Man so many SBCs come so close to what you’re looking for but no one has that level of I/O. I was just looking at the ZimaBlade / ZimaBoard and they don’t quite get there either: 2 x SATA and a PCIe 2.0 x4. ZimaBlade has Thunderbolt 4, maybe you can squeeze a few more drives in there with a separate power supply? Seems mildly annoying but on the other hand, their SBCs only draw like 10 watts.
Not sure what your application is but if you’re open to clustering them that could be an option.
4 NAS HDD drives - will be SATA, but could use PCIe expansion; currently have 2 8TB 3.5" HDDs, want flexibility to add 2x more
minimum CPU performance - was fine on my Phenom II x4, so not a high bar, but the Phenom II x4 has better single core than ZimaBlade
Services:
I/O heavy - Jellyfin (no live transcoding), Collabora (and NextCloud/ownCloud), samba, etc
CPU heavy - CI/CD for Rust projects (relatively infrequent and not a hard req), gaming servers (Minecraft for now), speech processing (maybe? Looking to build Alexa alt)
others - actual budget, vault warden, Home Assistant
The ZimaBlade is probably good enough (would need to figure out SATA power), I’ll have to look at some performance numbers. I’m a little worried since it seems to be worse than my old Phenom II x4, which was the old CPU for this machine. I’m currently using my old Ryzen 1700, but I’d be fine downgrading a bit if it meant significantly lower power usage. I’d really like to put this under my bed, and it needs to be very quiet to do that.
Those are tough requirements to meet, I’m not sure there is a low power CPU that can do it all. You would likely need to cluster some devices but that means you need a separate NAS anyway and that kind of defeats the purpose for your case.
Man so many SBCs come so close to what you’re looking for but no one has that level of I/O. I was just looking at the ZimaBlade / ZimaBoard and they don’t quite get there either: 2 x SATA and a PCIe 2.0 x4. ZimaBlade has Thunderbolt 4, maybe you can squeeze a few more drives in there with a separate power supply? Seems mildly annoying but on the other hand, their SBCs only draw like 10 watts.
Not sure what your application is but if you’re open to clustering them that could be an option.
Here’s my actual requirements:
Services:
The ZimaBlade is probably good enough (would need to figure out SATA power), I’ll have to look at some performance numbers. I’m a little worried since it seems to be worse than my old Phenom II x4, which was the old CPU for this machine. I’m currently using my old Ryzen 1700, but I’d be fine downgrading a bit if it meant significantly lower power usage. I’d really like to put this under my bed, and it needs to be very quiet to do that.
Those are tough requirements to meet, I’m not sure there is a low power CPU that can do it all. You would likely need to cluster some devices but that means you need a separate NAS anyway and that kind of defeats the purpose for your case.