What makes a motherboard a NAS motherboard, precisely? I've got a decent Mini-ITX sitting around and I've been contemplating setting up/getting a NAS. Would be nice if I could re-use what I already have and save some money.
Technically any motherboard can become a NAS, but there are desirable features.
- low idle power consumption since your NAS will be sitting doing nothing most of the time - pretty much any desktop MB will do
- fast networking, 1gbe means ~100MB/s transfers, nicer to have 10gbe. Limited benefits beyond 10gbe in practice.
- enough PCIe lanes to connect enough drives. HDD of course but nice to have a separate fast SSD array plus SSD caching. You might also want a SAS HBA if you are looking enterprise drives or SSDs (and even for SATA SSD you will get a better performance via a HBA than through the motherboard). Some people also want a graphic card for video transcoding
- ECC memory
- IPMI - once you start using it it becomes hard to give up. Allows you to manage the server remotely even when switched off, and access the BIOS via a web interface. Allows you to keep the server headless (i.e. not have to go plug a screen to understand why the server is taking so long to reboot).
I'd say a good candidate for a NAS motherboard would be something like a supermicro X11SSH-LN4F, you can find used ones pretty cheap on ebay.
