[skazazes]

You should check out the Xeon D offerings from Supermicro. They make some M-ITX motherboards with embedded Xeon D chips that sport dual 10GB Ethernet. Used one in a freenas system at one point for years

Looks like the X10SDV-TLN4F[1] has everything you mentioned besides a second m.2 slot. Although its 8 cores they are a few generations old and low power (45w TDP on x86). For true compute its not exactly fast but for something like a high performance file server in 1U connected to a disk shelf, they are really nice.

[1] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/x10sdv-tl...

[gorkish]

I actually do run a production edge cluster with these exact boards; they are just too old. The price/performance is so far off the mark WRT modern hardware they are simply not worth using anymore. I have started hitting CPU instruction set issues with current software due to the ancient microarchitectures in these lowend parts.

On one hand they are able to still sell them because nobody is competing, but what is the reason for the lack of competition?

I have a theory about Broadcom buying and blocking up the low end PCIe switch market to purposely hold back this segment, but I'm not sure how significant that is.

[jmbwell]

I use one of these. For a system that’s honestly mostly idle, it’s plenty for proxmox with Plex and pihole and whatever else, and it’s good on power and heat and noise.

I made the mistake of getting Seagate 10TB rock tumblers, but they’re the only source of real noise. WD would probably have been quieter.

I have this and my switches and a ham radio base station all racked up on top of the cabinets in my laundry/utility room, out of the way but not hidden away, so I can still notice if the fans are too loud or the wrong lights are blinking or not blinking or there’s weird smells etc.