Does anyone have recommendation for a mini PC with min 2 sata ports for two 3.5” HDDs, min 2 NVMe for ssd storage, one ssd or eMMC for OS, and 64GB of RAM, with the ability to power up the HDDs from the miniPC (not requiring external power source)?
The HDDs are installed in a case externally. An external PCIe slot to support those 4 mixed drives via an adapter would work too. I tend to avoid usb HDDs enclosures, since usb connection doesn’t work well with ZFS.
But a two bay NAS is typically maxed out at 16 GB of RAM, see UGREEN or QNAP. The CPUs are also dog slow for non-NAS tasks, like running VMs and containers.
Zimaboards come close. Two sata ports and 1-2 NVMe via PCIe. I heard the board may not be able to power all these drives. RAM is limited to 8-16 GB.
I guess I should separate HDD storage in a proper NAS and use a miniPC for VMs and containers only.
AOOSTAR 2-bay AMD R7 5825U mini PC seems to check the boxes, for an entry-level storage + virtualization miniPC host. The CPU is similar to AMD R7 5800H in a Beelink SER5 Pro miniPC which runs proxmox very well.
It has a cpu with 8C/16T, up to 4.5GHz, and supports max 2x32gb DDR4 3200Mhz RAM, 2x4T PCIe 3.0 M.2 NVMes and 2x2.5G NICs.
Yeah I know, like Beelink 6 NVMe. But NVMe storage is not affordable at high capacities. So, I want two +14 TB HDDs for cold slow storage, and two 4 TB for fast warm storage for VMs, containers, databases, and applications.
I also need a lot of RAM for proxmox VMs and containers. The CPU in my experience need not have many cores. I mean truenas itself virtualized demands 8GB of RAM.
If you want lots of nvme, lots of sata, lots of ram and lots of ability to power drives then you're not looking at a minipc anymore.
Would suggest you do the same I did - climb onto ebay and look at the AM4 systems that gamers are dumping. AM4 is aging out of gaming space but for NAS/proxmox duty they're aging like fine wine. Look for one that has is X570 and has bifuraction support on the X16
The HDDs are installed in a case externally. An external PCIe slot to support those 4 mixed drives via an adapter would work too. I tend to avoid usb HDDs enclosures, since usb connection doesn’t work well with ZFS.
That would be a cool ZFS NAS.