When your board owns a free pcie slot, you could also buy an extension card to use all of you m.2 ssd.

I have something to read for you :

My Request

It is a request of me from earlier this year. The boards I mention in the opening post are no good choice. But the Asrock J500x or J5040 (the one I picked in the end) are. For my needs it is enough of everything. Even if some users here think the celerons are “heaters that can do math” ^^

On the other hand, the cpu is soldered to the board. No upgrade without switching the board either… Even the SODIMM ram needs to be replaced when switching away from an itx-board…

On the other hand, it is less energy consuming than using an old desktop cpu etc.

The pico-psu is just sweet 😊

Edit: fixed link

At the moment I do exactly that. Learn proxmox, omv, influxDB and tomorrow grafana comes around to play 😉

Nevertheless proxmox and omv are the difficult ones if you never used a hypervisor before. And my toughest lesson was: software raid is pretty slow. This took quiet some time to realise that this was the problem.

But it is great to have a hypervisor to play around with, test different things in containers or vms and if you mess things up, just spin up another in a few seconds and try it again. It just feels less impactfull than reinstalling all stuff on one machine.

And you learn a lot about networks along the way if you aren’t already familliar with it.

I have written a mail to the shop and asked them how to supply the power and if it is even possible with a picoPsu. If not, I guess I will take a Asrock instead. Using a regular ATX psu only for the one connector somehow feels not purposeful 🤷🏻‍♂️

Thank you for your answer. the picoPSU is the next point that causes headaches. I have two questions about the pico.

How to calculate how much energy is needed without knowing how much the board needs? My actual HDDs and planed parts are:

• 2x 6TB WD Red WD60EFAX -> and I found the use 5.3W under load what means even with four of them they only need 21,2W
• a NVME like the WD Blue SN570 with max consumption of 3,75W
• a fan (maybe an be quiet! Silent Wings 4 PWM 120mm) for the case with round about 4W by max Speed sums up to 27,95W But the information about the power consumption for the board is missing.

It seems like a 80 watts picoPSU should be sufficent. What I don’t understand is, how can I supply the power with this psu when it is a 24-pin ATX but the board needs only 4-Pin-ATX?