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Hey Kevin, Did stumble across a Biostar J4125NHU motherboard and found it attractive as it had a real M.2 slot for harddrive(s) as well as a M.2 for wifi .... or so the specs said. Thought in case it did not work out as an Unraid server I could always use it as a low power PC for streaming / watching TV. I did find a 6 SATA port M.2 card and installed it as well as another 4 SATA card contrroller for the one PCIE slot. The board itslef has 2 SATA ports. Unfortunately the MB I recieved did not have the slot for the wifi card and also had no internal header for USB 3 (in case I end up using it as an ordinary Windows PC). Later I figured out from the Biostar web-page that the wifi M.2 is "optional" what ever that means. Where I live the Biostar MB is same price as the Asrock J5040 but harder to find a retailer. Long story short I did build it into my 10 HDD Unraid server. I used 5 x 120 mm fans at full speed. Disconencted 2 of them and turned the other 3 to minimum flow and that turned out to be enough flow to keep everything cool enough inside the box. Doing parity (all drives spinng) check it uses ~78 W. Writing data to the array then it uses ~45 W (2 cahce drives are active). When at idle with all drives sleeping then it runs at 25 - 28 W. With the large amount of drives I did see slower parity speed at ~108 MB/sec than I had before, which was at ~130 MB/sec. My parity check time went from 17 hours to 22 hours. I do not do parity check that often so from an user perspective somehting I can llive with. As I am using cache drives then writing to the servers seems to be unchanged at 110 - 130 MB/sec i.e. saturating my 1 Gbps inhouse ethernet cable. I run "the data mover" in the midlle of the night so I do not care that it is slightly slower than what I am used to. For what I use my Unraid server for then the Asrock J5040 or the Biostar J4125NHU seems to be good choices - though it is not server grade equipment ment to run 24/7/365 nor has any future upgrade path. Will see how long time it will last. Conclusion: The Asrock J5040 / Biostar J4125NHU seems to be OK for an Unraid file server and did cut my power consumption some. The fewer harddrive you choose the better off you are from a power consumption perspective. The J5040/J4125 CPUs from my perspective seems power full enough as a file server CPU. I think the Asrock J5040 is more "up to date" than the Biostar J4125NHU but cannot document why. Really mis the sata M.2 slot at the Asrock J5040. Do not understand why they did not include. At the Unraid web-page there is a link to some guys that really made the power consumption "a fine art" and got their servers down in the 5 - 15 W range with sleeping drives handpicked power supply and motherboard etc. I am happy with bringing my server to the ~25 W range at idle but just know there are more power efficient solutions out there.

9/10 add on. Just had a boring train ride that gave me time to explore the Unraid forum. Looks like MB based at CPUs like J5040, J4125, J4105 etc has a limited number of PCIE lanes and long story short you shold expect read/write slowdown / penalty if you ecxeed 6 harddrives. So at the end it comes down to your needs and preferred way to design your server. For my main server i prefer to use 2 parity drives and 2 cash drives in mirrow mode. That gives me the redundency I can live with and the write speed I can live with i.e. I can saturate my 1 Gbps ethernet cable. J5040 would not give me the needed number of slots for storage drives ..... but the J5040 is the perfect match for a 4 drive Unraid server I have for backup that do not use cache drivens. Important to use enough time to explore Unraid forum as there is a lot of good info here. I have been looking for a low power solution for some time too and finally decided to buy the Asrock J5040 and see what it would do for me. Did build a test rig with 4 WD RED 3 and 4 TB drives, 650 W PSU, 1 x 120 mm fan and do some Wattage measurements. What I found was: - Max wattage during startup was ~65 W - stand by mode with HDD drives spinning ~34 W - standby mode HDD drives not spinnig ~19 W - writing data to the array ~40 W - performing parity check (all drives spinnig) ~40 W I think the J5040 used 15 - 18% of its CPU power to run parity check so it has more than enough CPU calculation power for being a file server. I do not run VMs etc. My main Unraid server is an ASUS A320K + Ryzen 200GE CPU, 10 NAS drives (primarily WD RED), 650 PSU, 4 or 5 120 mm fans. The power consumption I did measure looks like this: - Max wattage during startup was ~180 W - stand by mode with drives spinning ~94 W - standby mode drives not spinnig ~50 W - writing data to the array ~86 W I also have an old LGA775 based ASUS workstation motherboard with a Q9400 CPU. Ran it with 4 drives, 650 W PSU, 1 x 120 mm fan etc and saw this wattage consumption - Max wattage during startup was 140 - 160 W - stand by mode with drives spinning ~95 W - standby mode drives not spinnig ~75 W - writing data to the array 110 - 120 W So I am happy with the J5040 low power consumption. Did not do any particular effort trimming it but used it straight out of the box. I did run into one issue ..... had to change a folder name at the UNRAID USB from EUFI- to EUFI i.e. removing "-" in order for it to boot from the USB drive .... but somewhere else that is reported as a "known issue" .... frustrating when you are setting up the server hardware and do not know about this. I am also missing temperature data from the CPU etc but that is most likely me that just have to work more with setting UNRAID up properly. For my purpose then it looks like it is more than CPU powerfull enough for being a file server only. Asrock has "M" version (M-ATX and not ITX) of some of these low power Intel based onboard CPU boards you may consider as they have more PCIE slots than the ITX versions but fewer onboard SATA ports. You can then use small PCIE cards for attaching harddrives i.e. trad-off between 2 or 4 onboard SATA ports or 1 or 3 PCIEs you can use for attaching HDD. Where I live then the "M" versions of the motherboards are slightly cheaper than the ITX boards ...... make your self a PROs and CONs list and move on. Personally I would never use a PICO PSU for something that runs 24 x 7 x 365. I would use a good high quality regular PSU .... but is just me. PICO PSU is small and slick and I see why you are thinking/asking about it but I would vote for a real regular PSU.

Did replace the sata cables and reattached the power cabels ..... and I "hate" to say you are right as I feel like a fool. Now parity check runs at 130 - 160 MB/sec speed as normal. Was there anything in the diagnostic files that indicated bad sata cables or power cables ? thx a lot for the advice and 1000 thumbs up from me to you.

During coping data from my Unraid server to an external harddrive the Unraid server froze up. Did restart it and now parity check running speed is between 0 - 3 MB/sec where it normally is 100 - 130 MB/sec or more. Did run the disk speed check docker and all disk looks OK with regard to speed versus place at harddrive. All in the 120 - 150 MB/sec as I did expect. Did run SMART quick test at all my harddrives and all ended with "no errors to report". In the log file I see this; ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310) ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Could not resolve symbol [\_SB.PCI0.SAT0.SPT2._GTF.DSSP], AE_NOT_FOUND (20200925/psargs-330) ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PCI0.SAT0.SPT2._GTF due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20200925/psparse-529) ACPI BIOS Error (bug): Could not resolve symbol [\_SB.PCI0.SAT0.SPT2._GTF.DSSP], AE_NOT_FOUND (20200925/psargs-330) ACPI Error: Aborting method \_SB.PCI0.SAT0.SPT2._GTF due to previous error (AE_NOT_FOUND) (20200925/psparse-529) I can write data to the Unraid server at ~113 MB/sec as usual (it has cache drives). I can read data from the Unraid server at normal speed. ... but as soon as I start parity check then it only runs at 0 - 3 MB/sec and will last for 10 - 40 days where it normally takes ~8 hours. Have added the diagnostics file. Please help as I cannot figure out what is wrong. Any help is highly appreciated. svgmain-diagnostics-20220320-1914.zip