HL8 with Q670 motherboard

General
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I am considering the purchase of the HL8 chassis with power supply. I currently have two QNAP NAS chassis (672xt and 872xt) that I would like to ideally replace with one newer technology system. Both my QNAP systems are running currently Unraid but I have also used TrueNAS Scale in the past. I used to build my own PC’s decades ago but much of the new terminology is a bit overwhelming.

I am considering using at StoneStorm Q670 mITX motherboard since it has 8 onboard SATA ports and 3 NVMe slots on board. Has anyone used this board or its variants?

Any other suggestions for mITX motherboards are appreciated; ideally ones that have 8 SATA ports on board. These are apparently quite difficult to find.

Many thanks in advance for any replies and help.

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Is StoneStorm a real brand? As far as I can tell they just seem to have an Amazon presence and are reselling stuff off of Aliexpress? That board looks like the CWWK Q670 mini ITX board;

which has a reasonably positive YT video, but a low Amazon customer rating (neither board has a statistically significant number of reviews though) and is now currently unavailable on Amazon.

I’d be concerned about, among other things, being able to locate the Raptor Lake BIOS update for that board.

What are your issues with the motherboard used in the HL8 full build, or of the approach of using a 4x SATA to m.2 adapter, which greatly opens up the selection of usable mITX boards without using the PCIe slot?

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I agree with this board looking like a rebranded or cobranded CWWK Q670 board. I hadn’t thought about the potential issues of a Raptor Lake BIOS update. I suppose that could be an issue but I don’t have enough information to know. If I buy the board through Amazon (as opposed Aliexpress), any issues requiring a return would be easier.

As for using a full HL8 build with two M2 SATA adapters . . . most mITX boards I’ve explored only have two M2 slots and using the adapters would preclude me from using any slots for M2 NVMe SSD’s. This board not only has 8 SATA onboard, it also has 3 M2 NVMe slots.

Honestly, I only have experience with Intel CPU’s. AMD would be a new experience for me. I don’t have high graphics needs but do expect to use some graphics adapter (embedded or PCIe) for transcoding. Intel Quicksync has worked well enough for my needs on my current systems.

I feel I need to select an appropriate mITX motherboard before committing to an HL8 purchase. Thanks for your feedback and input.

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If Quicksync is a requirement then you are locked to Intel, yes.

Here are six other mITX boards that are supposed to have 3 m.2 slots, five appear to be Intel;

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#f=8&E=3,7

Not quite sure I understand that. You should only need one m.2 adapter with an SSD in the other m.2 slot. All it should preclude you from is a dual-nvme RAID 0/1 boot drive type setup.

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That helps. Thank you. I will do more research.

But a fully pre-built system got me wondering. How does the 45drives provided system board provide support for 8 SATA drives? It looks like the provided Gigabyte board only supports 4 SATA drives.

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They use a card like this;

Four drives (blue wires in the picture below) are connected to the motherboard, and the other four (dark grey wires in the picture below) are connected via the m.2 adapter.

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My understanding is that 1x PCIe lane maps pretty easily to one SATA port and that an m.2 NVMe connects with 4x PCIe lanes, so connecting 4 SATA through the m.2 isn’t introducing any sort of multiplexting bottleneck or such.

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Thank you for all the detailed replies. I still haven’t made a final decision but all the replies have been very helpful. They are greatly appreciated.

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I started my journey by ordering an HL8 chassis with power supply. I haven’t made a decision on motherboard yet and will continue my research.

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If you haven’t seen it, this might give you an idea of how a build would go;

Not suggesting his part selection matches your use case, just for the general chassis disassembly, cable routing, etc.

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Thanks! I did watch that video. It’s what helped convince me to pursue my own HL8 chassis. His chosen motherboard is another board that doesn’t seem to be available at the moment. I’ll make a decision on a motherboard once my HL8 arrives. It would be nice if it supported mATX motherboards but I don’t believe that is in the cards.

I do like his setup of Proxmox as the base OS and TrueNAS as a NAS VM. I have used TrueNAS in the past but am currently on UnRAID. This will definitely be a system I’ll do some experimentation with. I am really trying to reduce the number of systems I run.

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