HOSH

Well I pulled the trigger on one of the AR900i as they are on sale to use as a lower power compute node on unraid that can scale up in power as it is needed. I plan to run PLEX, pi-hole, a VM or two, and maybe some other items on there. One other idea I did see that Erying does have a ITX i9-13900HK D5 with two SATA ports that you could add an HBA card to on the pci-e slot and use the nvme for the cache. I did see from reviews and some others testing that the AR900i currently has no support for SATA devices at all, with the pci-e M.2 slots only being nvme drives. Which is fine with me, as I will be running 2-256GB USB thumb drives as storage. (I found a few others doing this as well so I meet that storage pool requirement with parity.) Then the two top nvme M.2 and pci-e slot should hold six pci-e 4.0 M.2 nvme drives for apps, docker, and the VM machines. They added bifurcation support recently. I think I can back this setup to a much larger HL15 NAS box I am also building to replace aging C2100s and a R710 only running 2 VMs, otherwise I may need to add another USB HDD storage for backups temporarily. My main risky/unknown part is that it only has a 2.5GB RJ-45 NIC, but I have a 10GB SFP+ network core, so going to try one of the ADT-LINK risers and use the StarTech 10G PCIe SFP+ adapter off one of the back M.2 pci-e slots. This would leave me with one more M.2 pci-e slot for future needs.