Hello from North Carolina

[Commander_ET]

Hello everyone, I am new to the nas community and I am currently in the process of gathering parts to build my own nas. I am having some problems though, I seem to find a lot of cases, but then I have a problem finding a motherboard that I like. I need a motherboard with 8 sata ports and I need it to be micro itx or atx so I can place it in a small case. At max capacity the NAS will have 6 x8TB drives, I would also like to have M.2 support on the Mobo for caching. Lian li and Fractal Design make nice cases for nas, but it seems to be a problem with availability. I will use 32 gigs of ram as at max 4 drives will be active with 2 for failure. Hope that is enough info. Any hardware advice would work thanks.

 

[gpsguy]

Welcome to the forums!

Have a look in our resource section for FreeNAS recommendations.

I understand the desire for a mini-ITX system. Realistically, there are only a couple of Asrock or Supermicro boards to choose from. If you bump up the form factor to Micro ATX, you'll have more options to choose from.