> On 12 Dec 2019, at 17:31, Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'd like suggestions for some hardware on which to run Plan 9, almost
> certainly expandable SSD capacity will be a must (Venti service).
> Price and quality will be the biggest factors, as always.
> 
> Ideally, storage is where the value will reside, the actual processor
> could be expendable.
> 
> ARM would allow me to start with Richard Miller's release, which I
> believe to be a very sound foundation.
> 
> Thanks for any and all comments.

This is very likely overkill, but

   https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/ <https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/>
   https://www.chip1stop.com/USA/en/product/detail?partId=SOCI-0000003&mpn=SC0FQAA-B-000 <https://www.chip1stop.com/USA/en/product/detail?partId=SOCI-0000003&mpn=SC0FQAA-B-000>

It’s a µATX PC-style motherboard, with what looks like standard PC power connector.
It has a 24-core ARM8 CPU, up to 64GB RAM (4 DIMM slots), onboard 1 Gbps Ethernet, looks like two on-board SATA ports, and (most usefully) 1 PCIe x16 and 2 PCIe x1 slots.

You could populate the x16 PCIe slot with an M.2 carrier board, like

   https://amfeltec.com/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-m-2-ssd <https://amfeltec.com/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-m-2-ssd>

to give you a decent amount of high-speed SSD storage?

The motherboard appears to have been sponsored by Linaro, which is some sort of Linux-on-ARM booster organisation, so it’s likely got decent documentation and/or sample drivers available.



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