Have you needed the customer support a lot with your NAS? How expensive is it for 1 device in a freelancer office?
Hah.....
So, the first series of Motherboards associated with the mini and Mini XL was made by Asrock Rack (C2750D4i), which used a Avoton 2000-series embedded CPU from Intel. A number of issues plagued the board, including a bad Asrock BMC setting causing the local config flash to get nuked (by writing to it continuously). Most of these "teething" issues were resolved by the time I bought my Mini XL. iXsystems had also allegedly spent a lot of time and software resources to make the board reliable.
However, there was a industry-wide issue with the
2000-series CPUs courtesy of Intel, in the form of AVR 54. This bug was essentially a CPU flaw, which, with time, led to NAS' becoming un-bootable. Intel pledged to make things right via their customers, and allegedly everyone affected by a AVR54 bug could get their motherboard replaced within a certain time period.
However, the support that Asrock Rack offered was spotty at best, with people exchanging notes here, at STH, and elsewhere on how to contact whom at Asrock Rack to actually move their motherboard replacement process along. Thankfully I didn't have to, as I contacted iXsystems when my motherboard died and their support was simply awesome. I had to replace the motherboard multiple times, as some replacements were older returns or not properly repaired. I finally got a good model and could not be happier (revision 1.03 IIRC).
IxSystems most definitely lost money on me as a customer thanks to the multiple repairs, support exchanges, etc. Compared to folk who relied on Asrock Rack, I made out like a bandit, and all of that for free. If iXsystems offered the motherboard I wanted for sale from SM, I would have happily paid a significant premium to acquire that vs. buying it from WiredZone. The few times I contacted SM, (for issues that turned out to be benign) the support was excellent, though not as fast as iXsystems.
Based on what I have read here, at STH, and Reddit, I would
NEVER buy a Asrock board from anyone but iXsystems unless I had zero expectation re: customer support (i.e. used, out of warranty, and not mission-critical). While iXsystems has the recurring transaction relationship with Asrock Rack to motivate them to play nice, a single-system customer like me would be undoubtedly be left in the rain if anything went wrong. No thanks.
That said, the C2750D4i rev. 1.03 is still fully-functional and makes a for a great compact Mini-ITX board that can handle a lot of drives. So I understand why iXsystems chose this board and sank so many resources into it. The current Mini XL apparently uses the
A2SDi-H-TF from SuperMicro though I cannot confirm that from personal experience.