Hi

The title says it all really, just after a small board for a NAS project. Honestly budget is as tight possible so I'm not worrying too much about CPU performance, or whether its an integrated CPU or not. Whatever people think is the cheapest. In my experience the cheapest I've found so far is ~£100 for a Zotac H55 board which is a little too high considering I'd love a D525 board for around £55 if they actually had a useful amount of SATA ports.

Any thoughts/experience with this?

Cheers

James

There is the ASUS E35M1-I which has 6 SATA. It's about $130 CAD here, so hopefully it would be under £100.

Depending on how you are going to RAID or not a D525 board with a cheap 4 port PCI SATA controller would probably do fine. It would be fine for no RAID/JBOD or RAID-1. Wouldn't do a RAID 5 on that.

You don't say why you'd want such a thing and what you'd like behind the ports. Among the common low-power mITX boards for sale around here, you've got:
-ZOTAC NM10-DTX if all you want are physical ports
-ASUS E35M1-I if you want real SATA III ports but don't care about availability right now
-SAPPHIRE PURE Fusion Mini E350 if you want something you can buy right away with proper SATA III ports

edit: the Zotac was listed as mITX but is probably not an mITX board

In amzon uk i could only find the Deluxe version, its expensive, but just in case, Asus E35M1-I DELUXE Zacate Motherboard, it comes with 5 sata ports.

Of the boards listed here I think the Asus E35M1 is the best suited for the job, unless you need the built in wifi on the deluxe board. Otherwise, it has a passive heatsink and all six sata ports are available for internal storage. If you can`t find it in the UK it might be worth getting it from Germany (do a searrch in http://geizhals.at), as long as shipping is less than the difference in price between the two models.

Yeah, I just got the asus e35M1-i, haven't gotten it working yet, still need to get some memory. That's the only real downside to the board, they say it uses on ddr3 1066 240 pin simms, but in the manual they also list a whole bunch of ddr3 1333 240 pin sims that are also compatible, although they only run at the 1066 speed. But so far, so good, I was worried that the passive heat sink might be a little too tall, but it goes no higher than the highest socket on the back panel.