I am looking into building a new NAS to replace my aging current one. I want to go self-built with focus on low power consumption and silence. It will run FreeBSD on bare-metal. Data disks are planned to be SSD with ZFS.
With this, I am looking for a mainboard with these properties:
- Onboard low power CPU with passive cooler (no fan)
- Min 4 SATA ports for the data SSDs
- Min 1 M.2 slot for the IS
- IPMI, this will be headless, even for initial config
Any ideas? Thanks very much!
This NAS build might interest you: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vjDoQA4C22c BTW. you don’t need IPMI you can use a pikvm or blikvm
I’m using a SuperMicro A2SDi-4C-HLN4F for my NAS.
It takes like 20-30W with 4 3.5" SATA HDDs and one M2 SSD installed. It has IPMI and I’m running it with FreeBSD 13.2, works like a charm. You just need to be aware that you need to adjust the SATA ports in the bios in order to use all 4 of them, by default only 2 SATA ports and the SAS interface will be enabled.
The temps are fine on the cpu without fan - I only have three fans in front of the drives.
