Very good review, and contains exactly the information I would be looking for. The price is a bit much considering what it actually is though. An N100 with a 2.5gig port and essentially 4 (empty) M.2 ports isn't worth 400€. Or even 300€. I just paid like 240€ (ish) for an N100 with 4x 2.5g ports and 2x 10g ports (obviously intended to be my Router/Firewall). I mean I know I can't replace the onboard 2.5g NICs with NVMe slots, but I'm just saying there are other options our there. I'm also VERY worried about the essentually passive only cooling on 4 NVMe using a single, small piece of sheet metal with no cooler as a makeshift heatsink I guess? There isn't even any airflow in that part of the case from the fan, which is on the other side of the board. If you actively use this as a NAS with the NVMe and do something that actually stresses them, they will get rather uncomfortably hot without question. Even when buying NVMe models that specifically get less hot, that's probably not exactly great for them...
I agree with that assessment. It's build quality is fine considering it's trying to fit the small-size and very low power niche, the USB-C PD is a big plus for certain people, but it's priced high. The metal plate will conduct some heat to the case (it's screwed to the bottom directly, and also through the board to the top), but it's mostly just going to spread/store the heat during bust operations on the drive.
@@PringelsDoppeltdip Well I made a typo on the price ("1" instead of "2", kinda important), but edited my comment now. I got the "KingNovy firewall mini pc 12. gen intel". As far as I can tell, that's essentially a Topton, comes from the same factory as Topton/CWWK/... You can get N100 from like 160€ though, obviously with more bare bones peripherals, but that's essentially what this reviewed unit is, too. Please don't really take this as an endorsement of my unit either though, since that thing has essentially the same problem with heat. The CPU has a cooler, which can also be nicely regulated using bios options. But the other side of the board, essentially the main "chamber" contains the M.2 NVMe slot, all 4x 2.5g NICs and the 2x 10g NICs on a riser. That chamber is COMPLETELY unventilated. I knew this was gonna be an issue when I ordered, but I got my 3D printers and can just design and print an alternate shell for that "half" of the case. I can include one or two 40mm fans or something. For reference, without putting any load on any of the NICs, the NVMe got to like 60°C in just a few minutes, and the 10g riser carg got so hot you could barely touch it, so like 70°C or even higher. Again, that was after just minutes and with no load (or even link on the 10g). There's an exhaustive thread with 110 pages on servethehome forums about these kinds of units (titled something like "CWWK/Topton/... quad nic router" or similar). If you want more details, that is a good place to start (should be google-able with that title).
Good probe into details. I've been saying future of home-NAS is mini PC with multi nvme slots for years. Looks like some are finally doing it. LMDE or other Debians are best choice. Do another video testing from WiFi & remote, with more nvme & also if it shares OK over networks attached portable SSD units/enclosures to the back USB ports. Great info on PCI gens & it's lanes too, thanks. Hopefully more similar units with N97 or N200 CPU, more powerful. Pricey at four hundred, will bite when half that price.
They probably could have made a smaller cooler to fit in a single DDR5 SO-DIMM, but LPDDR5 is also lower power. NUCs this size don't have 4x M.2 slots as well, if they went down to 2 slots a single SO-DIMM would fit on that side. There are tradeoffs in such a small space. Ideally we could use CAMMs to get removable memory with LPDDR5, but those are such a new standard I don't blame them for not being the first to ship a product with CAMM2.
@@apalrdsadventures I don't know if we'll see CAMMs in these small boxes anytime soon. They take up quite a lot of space directly on the PCB and have a fixed area for the connections. I can imagine that this makes the layout of these small boards more difficult compared to individual RAM chips.
They are thinner than normal SO-DIMMs, so in this case they could fit underneath the M.2s. That would make cooling worse though, since the LPDDR5 chips are currently cooled directly by the CPU cooler. Layout wise you can flip the CAMM so the connector is on the side of the board with the m.2 screws, so the traces coming out of the cpu have memory to one side and PCIe to the other (this is also similar to how the pads on tiny CPUs are often laid out).
That's what I thought too. Points that may be let it stand out are 4x NVME and 2.5Gbit ethernet. For less than this price I bought a 1U case, N100-Motherboard a PSU and some better fans with more flexibility for harddrives and future usage.
Any suggestions for n100 and 4nvme similar to this priced nvme nas? seems assigned 2 lanes per m2 slot (N100 have 9 pcie lanes can be assigned) Currently I have a low speed version which is a p5 x86 n305 with quad nvme carrier board but they assign 1 lanes to each slot so they max out 1GB/s each slot in theory 😢
FYI: The link above currently cuts the price significantly in the Shopping Cart, if that's any incentive. Further, this is not a ProxMox box, it looks like will do what's on the Tin: "All-SSD NAS". I notice the 3.2Gen2 USB-C which adds the ability for external enclosed SSDs - every Disk Storage needs the ability to Backup and take that somewhere else. I appreciate the look into the box, and personally not too concerned about the "performance" given the saturation of the 2.5GB interface being the bottleneck with one channel servicing it.
That's not bad, my ASUStor uses one lane gen 3 for each drive, and it's enough to saturate the two 2.5 gbps links in RAID 0. I'd probably use LVM to make a small system volume on each drive, and devote the rest to RAID. I wouldn't use software RAID for the OS, but if partitioning for each of 4 drives is identical, it leaves three spares for the OS volume. Just dd the images in sequence, letting the oldest copy fall off the end. And RAID 0 would give maybe 15TB from 4 4TB sticks, or ~11 with RAID 5. That would make a solid multimedia server for a vacation home or business trip.
Proxmox with ZFS will add the efi partition to all disks and boot off the zfs pool, so no need for lvm even. It keeps the efi partitions in sync as well.
@@apalrdsadventures for the server just one interface 40Gbe, will have another one 40gbe in my workstation, maybe a xeon D ?, it is low powered and has lots lof lanes 30 to 40, also it is ECC capable, this way you can even throw some spinning rust and have a full NAS
@@apalrdsadventures id settle for something that could peak into the 35w -65w range, but idle nice and low. Basically a modern mid range desktop cpu but with some actual pcie lanes. My home server is idle 95% of the time, and something like a threadripper, epyc, xeon, don't understand idling very well.
Ugreen's all-NVMe NAS might be more of what you want. My review video hasn't publshed yet, but it's.... significantly more powerful in every way than this.
You failed to mention that the company is charging $6 for the 256 GB drive. Although you consider the software included, for $6, well, you have a drive that you could toss in something else; so paying $6 for the 256 GB SSD is not really a deal killer.. It would be the first thing yanked out to begin with; the company probably could have included the software as an installer on a USB flash drive, I guess .. The price is not super great, but not terrible either considering. It would be nice for the manufacturer to state what the largest sized drives that it supports is.. Given that its size is quite small, that's one thing; but it'd be nice if all of the spec is nicely flushed out.
Sounds legit. I'm doing a little nas with asrock n100-itx, v. smol case, 2x used intel 660p 2tb for storage mirrored, £60 each, for mirrored boot, 128gb used internal sandisk ultra fit and 128gb used intel 320 series ultra slim sata II 3Gbps 120gb mirrored. Using used because cheap and safe because mirrored. Board and 32GB ram, £190, case £40, nvmex2 £120, bootx2 £25, adapters £5 total £380. not built yet so no perf/eff numbers for you.
I'm still waiting for someone to bring out an N100 based nas with 6 M.2 slots at Gen 3 x1, along with a 10G nic. Having 6 slots would allow 1 to be used as a boot device, the other 5 in some sort of RAID flavour... which should easily saturate a 10G connection. The N100 does have 2 SATA ports, so they could even put those 2 as m.2... use them to mirror the boot drive, then 6 NVME in RAID
The 2 SATA ports share analog line drivers with two PCIe lanes. Most of the rest of the PCIe lanes share analog components with USB3 as well, which is why there are so few USB3 ports on this device (trading PCIe vs USB3).
Wait, is he using his macbook as a external monitor + keyboard for the Aiifro?? If so, can anyone please let me know how it works? ive been looking for something like this forever
@@apalrdsadventures MY MIND IS ABSOLUTE BLOWN RIGHT NOW!!! So many times I had to find a monitor inside of a factory because they're network is locked.. thank you so much!!
400$ for the slowest minipc with a couple more m2 slots and a 2.5 nic. might be portable, but considering the cost of nvme drives, it's not like you're gonna carry this thing around like it's a external ssd. kinda pointless to have 4 nvme slots when they'll be bottlenecked by the cpu and ethernet port. if you need all nvme storage for some reason, you are more likely gonna build a server
Yea, I don't get it either. I've also received a mini PC in a 10 lb box that: 1. Could've fit 5-6 mini PC's in it, and 2. Had about 5 pounds of packing material before you even saw the box. Such waste for such a small product.
In almost every N100, N200, N305 that I own, if it had a SODIMM slot, well, every one so far has, maybe not supported, but functions with 32GB of whatever flavor, of DDR, either DDR4 or DDR5. Using LPDDR5 is a cool cost cutting piece that works well in super small packages, but this package should have been large enough to support SODIMM which likely would have allowed users to swap out that 8GB for upwards of 32 GB.. 8 GB is a tad small for consideration. Eventually I'll want to replace my conventional NAS, but this device is not quite it. The design has some obvious weak points..
Really makes you wonder why not just get a USB HDD, since the network speed would be no better than that of the USB drive. Also, less power, and fewer risk of problems, since there's no OS. Not to mention the capacity. Kind of neat, but kinda pointless, since it doesn't offer much that other solutions can't do better, and for less money too.
Don't feel bad for asking us to like and subscribe.
Did ya benchmark this a bit to see if speeds were in the ballpark of expectations?
Very good review, and contains exactly the information I would be looking for. The price is a bit much considering what it actually is though. An N100 with a 2.5gig port and essentially 4 (empty) M.2 ports isn't worth 400€. Or even 300€. I just paid like 240€ (ish) for an N100 with 4x 2.5g ports and 2x 10g ports (obviously intended to be my Router/Firewall). I mean I know I can't replace the onboard 2.5g NICs with NVMe slots, but I'm just saying there are other options our there.
I'm also VERY worried about the essentually passive only cooling on 4 NVMe using a single, small piece of sheet metal with no cooler as a makeshift heatsink I guess? There isn't even any airflow in that part of the case from the fan, which is on the other side of the board. If you actively use this as a NAS with the NVMe and do something that actually stresses them, they will get rather uncomfortably hot without question. Even when buying NVMe models that specifically get less hot, that's probably not exactly great for them...
Which router did you buy, I would like to find one with these specs at this price point
I agree with that assessment. It's build quality is fine considering it's trying to fit the small-size and very low power niche, the USB-C PD is a big plus for certain people, but it's priced high.
The metal plate will conduct some heat to the case (it's screwed to the bottom directly, and also through the board to the top), but it's mostly just going to spread/store the heat during bust operations on the drive.
@@PringelsDoppeltdip Well I made a typo on the price ("1" instead of "2", kinda important), but edited my comment now. I got the "KingNovy firewall mini pc 12. gen intel". As far as I can tell, that's essentially a Topton, comes from the same factory as Topton/CWWK/... You can get N100 from like 160€ though, obviously with more bare bones peripherals, but that's essentially what this reviewed unit is, too.
Please don't really take this as an endorsement of my unit either though, since that thing has essentially the same problem with heat. The CPU has a cooler, which can also be nicely regulated using bios options. But the other side of the board, essentially the main "chamber" contains the M.2 NVMe slot, all 4x 2.5g NICs and the 2x 10g NICs on a riser. That chamber is COMPLETELY unventilated. I knew this was gonna be an issue when I ordered, but I got my 3D printers and can just design and print an alternate shell for that "half" of the case. I can include one or two 40mm fans or something. For reference, without putting any load on any of the NICs, the NVMe got to like 60°C in just a few minutes, and the 10g riser carg got so hot you could barely touch it, so like 70°C or even higher. Again, that was after just minutes and with no load (or even link on the 10g). There's an exhaustive thread with 110 pages on servethehome forums about these kinds of units (titled something like "CWWK/Topton/... quad nic router" or similar). If you want more details, that is a good place to start (should be google-able with that title).
@@TheCreat thanks for the detailed response.
Good probe into details. I've been saying future of home-NAS is mini PC with multi nvme slots for years. Looks like some are finally doing it. LMDE or other Debians are best choice. Do another video testing from WiFi & remote, with more nvme & also if it shares OK over networks attached portable SSD units/enclosures to the back USB ports. Great info on PCI gens & it's lanes too, thanks. Hopefully more similar units with N97 or N200 CPU, more powerful. Pricey at four hundred, will bite when half that price.
Memory being soldered is a big let down
You can't have every luxury in such a small box.
@@JohnADoe-pg1qk NUCs and similar have supported SO-DIMMs in the past. It's definitely feasible, this is purely a costcutting measure.
They probably could have made a smaller cooler to fit in a single DDR5 SO-DIMM, but LPDDR5 is also lower power. NUCs this size don't have 4x M.2 slots as well, if they went down to 2 slots a single SO-DIMM would fit on that side. There are tradeoffs in such a small space.
Ideally we could use CAMMs to get removable memory with LPDDR5, but those are such a new standard I don't blame them for not being the first to ship a product with CAMM2.
@@apalrdsadventures I don't know if we'll see CAMMs in these small boxes anytime soon. They take up quite a lot of space directly on the PCB and have a fixed area for the connections. I can imagine that this makes the layout of these small boards more difficult compared to individual RAM chips.
They are thinner than normal SO-DIMMs, so in this case they could fit underneath the M.2s. That would make cooling worse though, since the LPDDR5 chips are currently cooled directly by the CPU cooler.
Layout wise you can flip the CAMM so the connector is on the side of the board with the m.2 screws, so the traces coming out of the cpu have memory to one side and PCIe to the other (this is also similar to how the pads on tiny CPUs are often laid out).
$450 for bare bone N100/8GB? another dead overpriced minipc
That's what I thought too. Points that may be let it stand out are 4x NVME and 2.5Gbit ethernet.
For less than this price I bought a 1U case, N100-Motherboard a PSU and some better fans with more flexibility for harddrives and future usage.
Any suggestions for n100 and 4nvme similar to this priced nvme nas? seems assigned 2 lanes per m2 slot (N100 have 9 pcie lanes can be assigned)
Currently I have a low speed version which is a p5 x86 n305 with quad nvme carrier board but they assign 1 lanes to each slot so they max out 1GB/s each slot in theory 😢
FYI: The link above currently cuts the price significantly in the Shopping Cart, if that's any incentive. Further, this is not a ProxMox box, it looks like will do what's on the Tin: "All-SSD NAS". I notice the 3.2Gen2 USB-C which adds the ability for external enclosed SSDs - every Disk Storage needs the ability to Backup and take that somewhere else. I appreciate the look into the box, and personally not too concerned about the "performance" given the saturation of the 2.5GB interface being the bottleneck with one channel servicing it.
Sales People, Sales.
@@frankwong9486how do you feel about higher tier NVME encosures that can shed the heat of a gen 4 without throttling?
That's not bad, my ASUStor uses one lane gen 3 for each drive, and it's enough to saturate the two 2.5 gbps links in RAID 0. I'd probably use LVM to make a small system volume on each drive, and devote the rest to RAID. I wouldn't use software RAID for the OS, but if partitioning for each of 4 drives is identical, it leaves three spares for the OS volume. Just dd the images in sequence, letting the oldest copy fall off the end. And RAID 0 would give maybe 15TB from 4 4TB sticks, or ~11 with RAID 5. That would make a solid multimedia server for a vacation home or business trip.
Proxmox with ZFS will add the efi partition to all disks and boot off the zfs pool, so no need for lvm even. It keeps the efi partitions in sync as well.
Memory being soldered that's mean OpenMediaVault "only" as a NAS In my opinion , nice video man 👌
N100 gets it done. Cool rig!
a very cute package compared to the friendlyelec or asustor options.
But the BEST POKER FACE one need to say it's price says it all!!
I’m really hoping for a 1U Rack mount version of the flash stor.
you can fit a solid 4 of these in 1RU and make a cluster instead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I would love for you to make a cluster of 4 of these NAS. But the price is insane!
+1 for a pretty good use of å.
I WANT ONE !! and nice video man !!
weird observation i know, but apalrd has big arms for a linux user
Waiting for a DIY all nvme, low powered as well but with enough bandwitdh to saturate a 40gbe connection, a bit tricky but I think is doable
You'll need a more powerful CPU to hit 40Gbe.
Do you actually want 40Gbe, or 40G across multiple interfaces (say 10G + 2x Thunderbolt)
@@apalrdsadventures for the server just one interface 40Gbe, will have another one 40gbe in my workstation, maybe a xeon D ?, it is low powered and has lots lof lanes 30 to 40, also it is ECC capable, this way you can even throw some spinning rust and have a full NAS
What’s the default OS it comes with
with this kind of cpu they could have put sata m.2 so you could put cheaper drives in
This CPU only has two SATA lanes, so only two of the slots could get that without another controller chip.
We really need a n100 like cpu but with like 32+ pcie gen4 lanes. 16 for a GPU and 4x4 for ssds, and maybe dual 10gbe?
I'm going to doubt a 6W CPU will handle that much IO bandwidth
@@apalrdsadventures id settle for something that could peak into the 35w -65w range, but idle nice and low. Basically a modern mid range desktop cpu but with some actual pcie lanes. My home server is idle 95% of the time, and something like a threadripper, epyc, xeon, don't understand idling very well.
@@Cynyr intel 12 gen or higher. i idle at 5-10w on a 12900k on linux. that is overclocked abit also.
That amount of PCIE is Xeon territory for PCIE4 and 5 in Intel land. Consumer Intel is around 20 lances at the top end.
Ugreen's all-NVMe NAS might be more of what you want. My review video hasn't publshed yet, but it's.... significantly more powerful in every way than this.
You failed to mention that the company is charging $6 for the 256 GB drive. Although you consider the software included, for $6, well, you have a drive that you could toss in something else; so paying $6 for the 256 GB SSD is not really a deal killer.. It would be the first thing yanked out to begin with; the company probably could have included the software as an installer on a USB flash drive, I guess .. The price is not super great, but not terrible either considering. It would be nice for the manufacturer to state what the largest sized drives that it supports is.. Given that its size is quite small, that's one thing; but it'd be nice if all of the spec is nicely flushed out.
Sounds legit. I'm doing a little nas with asrock n100-itx, v. smol case, 2x used intel 660p 2tb for storage mirrored, £60 each, for mirrored boot, 128gb used internal sandisk ultra fit and 128gb used intel 320 series ultra slim sata II 3Gbps 120gb mirrored. Using used because cheap and safe because mirrored. Board and 32GB ram, £190, case £40, nvmex2 £120, bootx2 £25, adapters £5 total £380.
not built yet so no perf/eff numbers for you.
Teach us how to change one of the usb-c -pots into a NIC in proxmox!
This particular unit doesn't support Thunderbolt, but I have a system that does coming soon!
I'm still waiting for someone to bring out an N100 based nas with 6 M.2 slots at Gen 3 x1, along with a 10G nic.
Having 6 slots would allow 1 to be used as a boot device, the other 5 in some sort of RAID flavour... which should easily saturate a 10G connection.
The N100 does have 2 SATA ports, so they could even put those 2 as m.2... use them to mirror the boot drive, then 6 NVME in RAID
The 2 SATA ports share analog line drivers with two PCIe lanes. Most of the rest of the PCIe lanes share analog components with USB3 as well, which is why there are so few USB3 ports on this device (trading PCIe vs USB3).
Wait, is he using his macbook as a external monitor + keyboard for the Aiifro?? If so, can anyone please let me know how it works? ive been looking for something like this forever
or is he just using ssh?
A mix of SSH + this thing - th-cam.com/video/ZZ5P6MnBcHw/w-d-xo.html
@@apalrdsadventures MY MIND IS ABSOLUTE BLOWN RIGHT NOW!!! So many times I had to find a monitor inside of a factory because they're network is locked.. thank you so much!!
400$ for the slowest minipc with a couple more m2 slots and a 2.5 nic.
might be portable, but considering the cost of nvme drives, it's not like you're gonna carry this thing around like it's a external ssd.
kinda pointless to have 4 nvme slots when they'll be bottlenecked by the cpu and ethernet port.
if you need all nvme storage for some reason, you are more likely gonna build a server
CWWK make a barebone 4 NVME board for half the price, 180€ in EU (this as barebone is 375) X86 P5 NAS
Just the board though, no case
Yea, I don't get it either. I've also received a mini PC in a 10 lb box that:
1. Could've fit 5-6 mini PC's in it, and
2. Had about 5 pounds of packing material before you even saw the box.
Such waste for such a small product.
In almost every N100, N200, N305 that I own, if it had a SODIMM slot, well, every one so far has, maybe not supported, but functions with 32GB of whatever flavor, of DDR, either DDR4 or DDR5. Using LPDDR5 is a cool cost cutting piece that works well in super small packages, but this package should have been large enough to support SODIMM which likely would have allowed users to swap out that 8GB for upwards of 32 GB.. 8 GB is a tad small for consideration. Eventually I'll want to replace my conventional NAS, but this device is not quite it. The design has some obvious weak points..
Really makes you wonder why not just get a USB HDD, since the network speed would be no better than that of the USB drive. Also, less power, and fewer risk of problems, since there's no OS. Not to mention the capacity. Kind of neat, but kinda pointless, since it doesn't offer much that other solutions can't do better, and for less money too.
Depends on what you want. If you want to run services like Home Assistant, having a CPU is a huge benefit
build your own for more performance and value
Can you make a Zulip chat instead of Discord?
I haven't heard of Zulip before, but it looks like a decent open source alternative. I'll have to investigate more.
$450? ahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahha
8 GB? Nah.
another forgettable piece of landfill