Looking for new motherboard for low power NVMe server

[12tv2]

Hi all. I happened upon this site while researching for a new motherboard for my home server. I've been running servers for years, starting with an old AST Bravo P160. I quite quickly moved over to a Via Eden board. I've been running MiniITX for many generations due to their low power consumption and my current board was a SuperMicro a1sri-2758f. Nice because of it's low power Atom but server features like high RAM capacity, quad gigabit LAN and IPMI make it an idea server board. I also had two SSDs in RAID 1 with hotswap provided by an Icy Bay. It was a very nice set up until the board died. I've been looking for something a bit more up to date to replace it. One thing my research has uncovered is that that are modern offerings that more power efficient than the MiniITX / Atom combination such as some of the Xeon D and I3 lines (not sure how AMD stacks up). The other is the availability of NVMe storage. I quite like the look of that from a performance perspective. I don't tend to thrash the CPU on my VMs, it does tend to be RAM and particuarly disk IO when I get bottlenecked. I'm quite attached to my hot swap drives, having waited many years of making do with IDE because I couldn't afford SCSI, it was very nice when SATA offered hot swap drives at consumer prices. I've found an Icy Bay that offers U.2 hot swap. U.2 SSDs are looking a bit thin on the ground, so I'm likely to adapt that to M.2 storage (probably a Samsung Evo 970) in the drive bay. That leaves the issue of what to plug it into, as boards with U.2 interfaces are extremely thin on the ground and tend to be big, power hungry boards. I guess one option is to adapt M.2 to U.2 at the motherboard, although then boards with many M.2 interfaces are also thin on the ground

So to get to the point, I was wanting to ask if anyone knew of a motherboard that wasn't too power hungry, supported 2x U.2 or 2x M.2 PCI-E storage, dual LAN, >= 128GB RAM and IPMI. Yes, I know, I'm asking for the moon on a stick here

 

[Evan]

Also can convert PCIe slots to NVMe ports.

d-1500 Xeon is 128gb and can bifurcate the PCIe for NVMe, that’s 30-35w idle.
Maybe you could just make a c3758 work that’s lower idle.
Otherwise step up a bit more into modern scalable setups or AMD. But seems kind of hard to get anything below 50-60w

how many drives do you need ? Just the 2 ? If so getting creation with a c3000 could be the lowest option. But not the fastest !

(I suggest this because looks low power is a priority)

 

[funkywizard]

Also for U.2 SSDs, ebay has a good stock of 1.6tb P3605 SSDs. 3.84tb Samsung and 4tb Intels are showing up occasionally as well.