Which motherboard form factor should I get for a home server.

[Shadow13]

I was wondering which motherboard form factor I should use for a home server would anyone know?

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

2 minutes ago, Shadow13 said:

I was wondering which motherboard form factor I should use for a home server would anyone know?

That entirely depends on what case you plan to use, how many drives you want, what type of drive (NVME vs SATA) and if you're okay to get a SAS card for extra SATA ports or not.

[Biohazard777]

@Shadow13 I am gonna buy a car, should I get: a) coupe b) sedan c) suv d) minivan?

Or maybe I don't even need a car, maybe a bike would be better.

[Shadow13]

25 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

That entirely depends on what case you plan to use, how many drives you want, what type of drive (NVME vs SATA) and if you're okay to get a SAS card for extra SATA ports or not.

At least 2 HDD, NVME as well for boot and stuff needing faster storage.

[Shadow13]

20 minutes ago, Biohazard777 said:

@Shadow13 I am gonna buy a car, should I get: a) coupe b) sedan c) suv d) minivan?

Or maybe I don't even need a car, maybe a bike would be better.

Yeah I know I did not give much info.

[manikyath]

if you have to ask, form factor is irrelevant, you shop for what motherboard is able to hold the things you want to plug into it.

 

Spoiler

ps; the "if you have to ask" refers to people wanting small formfactor home servers, where it's obvious to go for a smaller motherboard.

 

[Biohazard777]

31 minutes ago, Shadow13 said:

At least 2 HDD, NVME as well for boot and stuff needing faster storage.

26 minutes ago, Shadow13 said:

Yeah I know I did not give much info.

Some info is still lacking, what will it be used for?

I mean with the info provided so far, any will do.

Or maybe you'd be better off going with something a bit different.

I personally went with a Tiny / 1L PC. ( Lenovo M720q ), so it doesn't even have a motherboard form factor (mobo is more like something you'd find in a laptop).

One NVMe, one internal 2.5" HDD, and two external (via USB 3) HDDs.

Cheap, takes up very little space, quiet, sips power, and the i3 9100T & 64GB of RAM is plenty powerful to run:

NAS + Jellyfin (with transcoding) + qBittorent + VPN + DNS + Nextcloud + Gitea + Redmine + RustDesk + 5 more containers for various other small projects. Not everything has active users/clients at the same time, and it is a small number of concurrent users (like 2 max for Jellyfin, 1 Rustdesk..).

If I needed a home server for AI image generation it would have been a completely different story.