Wishlist along the lines of
- Recent Intel processors preferred for generally-lower idle power usage (and Quicksync, I guess, if somebody really wants to run Plex on a hyperconverged cluster)
- single 10GbE (copper or SFP+)
- for ceph internal traffic (possible with only PCIe 4.0x1 as seen here)
- Maybe even a single 25GbE SFP+ instead; the R86S manages to get ~80% utilization out of two of them without too much tuning, so one should be possible. Pricier, though.
- single 2.5GbE (intel, not realtek) for LAN connection.
- single 1GbE or even 100MbE for corosync heartbeat or dedicated management network
- M.2 NVME
- ideally with flexible x4/x2x2/x1x1x1x1 bifurcation via breakout board, like we've seen on some of the CWWK minipcs
- 2+ SATA 3 or a second M.2 NVME slot
- Would be nice, not needed tho:
- M.2 E key (wi-fi, Google Coral, adapter to another slower SSD, etc)
- COM port, or maybe console redirection to one of the USBs
- ...GPIO could be fun to mess around with. I can't imagine needing it though.
- Don't need:
- onboard wifi
- onboard bluetooth
- a ton of miscellaneous I/O in general, actually. Three USB 2.0 (kb, mouse, thumbdrive) and a single HDMI or DisplayPort should be enough.
Closest things I've found are the Odroid H3+ (no 10GbE NIC unless you sacrifice the M.2 slot for an adapter), R86S (pricey, extra 2.5GbE NICs and no SATAs, makes you choose between dual SFP+ and dual NVME, no one-of-each option), and
maybe ZimaBoard (the PCIe expansion slot opens up a lot of options, but limited on-board networking, obsolescent processor, and not
nearly enough RAM)