I've been running one of these quad nvme mini-NAS for a while. They're a good compromise if you can live with no ECC. With some DIY shenanigans they can even run fanless
If you're running on consumer nvmes then mirrored is probably a better idea than raidz though. Write amplification can easily shred consumer drives.
Would be nice to see what those little N100 / N150 (or big brother N305 / N350) can do with all that NVMe. Raw throughput is pretty whatever but hypothetically if the CPU isn't too gating, there's some interesting IOps potential.
Really hoping we see 25/40GbaseT start to show up, so the lower market segments like this can do 10Gbit. Hopefully we see some embedded Ryzens (or other more PCIe willing contendors) in this space, at a value oriented price. But I'm not holding my breath.
Intel N150 is the first consumer Atom [1] CPU (in 15 years!) to include TXT/DRTM for measured system launch with owner-managed keys. At every system boot, this can confirm that immutable components (anything from BIOS+config to the kernel to immutable partitions) have the expected binary hash/tree.
TXT/DRTM can enable AEM (Anti Evil Maid) with Qubes, SystemGuard with Windows IoT and hopefully future support from other operating systems. It would be a valuable feature addition to Proxmox, FreeNAS and OPNsense.
Some (many?) N150 devices from Topton (China) ship without Bootguard fused, which _may_ enable coreboot to be ported to those platforms. Hopefully ODROID (Korea) will ship N150 devices. Then we could have fanless N150 devices with coreboot and DRTM for less-insecure [2] routers and storage.
With some currently still a bit of hands-on approach you can set up measured boot that can measure everything from the BIOS (settings) through the kernel, the initrd, and also kernel command line parameters.
I currently do not have time for a clear how to, but some relevant references would be:
Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new design goal? He seems to be describing about a desktop worth of storage (6TB), but always available on the network and less power consuming than a desktop.
This seems useful. But it seems quite different from his previous (80TB) NAS.
What is the idle power draw of an SSD anyway? I guess they usually have a volatile ram cache of some sort built in (is that right?) so it must not be zero…
i want a NAS i can puf 4tb nvme’s in and a 12tb hdd running backup every night. with ability to shove a 50gbps sfp card in it so i can truly have a detached storage solution.
Question regarding these mini pcs: how do you connect them to plain old hard drives ? Is thunderbolt / usb these days reliable enough to run 24/7 without disconnects like an onboard sata?
I’ve been thinking about moving from SSDs for my NAS to solid state. The drive are so loud, all the time, it’s very annoying.
My first experience with these cheap mini PCs was with a Beelink and it was very positive and makes me question the longevity of the hardware. For a NAS, that’s important to me.
Which SSDs do people rely on? Considering PLP (power loss protection), write endurance/DWPD (no QLC), and other bugs that affect ZFS especially? It is hard to find options that do these things well for <$100/TB, with lower-end datacenter options (e.g., Samsung PM9A3) costing maybe double what you see in a lot of builds.
While it may be tempting to go "mini" and NVMe, for a normal use case I think this is hardly cost effective.
You give up so much by using an all in mini device...
No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O.
I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use and has 10 docker containers and 1 windows VM running.
So I would prefer a mATX board with ECC, IPMI 4xNVMe and 2.5GB over these toy boxes...
The selling point for the people in the Plex community is the N100/N150 include Intel’s Quicksync which gives you video hardware transcoding without a dedicated video card. It’ll handle 3 to 4 4K transcoded streams.
There are several sub $150 units that allow you to upgrade the ram, limited to one 32gb stick max. You can use an nvme to sata adapter to add plenty of spinning rust or connect it to a das.
While I wouldn’t throw any vms on these, you have enough headroom for non-ai home sever apps.
Where are you measuring the power consumption? I've recently started measuring the wattage of all the various electronics in my collection, and I haven't found any computer that's not underpowered and draws under 25W from the wall when idle, and that's with no HDDs and minimal RAM.
Turns out I actually have power supplies that alone draw over 30W with zero load; when trying for the lowest idle power consumption I've found that the choice of power supply matters a lot,
I use a cheap power meter for initial testing and a tasmota plug for having a monitoring solution as well as a second measure and a possibility ro remote hard reset in case of a freeze or something.
Turns out that power supply and motherboard are the most important to save power - besides low C-states (powertop). I had best results with Fujitsu D3x17 / d3644 and Gigabyte C246 wu2.
Today these are unicorns not worth hunting for. Like I said: No modern server grade board is that good while being cheap. You could take a look at
Kontron K3851-R ATX
If i remember correctly. Kontron bought Fujitsus Mainboard segment a while ago.
HPE have announced 12th Gen servers for their other lines recently, so maybe the Microservers will get a 12th Gen update this year too. Hopefully with AMD cpus rather than the Intel crap.
Still think its highly underrated to use fs-cache with NASes (usually configured with cachefilesd) for some local dynamically scaling client-side nvme caching.
Helps a ton with response times with any NAS thats primarily spinning rust, especially if dealing with decent amount of small files.
I was recently looking for a mini PC to use as a home server with, extendable storage. After comparing different options (mostly Intel), I went with the Ryzen 7 5825U (Beelink SER5 Pro) instead. It has an M.2 slot for an SSD and I can install a 2.5" HDD too. The only downside is that the HDD is limited by height to 7 mm (basically 2 TB storage limit), but I have a 4 TB disk connected via USB for "cold" storage. After years of using different models with Celeron or Intel N CPUs, Ryzen is a beast (and TDP is only 15W). In my case, AMD now replaced almost all the compute power in my home (with the exception of the smartphone) and I don't see many reasons to go back to Intel.
(I assume M.2 cards are the same, but have not confirmed.)
If this isn’t running 24/7, I’m not sure I would trust it with my most precious data.
Also, these things are just begging for a 10Gbps Ethernet port, since you're going to lose out on a ton of bandwidth over 2.5Gbps... though I suppose you could probably use the USB-C port for that.
I am currently running a 8 4TB NVMe NAS via OpenZFS on TrueNAS Linux. It is good but my box is quite large. I made this via a standard AMD motherboard with both built-in NVMe slots as well as a bunch of expansion PCEi cards. It is very fast.
I was thinking of replacing it with a Asustor FLASHSTOR 12, much more compact form factor and it fits up to 12 NVMes. I will miss TrueNAS though, but it would be so much smaller.
I will wait until the have AMD efficient chip for one very simple reason: AMD graciously allow ECC on some* cpus.
*well, they allowed on all CPUs, but after zen3 they saw how much money intel was making and joined in. now you must get a "PRO" cpu, to get ECC support, even on mobile (but good luck finding ECC sodimm).
Related question: does anyone know of an usb-c powerbank that can be effectively used as UPS? That is to say is able to be charged while maintaining power to load (obviously with rate of charge greater by a few watts than load).
Most models I find reuse the most powerful usb-c port as ... recharging port so unusable as DC UPS.
Context: my home server is my old https://frame.work motherboard running proxmox VE with 64GB RAM and 4 TB NVME, powered by usb-c and drawing ... 2 Watt at idle.
Powerbank is a wrong keyword here, what you want to look for is something like “USB-C power supply with battery”, “USB-C uninterruptible power supply”, etc.
Lots of results on Ali for a query “usb-c ups battery”.
This isn't a power bank, but the EcoFlow River makes for a great mobile battery pack for many uses (like camping, road trips, etc) but also qualifies for a UPS (which means it has to be able to switch over to battery power with certain milliseconds.. that part i'm not sure, but the professional UPSs switch over in < 10ms. I think EcoFlow is < 30ms but I'm not 100% sure).
I've had the River Pro for a few months and it's worked perfectly for that use case. And UnRaid supports it as of a couple months ago.
The battery will eventually degrade, so how about using a portable power station with replaceable 18650 cells? Essentially a powerbank with replaceable 18650 cells. They're a bit bulky but you can replace the degraded cells as needed.
Is it possible (and easy) to make a NAS with harddrives for storage and an SSD for cache? I don't have any data that I use daily or even weekly, so I don't want the drives spinning needlessly 24/7, and I think an SSD cache would stop having to spin them up most of the time.
For instance, most reads from a media NAS will probably be biased towards both newly written files, and sequentially (next episode). This is a use case CPU cache usually deals with transparently when reading from RAM.
NVMe NAS is completely and totally pointless with such crap connectivity.
What in the WORLD is preventing these systems from getting at least 10gbps interfaces? I have been waiting for years and years and years and years and the only thing on the market for small systems with good networking is weird stuff that you have to email Qotom to order direct from China and _ONE_ system from Minisforum.
I'm beginning to think there is some sort of conspiracy to not allow anything smaller than a full size ATX desktop to have anything faster than 2.5gbps NICs. (10gbps nics that plug into NVMe slots are not the solution.)
These are cute, I'd really like to see the "serious" version.
Something like a Ryzen 7745, 128gb ecc ddr5-5200, no less than two 10gbe ports (though unrealistic given the size, if they were sfp+ that'd be incredible), drives split across two different nvme raid controllers. I don't care how expensive or loud it is or how much power it uses, I just want a coffee-cup sized cube that can handle the kind of shit you'd typically bring a rack along for. It's 2025.
I think the N100 and N150 suffer the same weakness for this type of use case in the context of SSD storage 10gb networking. We need a next generation chip that can leverage more PCI lanes with roughly the same power efficiency.
I would remove points for a built-in non-modular standardized power supply. It's not fixable, and it's not comparable to Apple in quality.
52 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 67.6 ms ] threadI know of FriendlyElec CM3588, are there others?
If you're running on consumer nvmes then mirrored is probably a better idea than raidz though. Write amplification can easily shred consumer drives.
Really hoping we see 25/40GbaseT start to show up, so the lower market segments like this can do 10Gbit. Hopefully we see some embedded Ryzens (or other more PCIe willing contendors) in this space, at a value oriented price. But I'm not holding my breath.
TXT/DRTM can enable AEM (Anti Evil Maid) with Qubes, SystemGuard with Windows IoT and hopefully future support from other operating systems. It would be a valuable feature addition to Proxmox, FreeNAS and OPNsense.
Some (many?) N150 devices from Topton (China) ship without Bootguard fused, which _may_ enable coreboot to be ported to those platforms. Hopefully ODROID (Korea) will ship N150 devices. Then we could have fanless N150 devices with coreboot and DRTM for less-insecure [2] routers and storage.
[1] Gracemont (E-core): https://chipsandcheese.com/p/gracemont-revenge-of-the-atom-c... | https://youtu.be/agUwkj1qTCs (Intel Austin architect, 2021)
[2] "Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion", 400 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44427986
I currently do not have time for a clear how to, but some relevant references would be:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
https://www.krose.org/~krose/measured_boot
Integrating this better into Proxmox projects is definitively something I'd like to see sooner or later.
This seems useful. But it seems quite different from his previous (80TB) NAS.
What is the idle power draw of an SSD anyway? I guess they usually have a volatile ram cache of some sort built in (is that right?) so it must not be zero…
One curiosity for @geerlingguy, does the Beelink work over USB-C PD? I doubt it, but would like to know for sure.
My first experience with these cheap mini PCs was with a Beelink and it was very positive and makes me question the longevity of the hardware. For a NAS, that’s important to me.
You give up so much by using an all in mini device...
No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O.
I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use and has 10 docker containers and 1 windows VM running.
So I would prefer a mATX board with ECC, IPMI 4xNVMe and 2.5GB over these toy boxes...
However, Jeff's content is awesome like always
There are several sub $150 units that allow you to upgrade the ram, limited to one 32gb stick max. You can use an nvme to sata adapter to add plenty of spinning rust or connect it to a das.
While I wouldn’t throw any vms on these, you have enough headroom for non-ai home sever apps.
Turns out I actually have power supplies that alone draw over 30W with zero load; when trying for the lowest idle power consumption I've found that the choice of power supply matters a lot,
Turns out that power supply and motherboard are the most important to save power - besides low C-states (powertop). I had best results with Fujitsu D3x17 / d3644 and Gigabyte C246 wu2.
Today these are unicorns not worth hunting for. Like I said: No modern server grade board is that good while being cheap. You could take a look at
If i remember correctly. Kontron bought Fujitsus Mainboard segment a while ago.https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/compute/tower-servers/proliant-mic...
Pity they're Intel cpu's though. :(
HPE have announced 12th Gen servers for their other lines recently, so maybe the Microservers will get a 12th Gen update this year too. Hopefully with AMD cpus rather than the Intel crap.
Helps a ton with response times with any NAS thats primarily spinning rust, especially if dealing with decent amount of small files.
(I assume M.2 cards are the same, but have not confirmed.)
If this isn’t running 24/7, I’m not sure I would trust it with my most precious data.
Also, these things are just begging for a 10Gbps Ethernet port, since you're going to lose out on a ton of bandwidth over 2.5Gbps... though I suppose you could probably use the USB-C port for that.
I was thinking of replacing it with a Asustor FLASHSTOR 12, much more compact form factor and it fits up to 12 NVMes. I will miss TrueNAS though, but it would be so much smaller.
*well, they allowed on all CPUs, but after zen3 they saw how much money intel was making and joined in. now you must get a "PRO" cpu, to get ECC support, even on mobile (but good luck finding ECC sodimm).
Most models I find reuse the most powerful usb-c port as ... recharging port so unusable as DC UPS.
Context: my home server is my old https://frame.work motherboard running proxmox VE with 64GB RAM and 4 TB NVME, powered by usb-c and drawing ... 2 Watt at idle.
Lots of results on Ali for a query “usb-c ups battery”.
I've had the River Pro for a few months and it's worked perfectly for that use case. And UnRaid supports it as of a couple months ago.
Check some models from cuktech and anker
For instance, most reads from a media NAS will probably be biased towards both newly written files, and sequentially (next episode). This is a use case CPU cache usually deals with transparently when reading from RAM.
What in the WORLD is preventing these systems from getting at least 10gbps interfaces? I have been waiting for years and years and years and years and the only thing on the market for small systems with good networking is weird stuff that you have to email Qotom to order direct from China and _ONE_ system from Minisforum.
I'm beginning to think there is some sort of conspiracy to not allow anything smaller than a full size ATX desktop to have anything faster than 2.5gbps NICs. (10gbps nics that plug into NVMe slots are not the solution.)
Something like a Ryzen 7745, 128gb ecc ddr5-5200, no less than two 10gbe ports (though unrealistic given the size, if they were sfp+ that'd be incredible), drives split across two different nvme raid controllers. I don't care how expensive or loud it is or how much power it uses, I just want a coffee-cup sized cube that can handle the kind of shit you'd typically bring a rack along for. It's 2025.
I would remove points for a built-in non-modular standardized power supply. It's not fixable, and it's not comparable to Apple in quality.