You don't need Intel at all. My Atom J1900 based NAS died last year, I re-plugged the SSD and HDD in an unused i7-4770 based PC as temporary solution, but with the info/experience available now, I also could have bought ROCK 5 ITX, so ARM instead of Intel. 1-to-1 formfactor replacement, has 4x SATA connector on-board. Same as you can see from my performance test in earlier message, it can run vanilla Opensuse Tumbleweed when flashed with EDK2-UEFI BIOS firmware in SPI. Debian Trixie I still use dedicated kernel, but should also work. So at power-on and hit ESC, you enter 'BIOS' settings. Also boot from SATA is possible. But if fast NVMe SSD is needed, then there is M.2 M-key slot.If you need more than 1 * NVMe + 2 * USB 3.1 SATA disks, choose an Intel based desktop. You can easily and cheaply have 1 * 4 TB SSD + 5 * 16 TB SATA in a RAID 5 for 64 TB of reliable and fast storage. There are, in our area, heaps of desktops like that thrown out as they will not run Windows 11.without an adapter
What made me not buy this solution is that I did not want/need that whole ATX PC powersupply connectors etc. Many people will like it I know as it is quite easy to replace an Intel/AMD motherboard, but I was/am aiming for lowest power and 12V (car / solar / mobile ) operation as well. And it is known that various high wattage ATX PSUs have a high idle or standby power consumption.
As you indicate, it all matters how many HDDs are involved and how often they are spinning. If 4 or so, the whole low-power ARM SoC doesn't really matter. If not spinning, 1x NVMe + 1x 3.5inch HDD I get to about 4 Watt. See viewtopic.php?t=383336#p2299669 An 8nm SoC alone but RJ45 connected is about 1.5W lowest I could get, measured with USB-C PD power meter, so on the USB-C power connector and base 5V.
Statistics: Posted by redvli — Tue Jun 10, 2025 8:06 am