The storage 'endgame'.

 I've been 'playing' with my NAS options. So far:

• The original Xeon E5-2630L v4 NAS. 200W, multiple 10G interfaces (built in 2017/2018)
• Zimaboard - 2x 1Gbit Network ports, 2 SATA ports, PCIe x4
• TMM Lenovo Thinkcentre M900 1xSATA, 2xNVMe PCIe x16
• Topton NAS board, 6xSATA, 2xNVMe, 4x 2.5Gbit ethernet
• Framework laptop motherboard with a+e 2230 to m.2 2280 converter and 2280 m2. 8x SATA ports: https://nl.aliexpress.com/item/1005004417694518.html 

All of these have some kind of 'severe' limitations in one way or another, be it form-factor, the lack of a real 'case' or just being plain ineffficient. Mostly, on everything except the E5, I'm 'missing' bandwidth (PCIe lanes).

Back the original NAS, but with a 'twist'. 

Storage is going to be SATA SSDs, and for performance some T4510 Intel SSDs attached directly to a PCIe switch. That should hopefully keep power low, as I do not have a real SAS controller for those disks. It should also keep performance really high.

I'll be using a backplane from Supermicro to house all the SATA drives, hopefully. But using a SAS controller with only 4/8 ports should keep power-usage down.

The SAS expander in more detail:

I'm going to be making something similar to this, but then for 2.5" drives and specifically for this setup, I hope: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5803558

Maybe I can even 'reduce' the backplane to a 10" format, making it suitable for a 10" rack. Or maybe it can be used 'sideways'