M.2 to SATA expansion card?

[TheDreadPirate]

Even better than the Asrock N100DC.  The Asrock N100M.  mATX, which is fine.  The case my J4205 is in can support it.  Standard ATX power.  Still only 2 SATA ports, but it has a full length 16x slot!  No more limits on what kind of SATA expansion card I can use.

Problem solved.

Edit:  Looks like finding one is going to be hard....

I haven't looked it up, but from memory this is / was the following PCIe configuration: (it's nearly midnight for me, so if I remember & have the inclination tomorrow I might look it up to remind myself)

• PCIe x1
  

• PCIe x4 (x16 physical)
  

• PCIe x1
  

To go down this everything in one box route, I feel like the AMD 58xx type boards are better since you have 3x M.2 (PCIe x4), while still having the ultra low power consumption and the crazy horsepower of the 58xx series. And using an M.2 to PCIe x4 adaptor & running the SAS out to a JBOD the SAS cards aren't much cheaper, more reliable, perform better and will take to being multiplied a lot better. Don't forget to saturate the 4x 2.5Gb links, you'd only need between 6 and 10 drives.

The N100M is actually PCI-E 16x (running at 2x) and a PCI-E 1X slot.  The M.2 slot is also 2x instead of 4x.  All fine.  The four SATA drives (see sig) I have will never saturate that 2x PCI-E link.  And I'm only serving five 1080p streams, tops.  10-11Mbps per stream.  So throughput is not a concern.  My 1Gbps networking is the limiting factor anyway.  Not that I consider it much of a limit at the moment anyway.