Mini ITX NAS Motherboard Intel CPU 6xSATA 4×2.5GbE

Always wanted to know if this boards will work fine with proxmox, to virtualize firewall and NAS. I was about to get one last year to try it out. Ended up using an Asrock ITX with a PCIE quad port network card and a SATA port multiplier on the M.2 slot.

Kudos! and Very illuminating. Also, looking forward to you getting your hands on the CWWK i3-N305 6x SATA NAS board and doing this same thing with it, eventually, I imagine, and hope. 🙂

at first "they" buy mini itx – then they "complain" that there is no sata ports.

please – don't do so.

in my regular cheap AM4 mainboard which i use 5 or 6 year is out of the box – 6 sata ports and 2 NVme ports and 6 PCIe slots – 2 PCIe from them is ful format.

and this is cheap AM4 mainboard

and all "what you need" – is just use brain before buy something and do not listen someone who tell stories about "tiny cool boards"

the difference between normal mainboard for humans and miniITX is

ATX: 305 × 244 mm

mini-ITX: 170 × 170 mm

How much do you need to “not be friends with your head”, that for the sake of “saving” like 13.5 cm (305-170) – create a lot of problems for yourself?

people – please use your brain and head – don't create invented problems for yourself.

Thanks for making this video! Been trying to find info on this exact n100 board for a nas.

Great comparison of these two cpus on basically the same board. Informative and in depth. Thanks!

Odd, this CPU should be able to transcode at least 1 4K to 1080P stream if not a couple, with ease. You need to make sure the USE HARDWARE ACCELERATION WHEN AVAILABLE is checked in the Plex settings for it to make use of the intel Quicksync, which is can.

right away i would prefer a dual channel system so both options are from the table. i would use my nas for other things too because most of the time those systems sitting there and doing nothing. i had a self build nas with a j5040 in it but now i have running a ryzen7 5700g in that system. this thing is mostly packed around 30%. it is doing more as only being a nas. its doing home automation stuff, running some game servers, being a nas and backup system and some other things. i do have a dell r630 i can technicaly use for those things but this thing is way to powerfull and uses a lot more power on idle as the ryzen 7 5700g at full load also it has a 1.8gb per drive limit and only 8 2.5inch drive bays si 14tb is the limit. i use this thing for my analytic stuff where i need that 8 ram channels with 768gb and the compute power from those 44 cores. i have done this stuff in the past on my ryzen7 5700g system but 50h of waiting was not woth it also in that time the system cant do anything other and everything took ages to do something. i looked online and find a retailer for server stuff and find a r630 with one xeon e5 2699v4 for 600€ it had only one in it but bought a second used e5 2699v4 for 200€ and much as ram from the same type i got my hands on also used and some used sas drives and i was good to go. in the end i spend 1200€ on this thing in total and now i can do the same run in 3h and using only a third of the total power consumption of the ryzen7.
but using this thing as a home server with nas functionality is no option because of the 220W idle power draw if i config it do dynamic power mode and use automatic core count system it can go low as 75W but in this the system lag is high because of both options. for example i run ubuntu server on it and let it sitt in idle the system shows only 1 to 2 cores per cpu are active also there clock speed is down to 800mhz at this stage the system uses only 60w. the main power usage comes from the 24 ram modules and the ipmi / idrac system and the H330 raid controller the idac alone uses 25w. also each ram modul uses around 0.8w to 1W and the H330 uses also around 20w also the mainbord and the psu uses some power lower that this is not possible.
my ryzen7 system uses on idle 20w with all stuff deactivated i dont use. on that 30% load the system uses 35W this is ok for me. it was not the cheapest option using a ryzen7 but the best performance to power ratio with a reasonable price. in the end i payed nearly the same as for the r630. but this system is slower in all possible ways and had less functionality and safety and comfort features.

it's funny that most of aliexpress offers seams to claim that those would support upto 32Gb of RAM, even Intel spec clearly says that it wouldn't. Fairpaly mate very good review! 100%

Wow! Thank you very much for this video! Such an in-depth testing is very rare. Others are just like "I installed unraid, connected drives and it works, great board"

The only thing i'm missing is some information about the noise. In some review i did read that the cpu fan is horribly loud and not controlled by temperature at all. Is this true for both boards?

On the N100 board, can you see if there is presence of a PCIE switch chip, such as an Asmedia 1806? Should show up in the windows device manager. Seeing the lower performance of some of the SATA ports of the N100 motherboard, I suspect they may be on a switch with something else, like maybe the ethernet ports.

Hardware Haven sniffed this out on their recent review of the ZimaCube NAS/server device: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfXieR52j8o

Thank you, you collected all the boards and adapters that interested me in one video and showed everything without further ado! Super!

14:47
Is that USB 3.0 speed for both or each?
We could leverage that speed and put it to hard drives like how chia people do it. 5 port usb 3.0 hub with separate power.
If its for each port, you could get an extra 10 HDD potential.

Greetings from the south of the world

Dude. This video provides such easy to understand data points and relevant info for my use case. Easiest subscribe of my life, thank you for the upload.

Nice comparison!! 👍
What about C-states? Did you test if the boards can enter a deeper c-state using "powertop –auto-tune" under Linux?
I read somewhere that some JMicron SATA chips can prevent the system from entering a low power state, in that case ASMedia would be a preffered option (while disabling the JMicron SATA ports if that's possible)
The 20W consumption tells me that the system was not going deeper than C-2. I would not be surprised if 9W is possible when going to C-8

this is very informative. thanks for the hardware breakdown.

I really wish I saw this video before purchasing the N100 board. I have the same one and have noticed that I’m not getting the performance out of my drives that I should be. Boggles the mind a little that despite being a generation older the N5095 is faster for data

Hi, at 26:23 Plex transcoding it seemed you only have software transcoding working. Both chips should have Quicksync and could transcode multiple streams with very little CPU overhead.

HOW?? I have been obsessively scouring every nook and cranny of YT for DIY NAS content, but only today the algorithm spat out your channel 😤 (subbed, obviously..)

What an amazing video! You covered all the bases!
Awesome work!
Thank you!

Good job

don't limit yourself to itx boards – too many gotchas and less expansion possibilities, less upgradeable, tougher to work on

why they still add 4pin cpu power for 10w cpu.. 🙁