Finally, a actual proper review! So many darn reviews are more talking points and not really testing the hardware inside the case, doing sound tests (and giving samples!).
Thank you for this review! It’s the perfect case for my needs. I currently have a mITX Xeon with 6x 3.5, 1x 2.5 in a Fractal Design Array R2 and wanted to install an Intel Arc 380 for video transcoding and some ML photo classifiers, but the card blocks a HDD… this is the solution! As others have said, more modern boards come with 2 M2 slots, of which one can be converted to 5+ SATA ports, and having space for a GPU for ML applications or transcoding is in my eyes a big bonus for a home server. I don’t want to have multiple machines running 24/7. In this Jonsbo case, one can provide a ton of storage to the house, and host media services with plenty of processing power in one box. The separation of storage and compute compartments is brilliant, one can put a powerful CPU/GPU in there and not worry about frying the disks!
That was a really nice review. Everything I would need to know is there! As someone researching to build a small home server (media, backup, maybe automation), this helped me a lot! Thanks.
One note to the ITX form factor and only 1 PCIe Card: you can bring out 4 pcie lanes from an unused m.2 slot on the mainboard via an adapter cable (just google m.2 to pcie cable) and use that for a 10gbit ethernet card or similar :)
been researching for a few weeks, and it's been frustrating finding that itx+10gbe+8sata, and i'm smacking myself reading your comment why I didn't think of that
@@zacki5663 i got a qnap qm2-2p10g that has dual m2 slots on it, since i used the only m2 on mb to add 6 more sata ports, pricey but, was the best solution i could find, other than possibly one of the pcie to m2 with pcie riser to add a ded gpu if i ever needed one for my plex server.
Thank you for this video. I am planning to build a NAS in this case and this was a great help. There's a cool little board from Silverstone (the ECS07) that plugs into an m.2 slot and provides 5 additional SATA ports. Only Gen 3, but it looks like it will provide the throughput needed for hard drives.
Great review! Thank you for all the information. I know it's been a minute but when you built this did have any issues with the power configuration on the back plane? Did you have the 2 atx and sata plugged in to supply power?
Good review, thanks. Whilst I agree with your review, in the summary there is one thing I dont agree with. I dont want a NAS, I want a mini Application Server! I will need a NVIDIA GPU card because I would be running Frigate, Compreface and Double Take. So the height is needed for me. (and actually the PSU needs the height!) and I will need to ensure good cooling on the CPU and the M.2 cards. BUT as I said a good review to confirm it is a good case for those needs.
Thanks for your comment! It is good to have the option for sure. Just for those looking for a NAS case (which seems to be its primary intent) it is just extra unnecessary bulk. In my mind ultimately make the footprint a bit bigger to fit mATX board and then can mount GPU sideways, move PSU down next to hard drives, and not be much larger overall. But that's a wishlist, lol. The case is pretty nice as is.
Great overview! I have the N2 and it's great but I wish the N3 let you install a mATX motherboard as the added width wouldn't make that much of a difference and would differentiate it even more from the N2.
Fully agree, Mini ITX is OK for a 4 bay NAS, as you can find motherboards with four SATA ports, but 8, you need an HBA PCIe card. They could widen the case by a few inches, shorten it by a couple inches because you don't need full height cards or massive CPU coolers, and put the SFX PSU next to the hard drives.
@@Andreas-w Agreed. But if you use M.2 to SATA port adapter you lose the M.2 port for your OS. I know there are mITX motherboards that house two m.2 slots but one is on the bottom of the board and uses a separate controller and usually are much more expensive boards. I just think that this device wouldn't need to be much bigger to house an mATX, just make it wider and house the SFX PSU next to the drive bays, and allow room up top for an mATX board, and doesn't need to be quite as thick either. Just my opinion though. Otherwise case is actually quite nice.
OK, but what are actual SAS interface speeds for its backplane? Is it full 12G, or is it halved, because only one port is active? Sorry if my question is stupid, never had a chance to work with SAS drives…
I am not 100% certain, but I would imagine if it were "SAS compatible" that it would be 12G as it's just an electrical pass-thru and speed is more dependent on the SAS controller than the slot. Not to mention that unless you have drives that can run 1200 MB/sec it'd be hard to validate either way. SAS 12G is more for total bandwidth for expanding to multiple drives, which wouldn't be a factor in this situation, because each disk would get their own dedicated 6Gbps or 12Gbps lane.
Honestly it's like they are trying to make a bad design (and they are insultingly expensive), in my opinion a nas good for most personal use's doesn't have to be a very powerful machine, you have to take in account power usage (electricity cost's money) and noise as it most likely going to work near people. The motherboard should be placed preferably on top for good heat dissipation with an air vent or option 2 on the side and top vent, in both cases with enough room for a beefy cooler (to reduce fan usage and noise) . Jonsbo n3 is good but they just had to insult us with not having a top vent and some decent hdd bays also the price is high and your getting so little especially considering that the users are going for this option precisely because they don't want to spend to much money and the build quality could be better, also larger rear fan exhausts, they make less noise and you can move more air trough !
PSU is a Silverstone SX300-B 300W. I no longer have the system assembled, so unfortunately can't tell you at this point. Either way, that would depend entirely on the disks used, motherboard, CPU, RAM, PSU, etc, so it could vary greatly from setup to setup.
I put a similar comment on another video but I wonder if an Asrock H610M-HDV Motherboard will fit in this case it is an m-atx board but is only 19.7 cm x 18.8 cm so might fit and would allow use of both PCIe slots. I think it will but might have to mod how the Powersupply is attached, possibly mounting it horizontally rather than vertically?
Agreed. That's my one of my biggest gripes too. Nobody needs a mile high cpu cooler for a NAS case. And no need for full height PCIe card either, really. It's not a game case. This would be perfect if it accommodated a microATX board and reduced the height.
@@htwingnut Exactly! In my case I'm still running a 4 year old Asrock c2750d4i board with a SOC and only needs 1U with fans in the front. I know many people had issues with those boards but so far mine has been good but I'm out looking for a case to houses 8-12 case in a tiny footprint. Difficult.
07:43 Did they upgrade the backplane to support staggered spin-up? I read on chinese websites the newer models have a DIP-switch to choose spin up 250ms/500ms/off etc. PSU will not be stressed as much by having this.
Good question! It seems it's a "dumb backplane". I'm not sure the refresh interval of this power meter, but it pops up to 200W or so pretty instantly. It also sounds like they power on simultaneously: th-cam.com/video/0rWryODz7p0/w-d-xo.htmlsi=WeIoqpw2T8J-erog
@@htwingnut Ah that's too bad! Even my 8 year old synology had it. Guess those "dumb backplane" are old stock or something that they are trying to clear first. If you're in touch with a jonsbo representative, maybe you could enquire about it.
I have a Synology NAS and the HDDs constantly make vibration noises. Is it really dead silent here or you hear something? I used to have Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL with absolute zero vibrations. I suspect it's also because the disks could lay horizontal instead of vertical.
The rubber standoffs really make a difference. I didn't notice any vibrations through the case at all. Of course disks make noise in general when seeking and newer high capacity disks use PWL which can cause a slight "thump" sound every 5 seconds or so.
The extra HBA requires extra power consumption, which is not a good design, the PSU is heavy and should not be placed on the upper tier, the motherboard form factor is locked at ITX size, this is another drawback, I prefer buying second hand super micro servo The appliance has a case with 8 hard disk slots.
@htwingnut You used some thicker 2.6cm drives. can they be mounted side by side in all 8 bays without issue? Also I purchased a pcie x4 to m.2 nvme and added a asm1166 6 port sata adapter. my concern is that it will obscure the cable hole to the bottom and also not be able to have sata cables plugged in. what is the measurement in my between the hbacard and the side panel please. this case seems great compared to my Lian Li PC-q25 for the size and thinking to upgrade
@@htwingnut, thanks so much for the response! Planning on building a NAS using this case, but will be using the Topton n100 based MB, mainly because of the ultra low power consumption. Your video was really helpful and very detailed. Would have been great if you had some rough power-consumption stats. Thank you.
This is an older 4th gen Intel motheboard. It has 6 onboard SATA ports, and I used the wifi slot to add another two. Unfortunately it's hard to come across a current gen Intel (or AMD for that matter) motherboard with more the four ports in a mITX form factor. Asrock Rack makes server motherboards with 8 SATA ports, although they are a bit expensive.
sorry my OCD is killing me. WHERE IS YOUR MOTHERBOARD I/O PLATE?!?!?!?! you monster!! also, the motherboard clearly has x8 sata ports, why put the lsa card when you could have used the motherboard's ports and save the pci-e slot for a dedicated gpu for transcoding????? that is clearly the whole idea behind this. in any case, i'm interested in that motherboard.
Haha. For a quick build, I don't bother with back plates, I was disassembling afterwards anyhow. This wasn't intended as a practical usable build. Just for building up the case. The motherboard is just a test board. It's an antiquated ASRock Z87E-ITX for 4th gen Intel CPU's. It has six onboard SATA ports and one mSATA port on the back. But if you use the mSATA port you lose functionality of one of those six SATA ports. The additional two SATA ports come from an adapter board in a full size wi-fi slot. So while technically I could run 8 off that motherboard, I'd also need one slot for boot drive, leaving only 7 remaining slots. In this case, that wouldn't fly because the case supports 8 drive bays. But I've used this mobo a few times before for builds that had 5 or 6 drive bays, so there is one free SATA for boot drive. Not to mention I wanted to test SAS compatibility and that can only work with a proper SAS PCIe HBA card. Not to mention most ITX motherboards only support 2-4 SATA ports onboard, so figured they'd want to see a full length HBA card. All that said, I do have a video coming up showing a couple modern solutions though. As far as transcoding as long as you have an Intel CPU with an integrated GPU supporting Quick Sync, there really is no need for a dedicated GPU. I've seen reports of users getting upwards of a dozen or so simultaneous 1080p -> 720p transcodes with Quick Sync, and at least 6-8 4k transcodes. But you are correct, it is not the most practical build how I had assembled it.
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 80 | คู่เอก "รักษ์ vs ยอดนำชัย"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ckLMRorsMeY/mqdefault.jpg)
Finally, a actual proper review! So many darn reviews are more talking points and not really testing the hardware inside the case, doing sound tests (and giving samples!).
Thank you for this review! It’s the perfect case for my needs. I currently have a mITX Xeon with 6x 3.5, 1x 2.5 in a Fractal Design Array R2 and wanted to install an Intel Arc 380 for video transcoding and some ML photo classifiers, but the card blocks a HDD… this is the solution!
As others have said, more modern boards come with 2 M2 slots, of which one can be converted to 5+ SATA ports, and having space for a GPU for ML applications or transcoding is in my eyes a big bonus for a home server. I don’t want to have multiple machines running 24/7. In this Jonsbo case, one can provide a ton of storage to the house, and host media services with plenty of processing power in one box. The separation of storage and compute compartments is brilliant, one can put a powerful CPU/GPU in there and not worry about frying the disks!
That was a really nice review. Everything I would need to know is there!
As someone researching to build a small home server (media, backup, maybe automation), this helped me a lot! Thanks.
Glad it was helpful!
Another great and informative watch that can really assist in making a potential purchase choice.
One note to the ITX form factor and only 1 PCIe Card: you can bring out 4 pcie lanes from an unused m.2 slot on the mainboard via an adapter cable (just google m.2 to pcie cable) and use that for a 10gbit ethernet card or similar :)
Could also get an M2 to Sata adapter and leave out the HBA in favor of a 10gbt NIC.
been researching for a few weeks, and it's been frustrating finding that itx+10gbe+8sata, and i'm smacking myself reading your comment why I didn't think of that
@@zacki5663 i got a qnap qm2-2p10g that has dual m2 slots on it, since i used the only m2 on mb to add 6 more sata ports, pricey but, was the best solution i could find, other than possibly one of the pcie to m2 with pcie riser to add a ded gpu if i ever needed one for my plex server.
Yes, this is a great idea
Thank you for this video. I am planning to build a NAS in this case and this was a great help. There's a cool little board from Silverstone (the ECS07) that plugs into an m.2 slot and provides 5 additional SATA ports. Only Gen 3, but it looks like it will provide the throughput needed for hard drives.
This cleared up so many questions. Thank you.
I just got done building my first server Nas in this case love it w video
Great to hear! It is a nice case isn't it?
Great review - thanks for all the insights and analysis.
Thanks for the review. Planning to build my server in the next few weeks and this is really helpful. 😀
Great review! Thank you for all the information. I know it's been a minute but when you built this did have any issues with the power configuration on the back plane? Did you have the 2 atx and sata plugged in to supply power?
I had plugged in both SATA and Molex. You may not need all of them but I wouldn't risk it to be honest.
Good review, thanks. Whilst I agree with your review, in the summary there is one thing I dont agree with. I dont want a NAS, I want a mini Application Server! I will need a NVIDIA GPU card because I would be running Frigate, Compreface and Double Take. So the height is needed for me. (and actually the PSU needs the height!) and I will need to ensure good cooling on the CPU and the M.2 cards. BUT as I said a good review to confirm it is a good case for those needs.
Thanks for your comment! It is good to have the option for sure. Just for those looking for a NAS case (which seems to be its primary intent) it is just extra unnecessary bulk.
In my mind ultimately make the footprint a bit bigger to fit mATX board and then can mount GPU sideways, move PSU down next to hard drives, and not be much larger overall.
But that's a wishlist, lol. The case is pretty nice as is.
Great overview! I have the N2 and it's great but I wish the N3 let you install a mATX motherboard as the added width wouldn't make that much of a difference and would differentiate it even more from the N2.
Fully agree, Mini ITX is OK for a 4 bay NAS, as you can find motherboards with four SATA ports, but 8, you need an HBA PCIe card. They could widen the case by a few inches, shorten it by a couple inches because you don't need full height cards or massive CPU coolers, and put the SFX PSU next to the hard drives.
@htwingnut can use a m.2 to sata ports card on mitx but yeah make it a little wider to fit matx would be great
@@Andreas-w Agreed. But if you use M.2 to SATA port adapter you lose the M.2 port for your OS. I know there are mITX motherboards that house two m.2 slots but one is on the bottom of the board and uses a separate controller and usually are much more expensive boards.
I just think that this device wouldn't need to be much bigger to house an mATX, just make it wider and house the SFX PSU next to the drive bays, and allow room up top for an mATX board, and doesn't need to be quite as thick either. Just my opinion though. Otherwise case is actually quite nice.
@@htwingnut yes matx would be a better solution
Thank you for posting this video 🎉. You have a new subscriber. Keep up the great 👍 work.
I just finished my n3 build, i like the space for building inside for the size, i need to add 2 case fans i think but all in all its a good case
Great review! Which motherboard is that?
Very good 👍 thank you for the review and showing the build.
OK, but what are actual SAS interface speeds for its backplane? Is it full 12G, or is it halved, because only one port is active?
Sorry if my question is stupid, never had a chance to work with SAS drives…
I am not 100% certain, but I would imagine if it were "SAS compatible" that it would be 12G as it's just an electrical pass-thru and speed is more dependent on the SAS controller than the slot. Not to mention that unless you have drives that can run 1200 MB/sec it'd be hard to validate either way.
SAS 12G is more for total bandwidth for expanding to multiple drives, which wouldn't be a factor in this situation, because each disk would get their own dedicated 6Gbps or 12Gbps lane.
What PSU is that in the video please? Do you know what PSUs are supported by the case?
It requires an SFX form factor PSU.
Honestly it's like they are trying to make a bad design (and they are insultingly expensive), in my opinion a nas good for most personal use's doesn't have to be a very powerful machine, you have to take in account power usage (electricity cost's money) and noise as it most likely going to work near people. The motherboard should be placed preferably on top for good heat dissipation with an air vent or option 2 on the side and top vent, in both cases with enough room for a beefy cooler (to reduce fan usage and noise) . Jonsbo n3 is good but they just had to insult us with not having a top vent and some decent hdd bays also the price is high and your getting so little especially considering that the users are going for this option precisely because they don't want to spend to much money and the build quality could be better, also larger rear fan exhausts, they make less noise and you can move more air trough !
Hello. Can you tell me how many watts your power supply is? Approximately how much does the system consume when idle and with multiple disks?
PSU is a Silverstone SX300-B 300W. I no longer have the system assembled, so unfortunately can't tell you at this point. Either way, that would depend entirely on the disks used, motherboard, CPU, RAM, PSU, etc, so it could vary greatly from setup to setup.
I put a similar comment on another video but I wonder if an Asrock H610M-HDV Motherboard will fit in this case it is an m-atx board but is only 19.7 cm x 18.8 cm so might fit and would allow use of both PCIe slots. I think it will but might have to mod how the Powersupply is attached, possibly mounting it horizontally rather than vertically?
Can the power supply be mounted rotated 90 degrees?
No, unfortunately, because it is mounted to a bracket that only mounts one way in the chassis.
Full heigh is nice for those using a discrete gpu for transcoding in a medic server configuration.
Nice video! Case is almost perfect, wish the CPU/Mobo compartment wasn't soo high!
Agreed. That's my one of my biggest gripes too. Nobody needs a mile high cpu cooler for a NAS case. And no need for full height PCIe card either, really. It's not a game case. This would be perfect if it accommodated a microATX board and reduced the height.
@@htwingnut Exactly! In my case I'm still running a 4 year old Asrock c2750d4i board with a SOC and only needs 1U with fans in the front. I know many people had issues with those boards but so far mine has been good but I'm out looking for a case to houses 8-12 case in a tiny footprint. Difficult.
can the backplane use SAS drives by chance
or is it only SATA
I prolly should of watched the video first, im sorry lol
@@lordnikon981 No problem, LOL. Yes it can accommodate SAS drives if you have the proper SAS controller. Thanks for watching!
07:43
Did they upgrade the backplane to support staggered spin-up?
I read on chinese websites the newer models have a DIP-switch to choose spin up 250ms/500ms/off etc.
PSU will not be stressed as much by having this.
Good question! It seems it's a "dumb backplane". I'm not sure the refresh interval of this power meter, but it pops up to 200W or so pretty instantly. It also sounds like they power on simultaneously: th-cam.com/video/0rWryODz7p0/w-d-xo.htmlsi=WeIoqpw2T8J-erog
@@htwingnut
Ah that's too bad! Even my 8 year old synology had it.
Guess those "dumb backplane" are old stock or something that they are trying to clear first.
If you're in touch with a jonsbo representative, maybe you could enquire about it.
I have a Synology NAS and the HDDs constantly make vibration noises. Is it really dead silent here or you hear something?
I used to have Fractal Design Meshify 2 XL with absolute zero vibrations. I suspect it's also because the disks could lay horizontal instead of vertical.
The rubber standoffs really make a difference. I didn't notice any vibrations through the case at all. Of course disks make noise in general when seeking and newer high capacity disks use PWL which can cause a slight "thump" sound every 5 seconds or so.
The extra HBA requires extra power consumption, which is not a good design, the PSU is heavy and should not be placed on the upper tier, the motherboard form factor is locked at ITX size, this is another drawback, I prefer buying second hand super micro servo The appliance has a case with 8 hard disk slots.
@htwingnut You used some thicker 2.6cm drives. can they be mounted side by side in all 8 bays without issue? Also I purchased a pcie x4 to m.2 nvme and added a asm1166 6 port sata adapter. my concern is that it will obscure the cable hole to the bottom and also not be able to have sata cables plugged in. what is the measurement in my between the hbacard and the side panel please. this case seems great compared to my Lian Li PC-q25 for the size and thinking to upgrade
Nice review! Can you fit flex psu inside this case?
When I have something like the N3, I use a WiFi Power adapter to turn the current to the PSU on/off.
Great video! Just out of interest, what was the ambient temperature during the testing?
Ambient room temperature was about 23-24C
@@htwingnut, thanks so much for the response! Planning on building a NAS using this case, but will be using the Topton n100 based MB, mainly because of the ultra low power consumption. Your video was really helpful and very detailed. Would have been great if you had some rough power-consumption stats. Thank you.
They should add an option for 16 2.5" drives.
Do you think a Deep-ITX mobo would fit ? Something like an Asrock Rack ROMED4ID-2T would be nice :D
I had the same idea. I think the PSU is in the way of using deep ITX.
Did an x99 mATX fits?
Hello, Can you tell me which motherboard is that please?
What motherboard do you have with 8 sata?
This is an older 4th gen Intel motheboard. It has 6 onboard SATA ports, and I used the wifi slot to add another two. Unfortunately it's hard to come across a current gen Intel (or AMD for that matter) motherboard with more the four ports in a mITX form factor. Asrock Rack makes server motherboards with 8 SATA ports, although they are a bit expensive.
I'm looking for a motherboard socket lga1151 with more than 4 Sata. This is a big problem. The QTJ2 processor will be in my NAS.
Spinning disks like to sit around 42C, so, even the lower fan speed is too high.
sorry my OCD is killing me.
WHERE IS YOUR MOTHERBOARD I/O PLATE?!?!?!?! you monster!!
also, the motherboard clearly has x8 sata ports, why put the lsa card when you could have used the motherboard's ports and save the pci-e slot for a dedicated gpu for transcoding?????
that is clearly the whole idea behind this.
in any case, i'm interested in that motherboard.
Haha. For a quick build, I don't bother with back plates, I was disassembling afterwards anyhow. This wasn't intended as a practical usable build. Just for building up the case.
The motherboard is just a test board. It's an antiquated ASRock Z87E-ITX for 4th gen Intel CPU's. It has six onboard SATA ports and one mSATA port on the back. But if you use the mSATA port you lose functionality of one of those six SATA ports. The additional two SATA ports come from an adapter board in a full size wi-fi slot.
So while technically I could run 8 off that motherboard, I'd also need one slot for boot drive, leaving only 7 remaining slots. In this case, that wouldn't fly because the case supports 8 drive bays. But I've used this mobo a few times before for builds that had 5 or 6 drive bays, so there is one free SATA for boot drive. Not to mention I wanted to test SAS compatibility and that can only work with a proper SAS PCIe HBA card. Not to mention most ITX motherboards only support 2-4 SATA ports onboard, so figured they'd want to see a full length HBA card.
All that said, I do have a video coming up showing a couple modern solutions though.
As far as transcoding as long as you have an Intel CPU with an integrated GPU supporting Quick Sync, there really is no need for a dedicated GPU. I've seen reports of users getting upwards of a dozen or so simultaneous 1080p -> 720p transcodes with Quick Sync, and at least 6-8 4k transcodes.
But you are correct, it is not the most practical build how I had assembled it.