ECC and mITX

[Enquiries]

I’ve watched quite a few of your videos. Many thanks!!! I first discovered you when trying to install TrueNAS on an old QNAP w/o video-out, which was successful.

Anyway, lately looking to build another DIY NAS and thinking about mITX just for flexibility of being able to migrate the board between various cases. You also seem to have an affinity for ECC, but many of the boards you are reviewing lately don’t have it.

I’m looking for a mobo that supports ECC and is similarly featured to the CWWK boards you’ve reviewed. It seems like the only one you’ve reviewed recently that falls into this category is the Gigabyte Aorus board that comes in an HL8 which you sorta criticized because of its single NIC and the fact that it uses one of the NVME to get all 8disks connected. Do you have any further thoughts? Can you confirm that CWWK Q670 board actually supports ECC if you find an AMD 7735HS CPU? I might just end up with the Gigabyte board.

[ed]

You’re absolutely right — I do value ECC, especially in long-term NAS builds where data integrity matters. And you’re not the only one eyeing mITX boards for the flexibility they offer — being able to move between compact and rackmount cases is a big plus.

To your question: unfortunately, most of the newer boards I’ve reviewed lately (particularly from CWWK) don’t offer full ECC support, even when they advertise compatibility. The CWWK Q670 board paired with the AMD 7735HS is a good example — while AMD officially lists the 7735HS as ECC-capable (with proper platform support), boards like the CWWK lack full validation and won’t give you BIOS-level ECC error reporting or logging. ECC might “work” in the sense that it’s enabled, but you won’t get the kind of reliability you’d expect from a server-grade setup.

As for the Gigabyte board inside the HL8 — yes, it does support ECC (if paired with a compatible Ryzen CPU), and many users have confirmed it works in real-world TrueNAS setups. That said, the limitations I mentioned still stand: single NIC, and sacrificing one of the NVMe slots for SATA expandability through a port multiplier. Not a dealbreaker, but worth being aware of depending on your build goals.

If you want true ECC with proper validation and reporting in a small board, your best bets are boards like the ASRock Rack X570D4I-2T or Supermicro’s X12STH-F — both are pricier and harder to source, but give you IPMI, full ECC support, and more peace of mind if data protection is the priority.