Hey y’all. Currently I’m running my homelab across a few different SFF computers and a Synology DS920+. I have quickly outgrown the Synology’s 4 drive bays and don’t really want to continue spending money on the platform and would rather set up my own unRAID server to consolidate all of my computers into AND host the NAS from. That said, I’m going with a rack-mount chassis and have been looking at the options Sliger has. I’ve been debating between the 3U and 4U options that both have 10 hot-swap bays. Here lies the issue…

I currently plan to get things together to be able to support ~20 drives in the future and obviously can’t get 20 SATA drives on the same board (maybe something enterprise, but that’s $$$ that I’m not spending). So I need to make sure I have a way to get data connections between at least 20 drives (not including NVMe drives). I know about the LSI SAS/HBA cards already, but can’t find them at an inexpensive price point for a -16i which means I’d need at least 2 -8i’s and with most Mini-ITX boards, there’s only one 16x slot.

The other issue/concern I have is that I would very much prefer to have 10G networking, so if the board doesn’t have 10G networking, I’d need another PCI-e card for this, too.

I’d PREFER to go with the 3U Sliger case option, which only supports Mini-ITX boards. BUT- if I’m completely out of my mind here, then I could go with the 4U option that supports E-ATX and I’m sure that would be easier to configure a parts list for.

I’m not set on Intel vs AMD and truly don’t know which generation from either I would really need, so any advice there is helpful. I run a Plex server with generally 6-7 concurrent connections, a bunch of Docker apps, ISO downloaders (Usenet/Torrents) and Home Assistant- but want to be prepared for more down the road.

Any help/advice/constructive comments are appreciated. Thanks!