They were wise to give it to you to review. You looked at all the areas I wanted to have covered. A few tweaks would be a good idea at that RRP. Thanks for including the energy prices for those of us who pay through the nose.

Great video! Your assessment at the end comparing this set-up to a RAID1 HDD set up, looking at cost and performance is exactly the kind of decision most people are going to be making.

Excellent video, as always. Comprehensive and very helpful .

Amazing video

Really good review, once again. I could live with 2.5gig nic with ease, but I'd really like to see conventional user changeable memory on this and especially I'd like to see 2.5" inch sata drive slot in these kind of devices that I'd likely do backups to. Not bad unit at all, but for that pricing I'd like to see those options. After all one could build quite small customized device for the pricing of this one, though obviously the small foot print is obviously the "thing" in devices like this.

I paid about the same recently for an all-flash Ugreen DXP480T Plus (yes, it was a Kickstarter deal). The Ugreen NAS has 10G Ethernet onboard and a Core i5 equivalent processor and two USB4/Thunderbolt 4 ports. 2.5G connectivity is woefully inadequate for a device with four M.2 SSDs inside. The Aiffro is clearly based off a very common N100 design with a tweak for the four SSD sticks.

@ElectronicsWizardry

8 күн бұрын

Yea that uGreen NAS has better specs with the i5, thunderbolt and 10GBe. Its hard to compare them directly price wise currently as the Ugreen NAS is a crowd funded project currently and not out for general availability from what I see.

With that price point, wouldnt an asustor as502t be a much better value with the 4 nvme as well as 2 3.5 hdd and 2x2.5gbe? Or would the efficency of an n100 over an n5105 outweight the inital cost?

This mini nas looks quicker than the one i planned as they using 2 lanes per nvme slot I ordered a cwwk p5 n305 with nvme carrier board and it still in shipping atm That thing let me use a large nvme heataink because it got no case Nvme should not hot with that limited pcie lanes and buswidth but lower temp should help those caps and ressistor on pcb live longer N100 model is cheaper but i go n305 just in case i might slap some docker /vm on it

Do you think those two USB-C ports could be used for networking? Strap three of these units together to make a ceph cluster and run the replication over the USB-C?

@ElectronicsWizardry

8 күн бұрын

I don't have 2 of these so can't test, but to my knowledge the computer to computer networking needs to use Thunderbolt, not standard USB 3(but USB 4 should support this as its basically thunderbolt). I think a C to C connection between multiple of these systems won't connect at all. USB is also really complex with all the variants and capabilities that all use the same port with poor labeling.

these little mini pc are getting there - not perfect or even very performant but may well be 'good enough' for may use case like in a small office or whatever

Idk, not really in the market for one, but I would expect a 10g port for that price, or at least a 2x2.5g for redundency.

It is a shame that the n100 has so few PCI lanes.

WD keep coming up on list of trouble m.2 ssd. 🤔

Not a good review as it seems to be rushed, and I didn't even see pricing details of the base unit... preferably at the beginning of the infomercial. This channel is really good when it describes, in detail, aspects of hypervisors, not commodity hardware. Perhaps a TWENTY part series of different feature capabilities of Proxmox, the authors favorite, so viewers can refer back to how to's when they want to implement that capability. No more hardware reviews please. KZread is full of them.

@mrkdosmil2879

7 күн бұрын

People gotta eat though

@allanzfs

6 күн бұрын

If he creates a 20 or 30 part series about Proxmox and its special features people will come back over and over again to watch the section on what they're interested in doing. It's a real money maker versus just having generic infomercials.

2 lanes per NMVE slot, and only 1 to the NIC.... there seems to be a few of these all NVME NAS units hitting the market at the moment, and all of them somehow seem to assign the PCIe lanes in weird ways. As for the channel, do what makes you happy. But please do include some hardware ones now and then, you are one of few who bothers to dive into the actual low down of the hardware. Even if it just means you include a few comments as to why you are using a particular piece of hardware for whatever project you are doing.

@ElectronicsWizardry

9 күн бұрын

Glad you like my reviews. I think for the PCIe lane layout is often a limitation of the processors used. I don't know of a ultra low power CPU that has all the PCIe lanes needed for a system like this to use the full speed of 4+ drives. Something like a desktop ryzen chip could be used, but those use much more power at idle and need a chipset uses additional power and board space. A PCIe switch could be used, but those are pricey and power hungry typically. I think the low power CPU + limited lanes for drives can make sense where noise and power are main factors, but there is performance left on the table that can't be used on the SSDs.

@Andy-fd5fg

8 күн бұрын

@@ElectronicsWizardry I'm not saying they need a different processor... they just need to use the lanes better...... One lane of PCIe 3.0 is 8Gbits 10 Gigabit Ethernet is 10Gbits So an NVME connected with 1 lane could (with the obvious exceptions) easily saturate a 10G NIC, with room to spare. Now when you take 4 NVME devices, stripe them with some flavour of RAID, then you are defiantly going to saturate that 10GNIC. An Intel n110 has 9 PCIe lanes...... They could easily dedicate 2 lanes to a NIC, and have enough lanes for 6 NVME..... that would even leave a lane free for a 7th NVME to use as a boot device. If they use the right NIC chip, that supports 1G, 2.5G and 5G, as well as 10G, that leaves it to the customer to decide what switch they connect to.... but with the option of expanding too. These are just my ponderings..... makes me curious as to what some of these system designers are thinking.

@ElectronicsWizardry

8 күн бұрын

Thanks for clarifing. I agree it makes more sense to connect the SSDs at a single link width, and more bandwidth for the NIC. The lower single SSDs speeds probably won't matter as RAID would be used. There might be some speed limits if something like unRAID is used though.

Shame that NVME SSD Nas does not have 10G LAN.

@ElectronicsWizardry

9 күн бұрын

Yea I think that would have helped take advantage of the SSDs much more than 2.5Gbit can. I know there are power, space and thermal concerns with adding a 10G nic, but It would have been interesting to see.

Unpopular opinion perhaps, but unless this product would’ve come with a 10 GbE interface there’s no reason at all to use NVMe’s. They’re just PCIe intensive and power hungry compared to SATA SSDs. Yes, 2.5” SATA SSDs would’ve been a bigger footprint but the output through the 2.5 GbE would’ve been the same and the overall power would’ve been less.

@fwiler

8 күн бұрын

There is a reason. m.2 is now cheaper than sata ssd's and takes up a lot less space because of sata ssd needing a separate power and data connection. And no, at gen 3 x2 these are very low power as he shows. I have one with 5 nvme's and idles at 13w and goes up to 28w max in burst.

Overpriced. It should be 250 USD.

@ElectronicsWizardry

9 күн бұрын

There is defiantly a premium on this compared to other N100 MiniPCs that I don't think is explained by any of the parts inside. I can't find a spec for spec similar system for a lower price, but I think this system would be more competitive at a lower price.

@bluesquadron593

9 күн бұрын

@@ElectronicsWizardry 100%

@jeffnew1213

8 күн бұрын

Agreed. For it's price, it should have a 10G NIC or, at least, two Intel 2.5G NICs.

@TerenceKearns

8 күн бұрын

@@ElectronicsWizardry the FriendlyElec has a quad M.2 solution is very similar (3.0x1) although it's only 1gb ethernet and it's an arm chip - the respectale RK3588. LTT did a review/build for a NAS. I'm sure the performance would be comparabl. The board and the compute module is $145 with no case or psu. 8GB ram qwith 64GB eMMC. Overall, a slghtly slower solution for a tiny fraction of the price. Won't be able to run truenas but LTT found an arm solution

@TerenceKearns

8 күн бұрын

I agree. It's way overpriced. Now you still gotta buy your SSDs. You'd be better off shopping for some cheap 2nd hand Xeon based systems which are old but perform way better for way less.