Staring at this board, mentally converting PCIe lane count to device requirements, only to consider that yet again…

It’s 2025. We’re still using the PCIe slot standard for most motherboards, even on enterprise boards. Who’s doing this right, at least marginally so?

ASRack (brain, please grow up and stop making elementary jokes) has been putting four physical x16 slots on their “Deep mini-ITX” series of server boards, to which are added two x8 lane Slim-SAS and two x4 lane OcuLink headers. These can be used for a variety of SFF fan-out connection purposes.

Extensions like this include:

• multi-drive backplane headers for hot-swap 2.5", 3.5", U.2, U.3 bays
• additional M.2 slots using a SFF backed PCB
• conversions from one standard controller to another, PCIe to SATA3 or SAS3
• adding external ports for SAN and DAS expansions
• additional physical slots in x4, x8, or x16 - just mount those style connectors in an adjacent or remote chassis zone via PCIe 1:1 extension or PCIe switch

There are likely other examples, and I’m always interested in finding more.

#servers #baremetal #linux #freebsd #motherboard #engineering #hardware