The plan was simple: put as many 3.5" hard drives as I could along with a system to control them in as small a package as possible. I also wanted it to be some sort of raid array for redundancy, and deciding that 4 drives would not be enough, I realized I needed a board with an expansion card slot for a raid controller. After looking at various Mini ITX options I happened across a form factor I had never seen before over at LogicSupply.com. The Quanmax KEEX-2030 is a 3.5" (or ECX) board powered by an Intel Atom N270 with a PCI Express x4 slot.
The open slot would be filled with a HighPoint Rocket RAID 2680 8 Port Sata/SAS raid controller card from Newegg.com. This system would mainly be storing files over the network, so this relatively low performance controller was an acceptable choice considering its very small size
Specifications
- Quanmax Industrial KEEX-2030 Atom 3.5" Mainboard (Intel Atom N270)
- 2GB Crucial DDR2 PC2-5300 SODIMM
- Highpoint RocketRAID 2680
- Serener 120w DC-DC PSU
- 8x 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green 3.5" HDD
- 320GB Western Digital Scorpio Black 2.5" HDD
- 30GB OCZ Vertex Series SSD
