Bijuuka

Glad to be of help. beneath you can find the link to the 20+ pages of the servethehome topic about that board. They discussed and tested many configurations for the 8i slot and so on. Unfortunately, the topic got a bit extensive and I can't remember what was discussed on which page so you have to do the digging yourself. https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/gigabyte-mj11-ec1-epyc-3151-mystery.41395/ Regarding the SlimSAS to SATA cable, in this post https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/gigabyte-mj11-ec1-epyc-3151-mystery.41395/post-395334 somebody linked an Aliexpress one. Don't know how that went for him, but I don't trust those cheapo ones too much. The SlimSAS to 4x SATA is already configured in the BIOS and should work out of box though. Here is another one talking about a 4i to 4x SATA cable and saying it's working. For me it's one from Amazon for around 16€. https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/gigabyte-mj11-ec1-epyc-3151-mystery.41395/post-398958 Additional Info while quickly digging through the thread on serve the home: Someone made a 3d print file for an I/O-shield. Maybe you can find someone, who can print it out for you in your area, or that offer delivery. The Hyperthreading is usually disabled in the BIOS. You have to turn it on in the BIOS yourself. The 8i uses half the electrical bandwith of the PCIe x16 Slot on the EC0 version of the board. SFF 8i to PCIe Adapter for an 3.0 x8 Port should work. YOu have to tune the fan profile otherwise that thing is going to slaughter your hearing. You can fit a 92mm Noctua over it by using only the single screw the original fan was mounted with, maybe ven a 120mm to cool the RAM too. Hope the board runs for you well. Have fun digging the thread, there are a shitton more usefull information in there. Just fyi, another bookmark i found in my dump folder was this: OEM Gigabyte MB10-DS4 Intel Xeon D-1521 - IThaehnlein sells it for 230€ used and 300€ new. Has a built in dual 10G NIC (2x Intel X557-T2 LAN 10GB) and a full 3.0 x16 Slot. Only 6 SATA ports base compared to the above. @vsmt

I'd stay clear of the N100 boards. And N300 and so on. They only have 9 PCIe 3.0 lanes. I also run the above mentioned N100M, but in a 2-bay configuration with the option for adding an expansion card for another 2 SATA drives in the bigger PCIe slot. (The NVMe Slot and the bigger PCIe slot are only 3.0 x2). It's nice for a starter board that can do pretty much everything, but in my opinion not the best for an extensive file server board only. I'd go with an older Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 AMD EPYC 3151 embedded system. Doesn't have iGPU and so on, but a full PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe Slot, 4 Sata 3.0, an additional SliMSAS that is I think configured to fork to 4 other SATA 3.0 Ports and then theres another SFF 8654 8i that can be adapted to like Oculink, NVME Cards and so on. Unfortunately the 8i slot doesn't support Bifurication if I remember correctly. Some people got it to do funny stuff on that port by flashing another Boardfirmware, where there is an PCIe slot instead of the 8i soldered to it. (EC0 version has PCIe slot, EC1 the SFF 8i slot). The CPU is a 7nm AMD chip, that consumes less than your old system and it can run ECC RDIMM as a "file integrity" bonus on top. I thin I read about 19 - 27w of usage when active. Don't know if it is allowed to post directly links here, but i got mine used on Ram-König. The board is for sale at 60€ used and 16GB of ECC RDIMM Samsung Memory can be bought from him for another 20€. I guess theres not much more you can get cheaper for a fileserver only. The board has IPMI and dual 1G RJ45. If the 8 SATA ports (4 + SliMSAS to 4 SATA Adapter) are enough, you'd maybe want to adapt the 8i SFF to a 10G NIC of your choice. There was a - I think "serve the home" -forum post - where they discussed the board extensively, but can't find the bookmark right now. I'll add it when I find it.