NAS mounted on a PCI Slot

The FriendlyElec NanoPi M4 is a RK3399 SoC based ARM board. It has the same form of factor as the RPi B3+ and has ports and interfaces compatible with RPi B3+ too.

I mounted it inside my main PC’s case to avoid having an external case using one of the free PCI slots.

It will take up to 2 PCI slots to fit the board and the dedicated heatsink. There’s also place for the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antennas that come with it, and for an additional RTC battery.

An angled usb-c connector can be used to power it up, or even the 5V pins on the IO. More info on the right pinout to use can be found on FriendlyElec’s wiki.

Shopping list

• a Nanopi M4 (v1)
• a momentary button of ~6mm diameter. Something like this. It can be installed and connected to IO pins for e.g. power-cycle.
• 4x M2.5 screws

Here are some final full assembly renders and the STL files for download.

The

All files can be found on Thingiverse.