is recommended

[SmallBarky]

Try browsing this. Probably closest to what you desire.

Can I please have a small footprint TrueNAS?

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. The NAS marketplace is filled with small appliance NAS devices, often built on an ARM device platform. These small devices, such as 2009’s iomega StorCenter IX2-dl (2x 3.5" HDD) and 2019’s Synology DS419slim (4x 2.5" HDD) are handfuls of modest network storage joy. [iomega-storcenter-ix2-nas-1.jpg] [DS419slim.jpg] My companies own and use …

[Stux]

People seem to like the Intel N100 for a low end NAS board.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1bedpcy/n100_and_n5105_itx_nas_motherboard_review_six/

Low-cost 2-drive NAS box?

These “AOOSTAR” R1 Mini PCs might be right up your alley at $319 It’s running an N100 CPU, 16GB DDR4 RAM, includes a 512GB NVMe SSD, Intel i226-V 2.5Gbps NICs, and has two drive bays for 3.5" HDDs. For $199 you can buy it without the RAM and NVMe SSD, in case you wanted to customize it a little for your needs. If you’re willing, these are abundant on AliExpress even cheaper. I’ve owned a couple and had no issues with TrueNAS SCALE while I was using them.

[briancmoses]

People all around the NAS/Homelab space all seem to really like the N100 CPUs for a lot of reasons. It’s a really performant CPU at its price point, it doesn’t consume very much power, and it’s embedded GPU has Quicksync. I enjoy seeing the people who’ve built a cluster of machines out of N100-powered (or similar CPU) MiniPCs in their home labs.

For NAS builders this dovetails nicely with how large hard drives have become. Once upon a time, I needed to build an array of disks because no hard drive was big enough to hold all of my critical data. That’s still the case for me, but I could almost get away with it today.

The “low end” DIY NAS builder is seeing a shift, too. People don’t/won’t have HDDs in their computers/laptops any longer, as a result data-accumulating folks will see an obvious need for a NAS sooner than they used to but that NAS doesn’t need to be as high capacity as it used to be.

The N100 isn’t without its shortcomings, though. Intel has misleadingly stated that the max amount of RAM it’ll work with is 16GB on its product page. Lots of people all around the Internet (myself included) sharing their experiences using up to 64GB of RAM. Lots of people understandably struggle with this contradiction and wind up shying away from the N100 CPU, which I imagine is a deliberate move by Intel considering that this mistake was also present with the prior generations’ CPUs (N5105) too. The N100 has a limited number of PCIe lanes (9) which means a lot of motherboards using it have made some (many?!) compromises to fit as many features on the motherboard (limited PCIe expansion options, M.2 slots bottlenecked at PCIe x1 speeds, etc…)