I'm a little confused who this is marketed for. This has a lot of storage capacity for home users or small offices, but is a bit underwhelming for big offices and mainframes. Small-scale implementations would be better off buying a pre-made NAS or just building an array of drives in their current workstation. Large-scale implementations would resort to something less barebones. The overkill power connectors are something only home users would buy into (you could easily get by with a single 20-pin ATX connector and a 4-pin CPU connector) but SFP networking isn't something home users are bound to use. Having all your drives in your workstation would be a cheaper way to get all that performance, while taking up less space in your home. This board has no redundancy or a quick/easy way to access the drives "externally". In the event this board dies, this doesn't have the dependability and ease of maintenance for anything large-scale. Meanwhile, buying many of these wouldn't be cost-effective for anything small-scale. This is clearly designed with small form factors in mind, but at the same time you're expected to use up to 16 drives. I'm not aware of any ITX cases that can fit 16 drives - I have one of the largest ITX cases available and you can fit up to 6x 2.5" SATA drives in that. This seems like a very nice platform on paper, I just don't understand who this would appeal to. I would rather buy a cheap(er) micro ATX board, get my own SFP PCIe, and a discrete RAID controller.

I'm a little confused who this is marketed for.

Industrial, underwater or extreme environement PC, inboard workstation etc etc etc... PC are not only in static server 😉 (there is one in my toolbox for trackday)

Industrial, underwater or extreme environement PC, inboard workstation etc etc etc... PC are not only in static server 😉 (there is one in my toolbox for trackday)

Good point, I wasn't thinking about portable servers or extreme environments. However for mobile purposes, I'd say there are better alternatives. You're still going to have issues managing 8-16 drives (let alone powering them) and with something that could be jostled around, the redundancy issue becomes even more critical. For mobile purposes, I'd rather buy an ARM server. They're lower in power and the lack of I/O isn't much of an issue.

I'm a little confused who this is marketed for.

A major and unique feature of the Gigabyte MA10-ST0 is the 32GB of eMMC flash memory. For those building, for example, a FreeNAS ZFS appliance, a Linux storage server with an embedded OS, or a hypervisor based hybrid NFV and storage converged platform the embedded eMMC allows you to utilize the onboard storage for embedded OSes. And you have 8 PCIe-3 lanes left for a hostbus/raid adapter.

A major and unique feature of the Gigabyte MA10-ST0 is the 32GB of eMMC flash memory. For those building, for example, a FreeNAS ZFS appliance, a Linux storage server with an embedded OS, or a hypervisor based hybrid NFV and storage converged platform the embedded eMMC allows you to utilize the onboard storage for embedded OSes. And you have 8 PCIe-3 lanes left for a hostbus/raid adapter.

For the sake of data recovery, I would pay extra to not use that for my OS. Unless you're doing software RAID (or not using RAID at all) and know exactly how all your drives are configured, you are completely screwed if something goes wrong with the board or the integrated storage. Keep in mind - the main advantage to this motherboard is its storage capabilities, in conjunction with the fiber optic networking. Such a platform for the sake of mass storage implies that whatever you're storing on it is important, where you need to be able to recover your data.

NAS servers for big corporations usually. We've got a few of the older c2000 based systems running NAS. Compared to a big server, they're smaller, they're cooler, cheaper, and use less power. If you're just running NAS or even an SQL server these are easy and make perfect sense to use.

For the sake of data recovery, I would pay extra to not use that for my OS. Unless you're doing software RAID (or not using RAID at all) and know exactly how all your drives are configured, you are completely screwed if something goes wrong with the board or the integrated storage. Keep in mind - the main advantage to this motherboard is its storage capabilities, in conjunction with the fiber optic networking. Such a platform for the sake of mass storage implies that whatever you're storing on it is important, where you need to be able to recover your data.

ZFS is software raid and will be recoverable on almost any hardware containing X86_64 with a hostbus for the drives. And ZFS raidz3 is pretty secure (the most secure raid I can find). Remember raid is not a BACK-UP.

My best guess would be remote office file servers. Strap them to a 10gbit NAS appliance via iSCSI and you'd be good for 50-100 employees without much issue as long as you aren't using advanced file server features, or maybe even with them if the CPU can keep up (not sure how fast Denverton is).