This would give 3 M.2 slots and high speed ethernet.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N1HC88M
Something like this can be used to upgrade a dual-3.5" SATA NAS into a 8x-M.2 NAS (assuming the cooling and everything work appropriately).
Just some ideas.
https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/CM3588_NAS_Kit
there is also the asustor nas: https://www.asustor.com/de/product?p_id=80
If you just need a single nvme SSD you could also buy a banana pi 3 Router:
https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R3
Edit: forgot links and product
Pros:
- It does what it says on the tin and I have 12 nvme drives in a ZFS pool
- It has 10G ethernet built in.
- It's pretty small, especially compared to most HDD focused NAS systems.
- It's just an x86 PC and you can blast the factory OS away to install your OS of choice without issue.
Cons:
- Each drive only gets a 3.0 x1 connection. It's honestly not much of a problem though as 1 GB/s per drive is still a ton of bandwidth after 12 drives.
- The built in ethernet is RJ45 instead of SFP+. Not the end of the world, just less power efficient.
- No PCIe expansion slots for anything but m.2 2280 drives.
- Single RAM slot so no dual channel and no large amounts of RAM. 32 GB works fine (I think Intel says the processor is only rated for 16). I can't remember if I tried 48 and it failed or if I never bothered. Either way 32 GB can be a bit small if you're really wanting to load it up with 4 TB or 8 TB drives and features like ZFS deduplication.
- The single built in fan could have been silent had they made any reasonable design choice around it. Instead I had to externally mount a noctua fan (to the same screw holes, just the inside is not a standard mount) and feed it power via a USB adapter. Works damn silent and cool now though.
- CPU (4 core Intel Celeron N5105) is very weak and the actual performance limitation for most any setup with this box.
I don't regret getting it, it's a solid choice given the relative lack of premade options in this segment, but the follow up NAS build was just me getting a motherboard/CPU with lots of PCIe lanes and loading up 4 way switches. You can do that via buying used Epyc servers on Ebay (loud/chunky) or just building a low end consumer class "workstation" (things like x8 x8 from the CPU instead of x16 for the assumed GPU) and PCIe to x4 switches (not the splitter cards which assume the motherboard has bifurcation and lanes available but actual switches). If you go the Epyc route you don't have to get switches and you can go back to cheaper splitters. I went the latter via some PCIe switch cards off Aliexpress. Performance and scaling of this one was better of course, but so was cost. Since I did all of this prices for m.2 drives have actually went up quite a bit so I'm glad I did it when I did.
What I would not recommend is anything non-x86 (older Ampere servers have lanes at not sky high prices but better to just go used Epyc at that point and get more CPU perf for the same dollar. SBCs are... a poor choice for a NAS on most every account but hacking factor). I'd also not recommend the Flashstor 6 as it only has 2.5 GBe connectivity and at that point what's the value in paying extra to do this all in flash.
You can get m.2 adapters: https://www.delock.com/produkt/64219/dokumente.html?d=467
Unfortunately Synology have been moving towards Enterprise segment and completely forgot consumer.
QNAP has at least two "NASbooks":
https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-464 (2.5 GbE, USB 3.2)
https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/tbs-h574tx (2.5/10 GbE, Thunderbolt 4)
Side note: One of the m2 chips that I got from Amazon was an obvious fake that I might not have caught if I hadn't ordered four together and one obviously didn't match.
But cheap SSDs got down to 2x the price of hard drives last year. Even after prices stabilized, they're at 3x. Flash catching up relatively soon seems likely. Flash matching the current price of hard drives seems even more likely.
Making sure I'm looking at new hard drives, I see prices around $15/TB at the cheap end. There are a few name-brand SSDs at $45/TB, many more at $50/TB. They're not high end but even the low end is fast these days.
Where can I find info on that roadmap, by the way? I've found a few things but they're very vague about price at best.
https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-870-QVO-SATA-MZ-77Q8T0B/dp/B0...
list price of $850 or $624 on sale for 8tb
Still way better than the M.2 NVMe drives which can be well over $1000 each.
However, these SATA drives still dominate HDDs in most metrics like random access and sustained transfer with like 560MB/sec. Not great compared to modern NVMe drives at like 7GB/sec, but for reference HDDs are usually less than half that and the random access metrics can be dire.
But your aren't going to like the price.
You can also use an external PCIe Thunderbolt enclosure for macOS.
As for controller I’ve had good luck with this one: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/2255800570197081.html
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B089C3TZL9/
Oddly, these were ~$300 when I bought them at the end of 2023, but the price has now doubled.
The Camel agrees with you! I've just setup a price drop alert.
Pricing in 2023 was edge case not the norm when everyone was losing money. But most on HN wouldn't believe it when I wrote it.
I also have an external one for backup purposes, and it works well in a Thunderbolt enclosure but has been a little unreliable (random disconnects) in a USB-C enclosure.