Date: 2018-10-04
I am planning to replace my NAS I currently am running at home, and I was planning to get a small board and some other parts to go with it, to replace my current NAS which is really power inefficient, and is pretty much all proprietary. This new solution would be really power efficient, simple and more sane. Instead of one single RAID 6 at home without backups, I'd be using this new computer with a simple RAID 1 and have nightly off-site backups.
I'll also be using OpenBSD on it, so the hardware has to be compatible.
Since the board I'll use (a PC Engines apu2c4) only has 1 SATA port, I'd have to get a miniPCIe SATA card.
This chipset supports 4 SATA III ports, and I've been using a card with this chipset for almost a year now in my previous NAS without issues.
Pros:
Cons:
This chipset supports 2 SATA III ports, gets less hot and is pretty cheap.
Pros:
Cons:
I've tried to fix the Marvell 88SE9215 chipset under OpenBSD, but to no avail. So I'll try to get the ASM1061 working with the apu2c4.
It seems all miniPCIe SATA cards seem to make trouble. So I decided to scrap the idea of putting an SSD into the mSATA port of the board and just using an adapter like this to forego SATA chipset madness alltogether. This also means I won't be having an SSD in the system at all, but since I'll never shut it off, longer boot times don't bother me much. This way, I'll be using both integrated SATA-like ports and not add any more.