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

submitted 2 weeks ago by stoy@lemmy.zip to c/sysadmin@lemmy.world

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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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[-] hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

If your concern is which motherboard will perform well, you can go with any. NAS applications are incredibly easy to run. Basically no resources required.

Your biggest issue will be narrowing it down based on port requirements. Then just go with whatever is cheapest. I’d still recommend AM4, because AM5 is still expensive af. It does mean you won’t have any upgrade path, but for what you’re doing, you shouldn’t need to upgrade ever.

If you’re planning on transcoding the media you’re serving, then you may want to think about throwing an A310 in there to handle that.

You could conceivable even just get a used desktop second hand and harvest the parts.

this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025

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