Asus C8HM70

[creepwood]

Asus is releasing a new motherboard with a soldered CPU, Sandy Bridge. Very cheap with only two SATA ports, However with a SAS/SATA expansion card which many will use anyway since most motherboards doesn't have enough sata-ports anyway, this would be a viable candidate?

What I'm wondering is, is this Celeron CPU too weak for a large freenas installation. I'm running on AMD E-350 CPU and that setup works very well for me. But since I'm thinking of expanding I'll be buying a Serveraid M1015 expansion card, it maxes out at 8GB RAM though which is the only real drawback with my system. The new ASUS motherboard is 16GB max.

 

[cyberjock]

Personally, I avoid Realtek NICs. You don't have many options in the realm of upgrading your NIC since you have only 1 PCIe slot and you really need to use it for a HBA. If you aren't expecting more than about 60-80MB/sec then I'd say its a good option. Not sure how well it will perform though. I'm not a fan of Celerons and never used one in a build so I can't say if they'll be able to handle the processing. Assuming the CPU can handle the processing it looks like a good option.