Quantum Lattus Part 2

 The Lattus has two 1gbps network cards, which is all fine, but even with mechanical disks it doesn't take too many of mechanical drives to saturate a 1gb NIC.  So I attempted to add a 10gb NIC.  

Turns out that the S30/40/50 using the the SuperMicro system board, the placement of the PCIe slots does allow for a standard height low profile card; in either direction, going the left side of the board (away from the CPU) there isn't enough room in height.  Nor going to the right as the card hits the CPU heatsink.

The S10/S20 does work either direction.  If going away from the CPU one must remove the 2.5" drive bay.  I didn't feel comfortable having the circuitry of the 10gb NIC basically touching the system board so I choose to run the NIC towards the CPU.  Doing so meant I had to remove the PCI-e SATA card.  Meaning I could only drive six hard drives, or five data, and one OS drive if running something like TrueNAS.  I found a 6gbps 2-port SATA card that is super small that fit in the other side; which brought my drive controller up to 8 drives.

Also I found these SuperMicro 10gb NICs that are based on the Intel x520 chip; they are physically smaller in nearly every dimension than the OEM Intel.