In addition to the Ampere Altra/Altra Max boards mentioned earlier, there are others:
- Pi 5 and RK3588 are extremely energy efficient and have just enough bandwidth to make a decent 2.5 or 5 Gbps NAS with 4+ SATA or SAS HDDs, and maybe one or two NVMes.
- Radxa Orion O6 is nearly M1 level of performance for a few hundred bucks, and has SystemReady certification for at least much of it’s hardware features (full UEFI, can install standard Debian, Ubuntu, Windows on Arm, etc.)
- Macs… which are frustratingly difficult to work with many PCIe devices, so building a customized NAS is harder but not impossible, especially if willing to stick to NVMe and/or Thunderbolt devices. The M4 mini with built-in 10 Gbps Ethernet is nice for a tiny 4W NAS.