Unfortunately that board, like pretty much all consumer-like boards, suffers from a lack of PCI-Express lanes.
Depending on the use case, this is true.
That M.2 slot can do only 0.985 GB/s, so literally all NVMe SSDs on the market will be limited by that. Maybe useful for a boot drive, but that's about it.
Yeah I stated speed limited, but you are correct.
The board has pretty lackluster network interfaces, so you want to get an external NIC
This is also true (in my post I wrote 2.5G interface, actually this was a typo, I meant 2x1G interface).
That probably means grabbing a cheap second-hand 40G NIC from Ebay. But those are designed for PCI-E Gen3, so sticking it in your only remaining (x4) slot means it is limited to 31.5Gbps - in a best-case scenario...
Ok, this might be not the normal persons use case... I think 10G is already pretty unusual in the homelab of most people, whereas I would say that 2.5G should be standard.
it's all about compromises
That's the point. You can't get "fast, cheap and good" - I think the MC12 is a pretty good compromise. Sure, you can get a Supermicro X13SAE or ASRock IMB-X1314 (Intel, W680) - probably higher quality and far more reliable, but limited bifurcation and only the board would cost ~450 bucks. Another problem with the Supermicro may be that DDR5 ECC RAM is hardly available and expensive.
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Depending on the use case, this is true.
Yeah I stated speed limited, but you are correct.
This is also true (in my post I wrote 2.5G interface, actually this was a typo, I meant 2x1G interface).
Ok, this might be not the normal persons use case... I think 10G is already pretty unusual in the homelab of most people, whereas I would say that 2.5G should be standard.
That's the point. You can't get "fast, cheap and good" - I think the MC12 is a pretty good compromise. Sure, you can get a Supermicro X13SAE or ASRock IMB-X1314 (Intel, W680) - probably higher quality and far more reliable, but limited bifurcation and only the board would cost ~450 bucks. Another problem with the Supermicro may be that DDR5 ECC RAM is hardly available and expensive.