Comment by _kb
2 days ago
There's a bit of a trend of vendors packaging mobile CPUs in desktop form factor which are a good candidate for this. Rather than the prebuilt mini PCs this also includes mini-ITX boards. Personally I use the Minisforum BD795i SE, but there are others too.
Check for PCIe bifurcation support. If that's there you can pop in a PCIe to quad M.2 adapter. That will split a PCIe x16 slot into 4 x M.2s. Each of those (and the M.2s already on the motherboard) can then be loaded with either an NVMe drive or an M.2 to SATA adapter, with each adapter providing 6 x SATA ports. That setup gives a lot of flexibility to build out a fairly extensive storage array with both NVMe and spinning platters and no USB in sight.
As a nice side effect of the honestly bonkers amount of compute in those boards there's also plenty of capacity to run other VM workloads on the same metal which lets a lot of the storage access happen locally rather than over the network. For me, that means the on-board 2.5GbE NIC is more than fine, but if not you can also load a M.2 to 10GbE adapter(s) as needed.
This sounds like a really nice setup. Which M.2 to SATA adapters are you using? I've heard some of those are dodgy and others are alright.
I don’t at the moment. This setup is new and my current hot storage needs are pretty minimal so I’m all in on NVMe. When that changes though thats the expansion plan. ASM1166 based boards seem to be an ok choice, but don’t have any personal recs there (yet).
I've not used any of them, but from my shopping some of them are multiport SATA adapters, and some of them are a single port SATA adapter plus a SATA port multiplier. I would expect the port multiplier variants to be dodgier.