Over twelve years ago, I built my very first DIY NAS. At the time, I had a very specific and unconventional idea in mind for my DIY NAS to be: small, with a passively cooled CPU, room for about 6 SATA drives, without breaking the bank. A bit surprisingly, I stumbled on a discounted motherboard that met this criteria, the ASUS E35M1-I Fusion. The motherboard met my criteria and it wound up being incredibly inexpensive, so naturally I bought it!
