One 32 GB DDR5 ECC stick costs about $1,084 on Amazon this week, which is more than every motherboard in this guide. That single number changes how to pick the best motherboard for NAS builds in 2026: the board decides which memory you are forced to buy, and the memory now dominates the bill.
The shortlist below covers the three platforms that matter for a DIY NAS motherboard: Intel N150 mini-ITX boards with soldered CPUs, AMD AM5 boards with ECC UDIMM support, and Intel W680 workstation boards that combine ECC with Quick Sync transcoding for Plex and Jellyfin. Each pick lists its SATA controller, NIC chip, idle power where a reviewer measured it, and the full board, CPU and RAM cost, so the choice can be made on numbers rather than on a spec-sheet headline. It pairs with the NAS case guide and the HBA card guide for the rest of the build.
Specs verified October 2026 against vendor spec sheets; prices from the Amazon catalog the same week.
Best NAS motherboards: quick picks
| Award | Board | Price (check live) | Why it wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best overall | Supermicro X13SAE-F | about $530 | 8 native SATA ports, ECC, onboard IPMI and Quick Sync on one ATX board, with a measured 31 W idle |
| Best value ECC + Plex | ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE IPMI | about $427 | Same W680 chipset and ECC for about $105 less, with an AST2600 BMC card in the box |
| Best AM5 server board | Gigabyte MC13-LE1 | about $428 | Dual Intel 10GbE, IPMI and a CPU-wired Gen5 x16 slot for an HBA; takes EPYC 4005 or Ryzen 9000 |
| Best AM5 workstation board | ASUS Pro WS B850M-ACE SE | about $360 | ECC UDIMM listed by ASUS, an onboard AST2600 BMC and 10GbE plus 2.5GbE |
| Best budget ECC | ASRock B550M Pro4 | about $90 | DDR4 ECC UDIMM on a 6-SATA board, so 32 GB of ECC costs about $280 instead of about $1,084 |
| Best low-power mini-ITX | CWWK M8 (N150) | about $269 | CPU soldered on, 8 SATA via two ASM1164 controllers, 10GbE plus two 2.5GbE, fits a Jonsbo N3 |
Prices move daily during the DRAM shortage, so treat every figure here as a band and check the live listing before buying. The full-build table further down shows what each board costs once the CPU and memory are added, which is the number that actually hits the card.
How the picks were chosen
No board in this guide was benchmarked in a lab for this article. Every spec comes from the manufacturer spec page, every price and stock state from the Amazon catalog API on the day of writing, and every power or throughput figure is attributed to the reviewer who measured it (ServeTheHome, NASCompares, Matt Gadient, Kevin Tong, Dawid Wróbel and TrueNAS forum owners). Boards were dropped for three reasons: no buyable new listing on Amazon US, a SATA controller that blocks deep CPU sleep states, or a manufacturer that could not be identified.
The selection weighted five things in order: whether the board runs real ECC memory, how many drives it takes without an add-in card, which SATA and network chips sit on it, whether it has a BMC for headless management, and what it costs as a complete platform. A board that looks cheap but forces an HBA, a cable kit and a second NIC is not cheap.
NAS motherboard comparison
| Board | Form factor | ECC | SATA (no HBA) | M.2 | Network | BMC |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Supermicro X13SAE-F | ATX | Yes, DDR5 UDIMM | 8, W680 chipset | 3x Gen4 x4 | Intel I225-LM 2.5GbE + I219-LM 1GbE | AST2600 onboard |
| ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE IPMI | ATX | Yes, DDR5 UDIMM | 4 + 4 via SlimSAS cable | 3x Gen4 x4 | 2x Intel 2.5GbE | AST2600 add-in card |
| Gigabyte MC13-LE1 | Micro-ATX | Yes, DDR5 UDIMM | 4, B650E chipset | 1x Gen5 x4 | 2x Intel X710 10GbE | AST2600 onboard |
| ASUS Pro WS B850M-ACE SE | Micro-ATX | Yes, DDR5 UDIMM | 4, B850 chipset (off when U.2 is used) | 2x Gen5 x4 (MCIO shares the second) | Realtek 10GbE + Intel 2.5GbE | AST2600 onboard |
| ASRock B550M Pro4 | Micro-ATX | Yes, DDR4 UDIMM (non-APU Ryzen) | 6, B550 chipset | 1x Gen4 x4 + 1x Gen3 x2 (shares SATA 5-6) | Realtek RTL8111H 1GbE | None |
| CWWK M8 (N150) | Mini-ITX | No | 8, 2x ASM1164 via SFF-8643 | 2x Gen3 x1 | Marvell AQC113C 10GbE + 2x Intel i226-V | None |
1. Supermicro X13SAE-F: best overall NAS motherboard
The X13SAE-F is the one board here that needs nothing added before eight drives go in. Supermicro wires all eight SATA ports to the W680 chipset, adds three PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, and puts an ASPEED AST2600 BMC with its own management port on the board itself.
Who it is for: a TrueNAS or Unraid box that also runs Plex or Jellyfin, where ECC, Quick Sync and remote console access are all required. Skip it if the box will never transcode and never needs IPMI; an AM5 board does the storage job for less money.
ServeTheHome measured 31 W at the wall at idle with an i7-12700F in a sparse configuration, and 3.8 W with the system off and only the BMC powered. That idle figure is the only measured one in the W680 group. Memory runs ECC or non-ECC UDIMM up to 192 GB, but Supermicro rates DDR5 at 4400 MT/s, below the 5600 MT/s the AM5 boards reach with one DIMM per channel (with two per channel the AM5 boards drop to 3600 MT/s, so the gap reverses). The 2.5GbE port is an Intel I225-LM, the older controller generation, so a 10GbE card goes in one of the two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots (they split x8/x8). The 10GbE NIC guide covers which cards behave on Proxmox and TrueNAS.
Pair it with a Core i5-14500 (about $241, ECC supported per Intel ARK, UHD 770 with two media engines). Stock on that CPU listing was thin when checked, so confirm the seller and stock before ordering. The i5-14400 and every F-suffix chip lack ECC, so they are the wrong CPUs for this board even though they fit the socket. Expect about $530 for the board, check the live price. The in-stock Amazon listing is the retail-box MBD-X13SAE-F-O from a third-party seller with few units left when checked.
Before first boot, flash a BIOS that carries Intel microcode 0x12B or later. Intel said the 13th and 14th generation Vmin instability could reach any desktop part rated 65 W and above, which includes the i5-14500, and the fix cannot repair a chip that has already degraded.
2. ASUS Pro WS W680-ACE IPMI: best value ECC board for Plex
Same chipset, same ECC support, same CPU list, for about $105 less than the Supermicro. The saving comes with two compromises, both in how the parts are connected rather than in what the platform can do.
Who it is for: a Quick Sync plus ECC build where the Supermicro price is the blocker. Skip it if the case needs eight SATA cables today and a SlimSAS breakout cable cannot be sourced; only four ports are native.
ASUS lists four DDR5 ECC UDIMM slots to 192 GB, two CPU PCIe 5.0 x16 slots (x16 or x8/x8), three PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots and two Intel 2.5GbE ports. Drives five to eight hang off a SlimSAS port that needs a breakout cable sold separately. The BMC is an AST2600 on a bundled expansion card with its own 1GbE port, rather than a chip on the board. Amazon showed limited stock when checked, so the listing can flip to unavailable quickly. Expect about $427, check the live price.
Both W680 boards report ECC corrections to Linux only on recent kernels. The mainline ie31200_edac driver gained Raptor Lake-S IDs (including the i5-13500, i5-14500 and i7-14700) in Linux 6.15. Unraid 7.3 (Linux 6.18) and Proxmox VE 9.2 (Linux 7.0) carry it; TrueNAS 25.10 runs Linux 6.12, so on TrueNAS the memory still corrects errors but edac-util shows no memory controller until TrueNAS 26.
3. Gigabyte MC13-LE1: best AM5 server board for a NAS
This is the board for a NAS that has to move data fast and be managed without a monitor. An Intel X710-AT2 drives two 10GbE ports, a separate 1GbE port serves the AST2600 BMC, and the micro-ATX board accepts Ryzen 7000 and 9000 parts as well as EPYC 4004 and 4005. It took this slot from the ASRock Rack B650D4U-2L2T/BCM, which no longer has a buyable listing on Amazon US.
Built for: a ZFS build with an HBA and a 10GbE network, where IPMI matters more than transcoding. Skip it if the plan is four drives or fewer without an HBA, or if Plex transcoding is a priority; the AMD iGPU encoders trail Quick Sync in the Jellyfin documentation.
Gigabyte’s datasheet lists DDR5 ECC and non-ECC UDIMM in four slots, at 5600 MT/s with one DIMM per channel and 3600 MT/s with two on Ryzen 9000 and EPYC 4005. Storage is thin: four chipset SATA ports and a single PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 wired to the CPU. The fix is the CPU-wired PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, which gives an LSI 9300-8i its full bandwidth and adds eight more drives; the only other slot is a PCIe 4.0 x4 from the chipset, which suits an NVMe adapter. The X710 runs on the in-kernel i40e driver, so TrueNAS 25.10, Unraid 7.3 and Proxmox VE 9.2 all bind it. We found no published idle measurement for this board; the ServeTheHome reading in the idle table below is for the ASRock Rack board it replaced.
Expect about $428, check the live price. The Amazon offer is a bulk-packed board from a third-party seller with few units in stock, and Gigabyte’s bulk pack holds only the board and I/O shield, so the four SATA cables and the M.2 heatsink of the retail box are not included. The listing title still names only Ryzen 7000, and the board launched before Ryzen 9000 existed, so ask the seller which BIOS it ships with before pairing it with a 9600X.
A Ryzen 5 9600X (about $180) is enough for ZFS on spinning disks; AMD lists ECC as supported on Ryzen 9000 when the board supports it. For a cheaper AM5 board that still has a BMC, the ASUS Pro WS B850M-ACE SE in the next section is about $360, trading the two Intel 10GbE ports for one Realtek 10GbE and one Intel 2.5GbE port.
4. ASUS Pro WS B850M-ACE SE: best AM5 workstation board with ECC
Most consumer AM5 boards say nothing about ECC, and some say it does not work. ASUS states ECC and non-ECC unbuffered DIMM support on this workstation board, including at 5600 MT/s with EPYC 4005, and puts an AST2600 BMC on it, which brings ECC and remote management to a retail micro-ATX board for less than the server boards here. It replaced the ProArt B850-Creator WiFi NEO, whose Amazon listing was down to one used unit in mid-October.
Best fit: a NAS that doubles as a Proxmox host or workstation, with display outputs and fast NVMe next to the drives. Skip it if the OS is TrueNAS 25.10 and the 10GbE port has to work on day one; Guru3D’s launch coverage identifies it as a Realtek RTL8127, which TrueNAS only binds from TrueNAS 26.
There is one CPU-wired PCIe 5.0 x16 slot for an HBA and a chipset PCIe 4.0 slot that runs at x4, so an HBA and a second add-in card cannot both get CPU lanes. Two M.2 slots run at PCIe 5.0 x4 from the CPU, and an MCIO connector at PCIe 5.0 x4 disables the second M.2 when it is in use. A U.2 connector at PCIe 3.0 x4 shares bandwidth with the four SATA ports, so enabling it turns the SATA ports off. Networking is one Realtek 10GbE port and one Intel 2.5GbE port, with a third Realtek 1GbE port reserved for the BMC, and the four DIMM slots take up to 256 GB. ECC reporting on AM5 runs through amd64_edac: Zen 4 support landed in Linux 6.5 and Zen 5 (Ryzen 9000, EPYC 4005) in Linux 6.6. Expect about $360, check the live price; stock was limited when checked.
On any AM5 board, confirm ECC is active after the first boot rather than trusting the box: dmesg | grep -i edac should print a line from amd64_edac handing the memory controller to the module, which only appears when the controller reports ECC enabled.
5. CWWK M8 (N150): best low-power mini-ITX NAS board
The M8 is the board for an eight-bay Jonsbo N3 build that never needs ECC, with a 6 W CPU. The Intel N150 is soldered on, so the platform cost is the board plus one SO-DIMM, and NASCompares confirmed both SATA controllers are ASMedia ASM1164 parts, which support the ASPM link power states that let the CPU sleep.
Who it is for: an Unraid, TrueNAS SCALE or Proxmox file server with Quick Sync transcoding and an electricity bill that matters. Skip it if the OS is OPNsense, pfSense or TrueNAS CORE; CWWK states there is no FreeBSD driver for the Marvell AQC113C 10GbE chip on the board.
The board exposes eight SATA ports through two SFF-8643 connectors (breakout cables come in this Amazon listing), two M.2 NVMe slots at PCIe 3.0 x1, one open-ended PCIe 3.0 x1 slot that shares its lane with the Wi-Fi slot, one AQC113C 10GbE port and two Intel i226-V 2.5GbE ports. Memory is one DDR5 SO-DIMM: Intel ARK lists a 16 GB ceiling for the N150, but CWWK and NASCompares both report 48 GB modules working. NASCompares measured 31.4 W idle with four hard drives, an NVMe drive and a PCIe card fitted, and about 950 MB/s reads over the 10GbE port. Power comes from a standard ATX 24-pin plus 4-pin, not a DC jack.
Two warnings belong next to the buy button. The Amazon listing had 8 ratings averaging 3.0 stars when checked, and the CWWK warranty is one year. The first boot also runs memory training for 3 to 10 minutes with a black screen, which reads as a dead board if nobody warned you. The Amazon seller is OakNode rather than CWWK. Expect about $269, check the live price.
A 16 GB DDR5 SO-DIMM (about $240) covers a file server; a 32 GB module (about $520) suits ZFS with a few containers. For how the N150 compares to the N355 and the new Core 3 304, see the budget homelab chip comparison; no N355 version of this board was in stock on Amazon US when checked.
6. ASRock B550M Pro4: best budget ECC board, on DDR4
The cheapest ECC platform in 2026 is not a new one. DDR4 ECC UDIMMs cost about $280 for 32 GB against about $1,084 for the DDR5 equivalent, about a quarter of the price, and AM4 boards from ASRock list ECC support with Ryzen desktop CPUs. Board, CPU and 32 GB of ECC on this platform total about $530, against about $1,620 for the cheapest DDR5 ECC build in this guide.
Built for: a ZFS file server with ECC on the smallest possible budget, with one gigabit port or a 10GbE card added later. Skip it if the box must transcode, idle low or run without a graphics card; the Ryzen 5 5600X has no integrated GPU.
ASRock’s B550M Pro4 spec page lists ECC and non-ECC unbuffered DDR4 up to 3200 MT/s with Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) CPUs, and notes that Ryzen APUs support ECC only in their PRO versions. That rules out the 5500, 5600G, 5700G and 5600GT, which are APU silicon. The board has four DIMM slots to 128 GB, six chipset SATA ports, a PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2, a second M.2 that shares lanes with SATA ports 5 and 6, a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot for an HBA and a Realtek RTL8111H 1GbE port. An owner running this board with a 5600X and Kingston ECC sticks posted dmidecode output showing multi-bit ECC and a 72-bit total width after more than a year in service. That is SMBIOS data rather than proof the controller has ECC switched on, so check dmesg | grep -i edac after first boot for the amd64_edac line reporting DRAM ECC enabled. Expect about $90 for the board, check the live price.
Pair it with a Ryzen 5 5600X (about $159), a six-core Zen 3 chip with no integrated graphics. For memory, a 32 GB DDR4-3200 ECC UDIMM runs about $280, or a 2 x 8 GB ECC kit (about $150) for a plain file server. Budget a cheap graphics card for the install: an owner of this board with a 5700X and no GPU got red VGA and BOOT debug LEDs. Idle draw is the cost of the savings. A TrueNAS forum build on B550 with 12 hard drives and an HBA idled at 90 to 95 W with a 5600X, against 60 to 65 W with a Ryzen 5 PRO 5650G in the same box, and PRO APUs are not sold new on Amazon US.
What each NAS motherboard costs as a full platform
Board prices hide the real gap. The table adds the CPU and one 32 GB stick to each pick, ECC where the board supports it, plus an LSI 9300-8i where the board needs one to reach eight drives. Drives, case, PSU and boot media are excluded because they are the same across every row.
| Platform (board + CPU + 32 GB) | SATA drives | ECC | Total (check live) | Memory share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ASRock B550M Pro4 + Ryzen 5 5600X (DDR4) | 6 | Yes | about $530 | 53% |
| CWWK M8 (N150 soldered) | 8 | No | about $790 | 66% |
| ASUS Pro WS B850M-ACE SE + Ryzen 5 9600X | 4 | Yes | about $1,620 | 67% |
| ASUS W680-ACE IPMI + Core i5-14500 | 8 (4 + 4 via SlimSAS; cable extra, not in total) | Yes | about $1,750 | 62% |
| Gigabyte MC13-LE1 + 9600X + 9300-8i HBA | 12 (4 + 8 on HBA) | Yes | about $1,760 | 62% |
| Supermicro X13SAE-F + Core i5-14500 | 8 | Yes | about $1,860 | 58% |
On the Supermicro build the ECC stick is 58% of the platform cost. Moving from the non-ECC SO-DIMM of the N150 board to a 32 GB ECC UDIMM adds about $560 on memory alone, which is the real price of ECC this year, not the board premium. Two 16 GB ECC sticks cost about $1,150 against about $1,084 for one 32 GB stick, so a single 32 GB module saves about $60 and leaves three slots free; a NAS on spinning disks loses little from single-channel memory. The ECC UDIMM guide tracks current kits, and the DRAM price explainer covers why the numbers moved.
How to choose the best motherboard for NAS builds
SATA controller: ASM1166 and ASM1164 good, JMB585 bad for idle power
The chip behind the SATA ports decides how deep the CPU can sleep. Matt Gadient measured the effect at the wall on an Intel H770 board with no drives attached (full method on his blog):
| Configuration | Idle at the wall | Deepest package C-state |
|---|---|---|
| No add-in SATA controller | 8 W | C8 |
| ASM1166 in a chipset x4 slot | 9 W | C8 |
| JMB585 in a CPU x16 slot | 12 W | C3 |
| JMB585 in a chipset x4 slot | 15 W | C3 |
| ASM1166 in a CPU x16 slot | 22 W | C2 |
With four drives attached, the ASM1166 added about 2 W and the JMB585 about 8 W. Gadient found the JMB585 does not appear to support ASPM, and the package never dropped below C3 with it installed. Two rules fall out of those numbers. Prefer chipset SATA or ASMedia controllers, and avoid N-series boards that list a JMB585 (several cheap 6-SATA listings do). Moving either SATA card to a CPU-wired slot on that Intel board held the package at C2 or C3, and a separate W680 test saw the same C2 cap with a GPU in the CPU slot, which is why a board with enough native SATA usually beats a cheap board plus a card for idle power.
ECC: sideband, in-band, or none
Three different things get called ECC. Sideband ECC uses 72-bit UDIMMs and is what the W680 and AM5 boards here run. In-band ECC (IBECC) reserves 1/32 of normal memory for check data and costs 5 to 25% of memory bandwidth in published tests; it exists on some N-series boards whose firmware exposes it, such as the Hardkernel ODROID-H5; CWWK does not list it for the M8. Intel ARK lists ECC as “No” for the N150 and N355. On the Intel desktop socket, ECC needs a W680 or W880 board and a Core i5-x500 or higher non-F CPU.
ZFS does not require ECC more than any other filesystem does. Matt Ahrens, a ZFS co-founder, put it as: “if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS.” At 2026 memory prices that advice now costs real money, and that cost is the reason the low-power non-ECC pick is on this list at all.
| CPU | ECC (Intel ARK / AMD) | Quick Sync / iGPU | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core i5-14500 | Yes | UHD 770, 2 media engines | W680 |
| Core i7-14700 | Yes | UHD 770, 2 media engines | W680 |
| Core i5-14400 | No | UHD 730, 1 media engine | W680, ECC off |
| Core Ultra 5 225 | No | 2 Xe cores | W880, ECC off |
| Core Ultra 5 245K / Ultra 7 265 | Yes | Xe with AV1 encode | W880 |
| Ryzen 5 9600X / Ryzen 7 9700X | Yes, board dependent | 2 CU RDNA 2 | AM5 |
| Ryzen 5 5600X (AM4) | Yes, board dependent | None | AM4, DDR4 |
| Ryzen 5 5600G / 5700G (AM4) | No (non-PRO APU) | Vega | AM4, ECC off |
| Intel N150 / Core 3 N355 | No | 24 EU / 32 EU, AV1 decode only | Soldered |
Transcoding: Quick Sync still wins for Plex and Jellyfin
Jellyfin’s hardware acceleration docs rank the Intel UHD 7xx graphics in the high-performance tier and note the second media engine on the UHD 770 for more concurrent streams. The same docs say the AMD encoders are currently no match for Intel QSV and NVIDIA NVENC. None of the UHD 770 or N-series iGPUs encodes AV1; they decode it. If AV1 encode matters, W880 with a Core Ultra 245K or 265 adds it, but no Arrow Lake desktop IDs exist in the Linux EDAC drivers yet, so ECC corrections are not reported. A discrete Arc card is the other route, covered in the Jellyfin and Plex GPU guide.
Network chip and the OS kernel
A NIC is only as good as the kernel that ships with the NAS OS. TrueNAS 25.10 still runs Linux 6.12, while Unraid 7.3 moved to 6.18 and Proxmox VE 9.2 to 7.0, which matters for new Realtek and Marvell chips:
| Controller | Linux driver | TrueNAS 25.10 (6.12) | Unraid 7.3 (6.18) | Proxmox VE 9.2 (7.0) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel i226-V, i210, X550, X710 | igc, igb, ixgbe, i40e | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Realtek RTL8125 2.5GbE / RTL8126 5GbE | r8169 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Realtek RTL8127 10GbE | r8169 (Linux 6.16+) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Marvell AQC113C 10GbE | atlantic | Yes, with regression reports | Yes | Yes, with regression reports |
TrueNAS documentation names Intel and Chelsio as the best-supported network interfaces. A board with Intel ports is the safe default; a Realtek 10GbE board works on Proxmox and Unraid today and waits for TrueNAS 26, which moves to Linux 6.18. FreeBSD-based systems (OPNsense, pfSense, TrueNAS CORE) are a separate question: CWWK states the AQC113C has no FreeBSD driver. For Realtek’s RTL8127 card, our RTL8127 Linux and Proxmox guide shows which kernels bind it with the in-tree driver.
PCIe lanes decide whether an HBA works
An N150 has nine PCIe 3.0 lanes in total, so the M.2 slots on the M8 run at x1 and its expansion slot is x1. An LSI 9300-8i in that slot runs at roughly 1 GB/s, fine for four or five hard drives and a bottleneck beyond that. The AM5 and W680 boards give an HBA a CPU-wired x16 or x8 slot. For a ZFS pool beyond eight drives, the ZFS storage server build walks through the HBA and expander layout.
Idle power and the yearly cost
Every 10 W of continuous idle draw is 87.6 kWh a year. Published wall readings, each under different conditions:
| Platform | Configuration | Idle at the wall | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intel N100 (ASUS N100I-D) | SATA SSD, NIC linked, no HDDs | 8.5 W | Kevin Tong |
| Intel N100 (ASUS N100I-D) | Six WD Red Plus 6 TB idle | 29.1 W | Kevin Tong |
| Intel N150 (CWWK M8) | 4 HDDs, NVMe, PCIe card | 31.4 W | NASCompares |
| W680 (Supermicro X13SAE-F) | i7-12700F, sparse build | 31 W | ServeTheHome |
| W680 (used HP Z2 G9 board) | i5-12600K, 2 NVMe, empty slots | 4.5 to 5.5 W | Dawid Wróbel |
| AM5 (ASRock Rack B650D4U-2L2T) | Ryzen 9 7900, 64 GB ECC | 14 W CPU package; 20 to 35 W system estimate | ServeTheHome |
The spread inside the W680 rows (31 W against 5 W) shows that configuration beats platform: the measured gap between two boards on the same chipset is larger than the gap between platforms. Spinning drives dominate once they are installed, which is where the NAS hard drive picks matter more than the board.
Which NAS board to buy
- Plex or Jellyfin plus ECC, eight drives: Supermicro X13SAE-F with a Core i5-14500.
- Same goal, tighter budget: ASUS W680-ACE IPMI and a SlimSAS breakout cable.
- ZFS with an HBA, 10GbE, headless: Gigabyte MC13-LE1 with a Ryzen 5 9600X and a 9300-8i.
- NAS that also runs VMs at a desk: ASUS Pro WS B850M-ACE SE.
- ECC at the lowest platform cost: ASRock B550M Pro4 with a Ryzen 5 5600X and DDR4 ECC.
- Low-power CPU, no ECC, mini-ITX: CWWK M8 in a Jonsbo N3.
For the wider question of whether to build at all, the DIY NAS vs prebuilt cost comparison runs the numbers against UGREEN and Synology boxes, and TrueNAS vs Unraid covers the OS choice that follows the board.
Matching the board to a NAS case
Form factor is the constraint people find out about after the order arrives. Every case below is a current pick in the NAS case guide, matched to the boards it physically takes:
| Case | Bays | Board size | Boards from this guide that fit | Case price (check live) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jonsbo N2 | 5 x 3.5-inch | Mini-ITX | CWWK M8 (65 mm cooler limit) | about $129 |
| Jonsbo N3 | 8 x 3.5-inch | Mini-ITX | CWWK M8 | about $160 |
| Jonsbo N6 | 9 bays | Mini-ITX, micro-ATX | CWWK M8, ASRock B550M Pro4, Gigabyte MC13-LE1, ASUS Pro WS B850M-ACE SE | about $176 |
| SilverStone CS382 | 8 x hot-swap, SAS/SATA backplane | Micro-ATX | ASRock B550M Pro4, Gigabyte MC13-LE1, ASUS Pro WS B850M-ACE SE, CWWK M8 | about $242 |
The two ATX picks, the Supermicro X13SAE-F and the ASUS W680-ACE IPMI, need an ATX tower or a 4U chassis; the Jonsbo N5 and SilverStone CS380 entries take ATX. A Jonsbo N3 with the CWWK M8 is the smallest eight-drive build on this page, and the Gigabyte MC13-LE1 in a Jonsbo N6 or SilverStone CS382 is the compact route to ECC and IPMI.
