Hi all,

I am looking at building my next NAS. My current will move to offsite, and the new will be primary. I previously used this motherboard, and was planning to go with that again. Then I saw this one, which seems like a better option. It has a slightly better CPU and a PCIe slot, but can only have 32GB memory max compared with 64GB max on my current.

Am I missing anything or is this a no-brainer to switch to the N100 board?

  • @NarrativeBearEnglish
    2•10 months ago

    I’m running my NAS on a 12 year old motherboard with 16gb of ram the max the board supports. Though I wish I could bump this up now after running this system for 9 years.

    I would recommend having a board with at least a PCIe slot so if you ever need more drives you can plug them all into a HBA Card. My board has 3 and I use 2 of them at the moment. One for the HBA card that supports 24 drives and another for a 10gb NIC.

    The third I would probably use to add another HBA card if I expand drive quantities.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•10 months ago

      I’m very happy with my current N5105 board that I linked, even though it doesn’t have any PCI slots. With 6 SATA and two M.2s I should be ok. If necessary I can add a 6 SATA M.2 adapter to get up to 12, which is definitely more than I need. If/when I get 10gbe I would have to upgrade either of these to get those speeds. Although a M.2 PCI riser with a 10gbe card would get me ~7gb so that is also an option.

      Any thoughts on these two boards? I don’t see any real disadvantages to the N100 board when compared to the N5105.

      • @NarrativeBearEnglish
        1•10 months ago

        Seems like the N100 is your option if you are only choosing between these two. Personally I am in the same both as others here, where desktop hardware is my preference at the moment especially if I can find combo deals for mombo/cpu.

        Though my recommendation is to consider a board that would support PCIe for a potential LSI HBA card, stay away from any other sata expansion cards unless you don’t value your data.

        If you do ever pick up a LSI HBA card with support for either 8/12/24 drives I would also state to plug the whole pool into this card and not mix and match between onboard SATA connections and the card.

        A boot drive can still connect to a SATA connection on the board as it not part of the pool.