Trawling the 'bay this morning and found one of these distinctly odd and proprietary Asus SFF motherboards: H97-I/G20AJ/DP_MB Something to amuse you other SFF 'Perverts' out there For scale, the cut out on the bottom left is to accommodate a 3.5" HDD It requires not 1, but 2 Brick PSUs. 1x 180W @ 19V to run the mobo and another at 230W (12V?) to power the GPU. Looks like it feeds the 6 + 8 PCIe sockets bottom right. Originally the CPU had a heat pipe cooler and 2 'snail' fans, the GPU was laid flat with its backplate on the HDD via a hard 90° riser. Currently 99p and no P&P! The later and VERY expensive H170 version has an M.2 slot, making tidy storage a lot easier. The H97 has 2 SATA ports and uses proprietary power cables for the drives, just to really make it hardcore. It's intriguing and challenging, but distinctly lacks the charm of the NUC and Thin ITX board I have purchased in this last month locked up at home. I don't think cabin fever has bitten badly enough to lead me into resurrecting this beast quite yet.
Just to tease those who bought the thin itx boards recently, I have an old Buffalo Terrastation 4 bay NAS that is the perfect size for a thin itx board mod but it is no use to me (I'm a Synology convert), I've even measured it up and it looks a fairly simple mod. Keep an eye on the marketplace, it'll be cheap.
Does it still work? I had a Buffalo single bay NAS 10 years or so ago and it died on me after a relatively short time. Outside warranty, of course...
It did last time i started it up, it has the 3 x 250GB HD's (I think I donated the 4th) that came with it, will check it this weekend. Has a maximum volume size of 1TB due to the O/S, hence why a thin itx transplant was considered. It's small for a 4 bay NAS, thinner than a Synology 4 bay but about a 1/3 taller. Plenty of room inside.
