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What motherboard should I use for a DIY NAS? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I posted last week about building a NAS, and on friday I saw that the Jonsbo N4 case I had been eyeing for a while was in stock at a good price.

So now I am looking for a motherboard to base my system on, which seems to be a bit difficult.

I need an mATX or ITX board that can handle six SATA drives and also have an NVME slot for a boot drive.

Performance, I value power efficiency more than super high performance, and am on the fence between Open Media Vault or TrueNAS, I like the familiarity of Linux, but I do value the features of ZFS.

If I end up on TrueNAS I may run a VM in the hypervisor from time to time, mostly just for testing.

The NAS will not be an HTPC, but will serve media through SMB and possibly NFS later.

Cooling could be a bit of an issue as the case does not have a lot of space for a cooler

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

imo, hardware raid is irrelevant for most small-scale use-cases and can be a liability for homelabbers. In a professional context, I've had a raid card shit itself causing temporary data loss and downtime because my idiot bosses didn't buy a spare card back when they set up their system. If you're doing hardware RAID, you must buy two cards, and they MUST be on the same firmware version. Software RAID is basically just as fast, is far more flexible, has one less SPOF, and is cheaper (a cheap HBA being all you need hardware-wise). About the only other thing some RAID cards have is a battery backup unit to get around write hole issues, but good filesystems can help with that too.

Hardware RAID isn't necessarily obsolete, but I'd say it's like mainframes—the applications for it are highly specialized.