Can anyone tell me how many SATA connections this mobo has? I’m interested in turning this into a DIY NAS but I need at least two SATA connections. Preferably four but I’m sure that’ll be asking too much. TIA!!
According to Dell, four:
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/product-support/product/optiplex-7010/docs
Edit - To add…
You are going to have more fun mounting drives inside the chassis. If you plan on using the internal 3.5" drive bays, they use proprietary brackets to hold the drives. Typically on refurb Dells there is only one bracket that comes with the included drive. They usually do not provide a bracket in the empty drive bay.
Edit2 - Further…
If you plan on using 2.5" drives in the 3.5" bays, you need an adapter that offsets the drive to one side to get around the tab on the mounting bracket and to position the power cables in the correct place. I have used this one:
One aspect to keep in mind about a DIY NAS – power consumption. For work, I repurposed a 7010 desktop (running TrueNAS) with the same i5-3470; with 16GB RAM, two 8TB WD Red Plus HDDs and a WD 320GB 2.5" boot drive, idle was at 39 watts.
Swapping out the CPU for a dual-core Pentium G2020 (which I didn’t even bother to file a reimbursement for because it’s that worthless) dropped idle down to 35 watts. No bottleneck; the CPU utilization doesn’t max out even under full drive activity.
If your NAS is intended to handle additional tasks like Plex transcoding, then I would suggest going with at least a 7th gen for its stronger iGPU.
(Note that I am not staff. I just volunteer to help out on the forums.)
