Man, I was looking for the reviews of these units. Right in time!

@ServeTheHomeVideo

9 ай бұрын

Thanks! We are a bit slower on production than normal right now due to moving the studio.

Ooh 10 GbE! You gotta stop showing off these things, I'm going to soon have a pile of them almost as large as my pile of SBCs!

@annebokma4637

9 ай бұрын

There are worse piles to have

@AXELTEM7

8 ай бұрын

​@@annebokma4637😅

@joegopher9280

7 ай бұрын

You can't catch chinese building new things 😂

@hyperprotagonist

6 ай бұрын

@@annebokma4637😂😂😂

That's a lot of ports, both for a NAS and firewall, these are a lot of value. Also shoutout to Asmedia for taking up the slack on PLX chips

I love your enthusiasm. Keep going!

Just ordered 3 on the same chassis with i5-1240p for Proxmox cluster, thanks for the video!

Thanks a ton for the very quick review between this and the n305. I'll wait for that with an 8 port. They already got the six port out.

Awesome Review. Keep it up. As usual, I enjoy watch it.

@ServeTheHomeVideo

9 ай бұрын

Thanks! Have a great day!

I couldn't help but also notice the front panel connector block on the corner of the board. That would make this board super easy to drop into another case with better airflow and a little bit more robust cooling solution for that CPU rather than that semi-passive setup they're running. That would also give options to populate those SATA ports and make this a NAS. beast plus network and vm host. Although power consumption would go up, obviously because you'd probably want to power SATA drives separately from that 12v power brick.

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

At that point why bother? You could build something similar from other parts if you need to. Plus, the cooling is perfectly adequate. The CPUs are intended to be used in tablets. The only reason they even have a fan is because it is cheap and it let's them boost longer. Finally, you could easily de-shell modern SATA SSDs and jam 6x in there. These things are 80% case now. Seriously, The board of the A-Data 1TB SSDs I have on-hand are smaller than a 2280 drive. There is plenty of room in there for 6 or more. The cables themselves will take up more room.

@Trains-With-Shane

9 ай бұрын

@@Prophes0rthe why bother would be to use 3.5" drives for higher capacity and an interesting project rather than de-shelled SATA SSD's. Although now that you've mentioned it i'd like to see you shuck 6x of those SSD's and jam them, and their cables, inside this thing and get it to close and function for an extended period of time. Price wise it'd be about a wash rather than just building something with an ATX board. I just put together a system with a 12 core xeon, 128gb, 2x 2.5gbe, 2tb NVME, 5x SATA 10tb spinners with a 2tb sata SSD as a cache drive in a Fractal Node 304 and although my setup is much more powerful it'l consume far more power both at idle and load, and doesn't have as much networking. So It would be neat, for my case, to swap out for one of boards from the systems here, to see if i'd notice the lack of horsepower while saving probably over 200w continuous.

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

​@@Trains-With-Shane What is your use-case? If you don't intend to do PCIe pass-through, You could take a look at one of those Erying franken-boards. They directly solder an 11th Gen BGA laptop CPU to a m-ATX motherboard. Laptop silicon is binned a lot like server silicon. Maximum performance per watt. You would be limited to 64GiB of non-ECC memory though. Which is actually fine for a NAS with a dozen drives or so. If you want to run a heavier virtualization setup it could get tighter, but you could make it work. I have one of the i9 engineering sample boards ($180). Default 45W TDP. If I run it as a power-sipping setup, it still clocks all 16 threads to 3.2Ghz and uses 14-60W. Or, if you want to go the other way they are unlocked, so you can crank them up to 120W. You just need to keep it cool. These things check pretty much every box other than Passthrough and bifurcation. And they are essentially e-waste already, so the more people who use them, the less we dump into a landfill. A bunch of popular tech channels have done videos on them. CraftComputing Level1Techs Even LTT

@Trains-With-Shane

9 ай бұрын

@@Prophes0r I had actually looked into those boards but when I was putting parts together they were all out of stock. I had been very interested when I saw Craft Computing's video on them a few months back. This build that I put together is basically a one size fits all my needs home lab and production machine. It's going to be a combination NAS + VM host that will not only run my "production" services which I am currently running on a 2nd generation i7 laptop, lol. but for my VM labs as well. I was using a beautiful old Dell PowerEdge R710 that is a re-flashed Google appliance with 2x hex core xeons and 288gb but it just sucks down the power and is very good at turning that electricity into heat. Which isn't a problem in the winter but summers in Texas are a big enough stress on the central AC and elect5ricity bills as it is so I wanted to move over to something a little bit more efficient. So I ended up with this Jingyue or whatever it is 2011-v3 motherboard and a low-ish TDP xeon which still isn't anywhere near as low as those laptop cpu boards. But like i said I wasn't able to find any of those when I was gathering parts. If I revisit this build again, which is likely, I plan on trying to source one of those boards again. But this little ITX board is pretty good with its dual 2.5gbt, 6x sata ports, 1xNVME, etc. I have done the drive PCIe passthrough in the Dell server for a TrueNAS Scale VM but I found that I prefer to just scrap the VM and use the drives directly in Proxmox using Cockpit in an LXC continuer to manage the users and shares since i'm not doing anything fancy with the shares as everything more advanced like de-duplication, etc. is handled on yet another piece of hardware which is a Dell Poweredge R510 with 12x4tb (currently) drives in a RAID6 using, don't laugh, windows server 2016 and VM's that were being hosted in Hyper-V. It was my main rig for years but not I just power it on when I want to run a manual backup. Like the R710 it's great at making heat.

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

​@@Trains-With-ShaneThere's no shame in using what you have and what you know. We do this to learn. My first "NAS" was a gaming machine running Windows XP and combining the drives together with software called DrivePool by StableBit. This was before Windows even had proper Storage Spaces, so it was the only reasonable way to combine all my old 500GB and 1TB drives into a single pool. I'm using 24x 4TB drives in TrueNAS right now, and I just got my 10TB drives in (2 days ago) to work on my phase-2 NAS. I'm also going to take advantage of the SUPER cheap flash prices, with a 4x drive pool of 1TB Samsung drives for my VMs. But I'm ALSO going to be returning to Windows Server to make another NAS using Storage Spaces. Why? Because I've never used it, and I want the experience. I have a bunch of 2TB and 3TB drives that are too old to sell, but still pass a long S.M.A.R.T. check. I'll be using it as a (second) backup server, probably at my brother's house. I'm kind-of on both ends of the scale with machines right now. My primary VM host is going from a 12-core 2011v3 Xeon w/ 128GB of RAM to a 64-core EPYC w/ 256GB of RAM. Purely because I ran out of PCIe lanes on the Xeon. But everything else is getting trimmed down to MUCH lower power gear.

This is cool! Would be Cool to see a small box like this with 2xSFP+ and 2x 2.5GBe, with like 4 or 6 M.2 slots so we can make our own fast NAS!

@Renderman-Official

9 ай бұрын

Oh and like Patrick mentioned with a N100/200/305, more power efficient and appropriate for this application.

Hey Patrick, it would be great to see iperf stress testing for machines that are primary targeted as a networking device. You mentioned that you could do 10Gb NAT but didn't actually show any numbers.

@wcr6121

9 ай бұрын

True it's easy enough iperf3 -s & iperf3 -c serveraddress

yes yes, been waiting for this video, been eying these for a couple months now! *hits play

Well done, nice video,thanks for sharing it with us :)

Nice little machine for pfsense! Love the two 10 gig SFP+ slots. If I get one I'd redo the thermal paste as it looks like a mess. 😁

I'm sorry that would be me !! LOL. Good video Patrick !

The dream would be one with a N100 or N305 with a x540 or newer 10Gb card. Airflow isn't too bad with a CPU that uses 15w or less.

@pauljones9150

9 ай бұрын

I agree a newer CPU would make them amazing

@kevincheng4739

9 ай бұрын

N100 dual 2.5G Ethernet ports and dual 10 Gigabit optical ports are expected to be launched in November, from CWWK employees@@pauljones9150

@alexatkin

9 ай бұрын

Definitely, given the N5105 already can do 2.5Gbit and possibly more, with the N100 being about 23% faster its rather held back by 2.5Gbit. Though useful for OpenVPN as I've personally found Wireguard doesn't live up to its "more reliable on bad connections" and had to use OpenVPN instead for reliability.

@etimacias

9 ай бұрын

X540 is copper only and sucks quite a lot of power. And it's pcie 2.0 x8 card. That would consume all of the PCIe lanes of N305 leaving just one spare. For that to make sense you'd need X550 or X710. But an option with Connect-X3 would be much more interesting!

@ChrisCarini

8 ай бұрын

@@kevincheng4739 how can someone be notified when such a device is released?

Im curious about what kind of throughput these can hit while also doing stuff like IPS. Wonder how that i7 can handle that amount of packet inspection

That SFP+ unit is very cool. Would be awesome if someone could reduce cost and size a bit by just producing a unit with 1-2 2.5Gb Ethernet and another 2 SFP+ ports. I would imagine that most people using a unit like this would have managed switches and VLAN's and don't really need all the physical connections on their router.

@joansparky4439

9 ай бұрын

I thought there was one with 3x 2.5GbE and 2x SFP+ ? Just not with an i5/i7 in it though..

@HunterEvans95

9 ай бұрын

@@joansparky4439 I thought it was just 4x 2.5Gb and 2x SFP+

@YKSGuy

9 ай бұрын

@@joansparky4439 The R86S they have reviewed it previously, was surprised it did not show up as a comparison in this video.. There are also several new variations of the r86s out now with newer CPUs and networking chipsets.

@kevincheng4739

9 ай бұрын

The N100/N305 dual 2.5G Ethernet port and dual 10 Gigabit optical port are expected to be launched in November (response from CWWK employees)

@CryptolockerMD

3 ай бұрын

Already forgot what specs were on NIc stuff, but first thing that comes to mind is isolating the ethernet ports per VM/container you run on it.

It would be helpful to know how hot the cpu temp is running. It’s particularly so since you highlighted the heat sink design.

U can suggest that for a virtualized proxmox with pfsense and a open nas? I just need a router + firewall and a nas with 48tb (5 x 12 tb hd in zfs + raidz )

How is the thermal load & management with loaded 10GbE & 2GbE ports active? Any suggestions on how to mitigate the top end thermal load?

Hi When making a box like this to use for virtualization. Can you get by with a cheap(ish), and small(ish) drive for the boot drive, and then have something big and fast for the virtual machines?

The 10Gb version would make an awsome CEPH device!

@11:33 - diff software vs OS. - do you have a comparison of same software version on same OS version, with the same set of tests?

Would have been good to see some raw network throughput numbers on these network devices. It would also be good to see some performance analysis of the device configured as a firewall.

@LordSaliss

5 ай бұрын

Not just some raw iperf3 test results, but Id really love to see STH start showing some tests on these reviews of firewall type units for performance with things like Suricada or other layer 7 type inspection filtering throughput. In todays day and age all firewalls should really be running IPS type firewall filtering so that level of performance needs to be taken into account.

What about those Intel i226 network chipset problems re firmware/hardware versions and them not running reliably (according to some worse than the predecessor i225)? Thanks

The model with SFP+ has been tested with 10GbaseT module ? Does it support it or only fiber optic sfp+?

Oooooh! That's the board I have been looking for!

so nice, i have buying it, and for the cooling i have buy 2x50mm fans and a bag of 20x 4mm holes on AL-Exp, so nice this AL-Exp..you have so much stuff :) :)

Hi Patrick. I'd be interested in seeing a review Mikrotik CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe board. Specifically about using the switching acceleration hardware on the board to make a high-performance firewall. One question I had about it was that, if you use more than one, can they be integrated into a single fabric, etc?

The orientation of the NICs on the 8-port model means that the RJ45 connector clips will be difficult to unplug when fully populated

@ServeTheHomeVideo

9 ай бұрын

Good catch

@andrewmorton9683

9 ай бұрын

And it's difficult to see the status LEDs.

@TradieTrev

9 ай бұрын

I was going to buy one of these until you told me that :P

@Treeck57

6 ай бұрын

Use a small flat screwdriver to push down the rj45 clip gently and then pull out. That’s what I did to mine once. But I know you guys want to unplug in easy way…but that’s just me. Lol

@maximusboscus

20 күн бұрын

Tell that to Siemens with their Scalance X200 series switches

Would have been great to actually test/verify that the onboard SATA ports and Molex power connectors are actually functional.

@robertohernandez1642

9 ай бұрын

idk extremely impractical, would have to remount to another case to use. at that point might as well build your own.

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

@@robertohernandez1642I'd bet you could fit some SATA SSDs in there with no problem if you took them out of their cases. The board on a modern SSD is usually only 1/8 or 1/10 of the size of the big plastic case. the SATA cable will take up more space. And these look like they have quite a bit of empty space in them.

@BoraHorzaGobuchul

9 ай бұрын

​@@Prophes0rcooling might be an issue though

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

@@BoraHorzaGobuchulMaybe. Remember that those SATA drives usually run inside a sealed plastic box. They don't normally have any way to get heat out other than slowly conducting through 1mm of ABS. The cheap ones that I'm comfortable shucking and taping to the inside of a case also usually don't have DRAM either, so they don't get very hot even at full load.

@mrdali67

9 ай бұрын

@@Prophes0r The speed of the Sata interface is already so low so no modern SSD's will be any near the performance where heat becomes an issue. It's another thing with a m.2 gen 4 or 5 SSD that runs at 20+ times the speed of the sata interface. Even the sata interfacei dont fill a 10'th of the plastic enclosure it's impractical to split it apart to fit in the case and you will have no waranty on the 6 drives you opened up to fit them in. But sure it's an interesting thaught to what you could do with it.

So is there any realistic way to either mod this thing to expose the sata ports to use an external drive caddy for them? Or another type of case that this board can be transferred to? Or perhaps this board is available off the shelf entirely? My problem with stuff like this is that it's cool to see but I don't know how to turn it into usable projects outside of it's intended use case.

@ServeTheHomeVideo

9 ай бұрын

There is a cable punch out on the bottom of the case that you could remove to expose the SATA ports, but then you need to do something with them

Now we need N305 with 10Gb/s ports (Topton please do it I'm going to buy one)

@robsdesk

9 ай бұрын

R86S, this seems to be the pick of the bunch for this type of workload

I need to make a rack ear kit for theseand a low profile right angle power adapter dang it for integrating the power into the motherboard and putting it on the network side If i really want to move power to the back i can probably just solder my own leads and mount one to the back/USB side.

How unique is the fan? If it were to fail, could i replace it in 4 years?

Is this powerful enough to get 10Gbps WAN LAN using default pfsense configuration? I am considering this against MS-01 for sole pfsense purpose.

Looks like I am one of those who ask to review them. Thanks! Very unusual hardware...

Can they resolve double nat issues and split networking to DMZ say a Google nest system from the internal business systems

Ordered one just shortly after this vid. Just got the notice the my order/shipping was cancelled. Actually showed that it had shipped for almost a week. Guess I have to wait until they get more stock made.

@ServeTheHomeVideo

8 ай бұрын

:-(

Now all we need is a deeper chassis for these with a 6 bay hot swap cage to utilize with those SATA ports...

See 10G, click thumbnail; see 10G Firewall, insta-thumbs up

@JeffMcJunkin

9 ай бұрын

You've described my process as well 😂

how does something that can do 100Gbit\s (Routing, Firewall, Switching) looks like? Maybe to early since 10Gbit\s just get's available for End Users but still I would like to know about what's around the next corner... Also do you think 40GBase-T will be a thing with wifi 7 "802.11be" or will we need 2x10Gbit\s POE for APs? Thx Jens

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

100Gbit routing? You need dedicated silicon for that. You aren't doing that on a CPU. The interesting/useful things about 802.11ax isn't the speed, it's the ability to use less transmit power with interesting shaping, so we don't fill the air with too much radio-noise. 99% of ax networks don't actually use the maximum speed anyway. 802.11be might TECHNICALLY have a faster theoretical connection speed, but it will be used even less. If you need more than 1Gbit, use a wire. (You should ALWAYS be using a wire anyway, unless you absolutely HAVE to use a wireless connection.)

Is the main pcb available on its own somewhere? No case, no pciE right angle card, no extra network ports. Maybe not even a powder supply.

@ServeTheHomeVideo

9 ай бұрын

The motherboard is too proprietary. It needs a certain style of case.

if you wanted to turn that into a really awesome small nas box with good networking, you could 3d print yourself a mini 6-bay desktop jbod case and either notch out out holes for the sata and power cables on one of the i/o panels or print your own i/o panel or just leave one of the i/o panels off of it... I think I could do that in a nice elegant design.

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

1. Don't 3d print boxes... 2. You can easily get SATA SSDs in there if you remove their cases. The board inside is TINY on modern drives.

@MikrySoft

9 ай бұрын

Looking at the Aliexpress listing, the case has a partially cut hole above the SATA ports, it might be big enough for data cables, not sure about power

@joshhardin666

9 ай бұрын

@@Prophes0r what's wrong with 3d printing boxes? I've 3d printed all manner of computer cases for sbc's and small desktops - so long as it's done in a material with reasonably high thermal deflection (like ABS) it's just fine.

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

@@joshhardin666Boxes are cheaply and easily available in any size you want. It is a HUGE waste of time, power, and plastic to print boxes, flat plates, and other readily available shapes. At my hackerspace we LITERALLY revoke your printer privileges for doing that shit. 3d printing is for art, prototyping, and complex shapes that cannot be made any other way. And if you somehow can't find a project box of the right size? You can easily obtain flat sheets of ABS in any color/thickness you want. Bend it in a break or by hand and use solvent glue to fuse it together. Boom, custom box.

The Enthusiasm is soo inspiring .

How many PCIe Lanes do these things have? and would it be sufficient enough to handle io bandwidth requirement of the 2x10Gb model? Also, 'Replacement AC Adapter' 😄😄

I really understand the desire for so many network ports. We do know about VLANs right?

Big question, Is this better than my original D1540?

I would love to know if the UEFI Firmware is accessible via the serial port.

This gives me ideas

I take apart one of those (I buy back an extra one ordered at work that finally we don't use) and I build a NAS/home server for home usage with 6 Sata SSD in ZFS Z2 configuration. I put it on an old/spare 1U rack I had. Performances are more than decent for a Home NAS. OS: Truenas scale, I put some docker on it to manage the home iot, the security cameras, the media library and the Voip (asterisk), no need for VMs. Boot on a USB adapter with a 2242 128 GB ssd, the internal SSD is configured for L2ARC ( just for fun no really need this for performance), Is an outstanding for such a cheap box,. But now you can find MBs with similar specs and less powerful CPU (N100) under 200$.

Great video and hope you do a video with Promox VE, those "Fanless 2.5GbE Switches with 10GbE", and add six sata drives for fun.

Great vids for a dummie like me. Could this would with 4 USB webcams that can record simutanious directly on the NVMe in the unit?

@ServeTheHomeVideo

9 ай бұрын

Probably more expensive than you need for something like that, but it would work

There's a cutout in the bottom-plate of the case. Perhaps you can run 6 sata-cables together with power from the molex connectors through this opening an in another case for the drives.

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

I was thinking the same thing. It looks like it might be in the correct place too.

@marcogenovesi8570

9 ай бұрын

Patrick has said to others that it's meant for exposing the Sata ports

Someone please tell me what that program shown at 14:58 is. I've been looking around for over an hour and I can't figure it out...

@johncalla2151

9 ай бұрын

I can't say for sure (never used it), but it looks like s-tui: Stress-Terminal UI.

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

@@johncalla2151 TYVM this was driving me nuts.

what's the switching capacity?

Topton link only shows a i3-8145U version. Would be great if these were upgraded to 12th gen for lower power.

how do you set up as a wifi/firewall?

With this design they could easily have a 5x2.5Gbit switch on that card that feeds back to the system over a single 2.5Gbit NIC. Or go all out and have one with 10Gbit uplink. Always puzzled me why we haven't gone down that route to make them more comparable to how consumer routers work, I'm guessing pfSense possibly is lacking switch support?

About time they have sfp on firewall device... gonna have to upgrade my pfsense to 10gbps

Very interested in making a router/NAS with one of these. Do you know if it's possible to actually use the 6 SATA ports? (the extension board doesn't block them?) And are they working? (not disabled on the BIOS or something?) The idea would be to design and custom 3D print the bottom part of the enclosure with a way to access the SATA ports for an external drive enclosure and add a small fan...

@inhaspie

9 ай бұрын

At 4:05 you can see they aren't blocked by the extension board if you look closely. Additionally, I think you would be better off cutting a hole in the enclosure rather than replacing it with a 3d printed part so you don't lose the heatsink capacity of the metal enclosure. It's possible the ports are disabled in bios but it should be trivial to re-enable them.

@BeariceRen

9 ай бұрын

I had a sfp+ one as my home router for few weeks, and I can see these sata ports in BIOS and kernel messages, I assume they are working but I never tested.

@shellydamaggot

9 ай бұрын

@@BeariceRen Thanks for the info! That's great news!

thank you for your review, is the Pentium gold 8505 sufficient for home firewall with NAS connected to the 10gbe port? i really need help to make a decision, the i5 is 200$ more and idk if it's worth it for just a firewall.

@ServeTheHomeVideo

6 ай бұрын

If you are going to have a lot of firewall rules, then 10GbE might be too much for the CPU. NAT and low firewall rules it will be OK. Personally, would aim for a bit more headroom for a heavy use 10GbE firewall if you want 10Gbps wire speed. If you really only need 2-5Gbps or something like that, this will be fine but I usually over provision so I can grow and not rip out hardware

@MAD20248

6 ай бұрын

@@ServeTheHomeVideo thank you. i just ordered the i5 from AliExpress, they have promotions going on these days so i got 72$ off my order, total with taxes was 515.00 , not too bad, i didn't see an i7 option on AliExpress, i hope the i5 will handle my nas and any other firewall rules and will be Long term investment for my home lab.

I am surprised you didn't pull out the R86S system for size comparison as it is one of the other few SFP+ units you have reviewed.

I wish the creators of these would put in a proper low profile fan or allow us to put in a low profile noctua fan.

@ServeTheHomeVideo

9 ай бұрын

I agree, it needs an internal 40mm mount and vents for a Noctua

@poorlybuffalo555

9 ай бұрын

@@ServeTheHomeVideo Or rack mount them on a tray /keystone patchbay and put the fans on the rack?

@egorchel1292

9 ай бұрын

Yeah, I got one and it gets so hot, it's is too much to touch. Ended up buying aluminum radiator that I stuck on top and sides with thermal tape. Much more manageable now.

The most likely reason for the reseting in Geekbench is that the cpu or ram parameters on the bios are not set optimally

Hmm. That power test doesn't show powering up and connecting the network interfaces.

A real console port! I think I'm in love.

How much Ram is supported? Can you get these Bare Bones?

2 rows of tightly packed ethernet sockets with the tabs facing each other. great idea.

Perfection would be 4x10gbe copper + 2x10gbe sfp+ + 4x nvme slors + some sort of sata or sas or hba port so i can have some kind of spinning disk chassis attached for massif storage that's not insansly slow. Ive been super tempted to replace my ancient server with one of these but I don't want to give up nas functionality.. ipmi is also nice.. but man I would love to replace a 2u screaming power hungry server in my house with a silent tiny box that uses under 20w

Would be great if you tested serial port connectivity on those fanless routers! Having some sort of OOB management is a huge selling point to me, and you can never take it for granted with those devices: some forgo console ports altogether, and for those that do have them, it is incredibly hard to find any documentation or real world experiences on stuff like the pinout for RJ45 console ports, or whether the BIOS actually supports console redirection.

@marcogenovesi8570

9 ай бұрын

They usually follow Cisco pinout in my experience

@user-lg4le8xr4s

6 ай бұрын

In my experience if the console port isn't explicitly described then it's usually standard Cisco type

Didn't these Intel CPUs get announced slew of new security vulnerabilites? As to say now, where is the and version!?

The sfp+ one I bet it is faster than netgate 6100 or the 8200 which is way more expansive. I already have 3gb internet’s. I am looking for a pfSence firewall box that can easily support 3 to 10 gig internet.

@MikeKirkReloaded

8 ай бұрын

3G! Are you a Bell Fibe customer? ;)

Did anybody replace ccr1072 with CCR2216-1G-12XS-2XQ and what is experience with this new mikrotik device ? To buy now which one do you recommend, CCR1072 or CCR2216, it is to do NAT

now that i like. But I would love to see something like that, that would mount in a rack. I know so many are going with 2.5g But I went strait 10g. Be nice to see one that can do any were from 1gig to 10 gig. like the 4 2.5's those could be 1 to 10 gig, and the SPF could be 10gig. been looking for a 1u Case that has the rear IO in the Front with power supply still in the back. I have found some, but the case's are all to short to fit X10SLH-N6-ST031 mother board.

The 10gbe ports are a welcome addon

I have a few i7 2600 systems using 30w, i want to lower power usage but the gains for these little systems are so small.

the i7-nnnnnU processors for several gens needed to have better cooling to get a speed boost over the i5 due to thermal throttling

NOoooooooooooooooo! I just got my N305 behaving exactly like I wanted it. I can't be lured away with something new.

@ServeTheHomeVideo

9 ай бұрын

The N305 is VERY good. I would not ditch that for this

Hey Patrick, I’m loving all the firewall reviews. I’m looking at upgrading my home network imminently using one of them. Slight rub - the only route that makes sense with the cabling involves putting either the router or a switch in the attic… which has no power. Do you have any recommendations for either a firewall or switch that can be powered by PoE? Is it worth doing that or should I just bite the bullet and get an electrician to run power up in the roof?

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

It would be cheaper and easier to just run your networking further and sit the router by another one of the computers. Why would you NEED to put it in the attic? (I'm actually interested. You obviously thought about it, but you didn't say why.)

@marcogenovesi8570

9 ай бұрын

I'd say switches because it's easy to get PoE-powered switches. Mikrotik's switches for example and one of their PoE injectors

@TAP7a

9 ай бұрын

@@Prophes0rso there’s 4 rooms of relevance: downstairs living room, upstairs bedroom, upstairs office, attic Existing runs (non modifiable, or at least, I’m unwilling to modify): 2x living room:attic, 1x living room:bedroom, 1x attic:office. Important to note the runs to the attic are all terminated separately At the moment, my ISP router/WAP is in the living room, with the TV in the bedroom using that one run directly. I’ve got a switch plugged in upstairs, to connect the office and the remaining living room run to the main uplink, but without power that doesn’t work I had initially planned to replace the ISP device by hooking the modem directly up to an attic run and putting the firewall up there, which would then distribute to the office and back downstairs. The office and living room runs would each terminate in their own 5-port switch to connect media devices in the living room and computers+laptop docks+printer in the office, leaving firewall ports open for a WAP and possibly one remaining for an out-of-the-way NAS. I knew that reverse-PoE switches kinda existed, so my first thought to mitigate the powerless attic was to inject PoE either in the office or the living room - at least finally connecting the office, but leaving lots of network equipment still stuck in the living room A more ideal solution would be a PoE-powered firewall to basically run the setup I described but with an extra box somewhere. The least good solution that would kind of sort of work would be to use a passive female:female keystone in the attic and leave one of the living room runs unused, but again that would then put both the switch and the router behind the TV, which doesn’t pass the wife test The ideal solution is of course to get an electrician round to restore power to the attic, but I’m really looking to see if the DIY solution is sufficiently impractical as to justify the call out

Would love to see a virtualized pfsense + truenas setup with this! (assuming the sata ports are functional)

@dudeh9702

9 ай бұрын

Agree. I have a travel router/NAS project I've been putting off for years, and 1 box to place inside a Pelican case with pfSense, TrueNAS, Jellyfin, etc with the ability to ingest hotel or family WiFi/ethernet and output a separate, lower power personal WLAN would be fantastic.

Does anyone else worry about the BIOS on these being backdoored or anything? I guess I’m paranoid…

Question is how much better is these in their switching and networking capacity compared to a cheap but decent off the shelf 8 port 2,5GbE switch, if you set them up as that ? beside the fact that you can have them do much more than just an auto switch ? Is it worth the extra money ?

@ServeTheHomeVideo

9 ай бұрын

A switch is much better at switching. Here the NICs are all PCIe to the CPU so if you try going port to port you are going through the NIC, CPU/ memory, and then out the other NIC.

@mrdali67

9 ай бұрын

@@ServeTheHomeVideo Interesting. Just often heard that the cpu's in those routers you often get from your ISP with those standard 4 port 1GbE switches is barely fast enough to handle full load from 4 ports, so there was a good idea in using just an old PC that could fit 4 Nics at once or a multiport nic card and install your own Firewall/switch software.

@SpeedRebirth

8 ай бұрын

​ So if using this as a Router/Modem and connecting the incoming (fiber>eth converter) to one port, and the 7 other eth ports to different units, they will experience higher delay (ping) than just using a normal router + switch combo? I have a 6 port patch panel in an extremely small (3" deep) cabinet and want to connect all of them to a router. Best would be a 7 port (1 WAN + 6 LAN) setup but there are almost no routers with more than 5 ports

Yesssss!!!! This is what I’m after!!!!❤

HI Patrick, thanks for the great video as always. What CPU benchmark are you using here? Don't think I've seen that one yet. Thanks!

Any one know if there are any NAS units that use the same/similar pcb? I'd like to use it with proxmox/truenas with 10GBe/2.5GBe

Very nice, but I want a fanless unit. I guess I'll be waiting a little longer.

i want to get one and 3d print a case for one and turn it into a firewall nas

Where can we buy just the Mother Board so we can build something that has better cooling and space for Sata drives.

With all these mini PCs, I'm a bit confused as to why they don't just have a single low profile 120mm fan rigged as exhaust and then place intake near components that need active cooling and filter those intakes. Obviously it would cost more, but I'm not buying a unit that cooling is an afterthought for.

@Prophes0r

9 ай бұрын

These CPUs are intended for tablets. That tiny little fan is literally a luxury compared to their 'normal' operating environment. Even an after-thought is overkill for these.

@gustersongusterson4120

9 ай бұрын

@@Prophes0r the CPUs yes, but the nics, ram and ssd will also generate a considerable amount of heat, and some performance is also left on the table.

Thanks for reviewing the units! Could you remove the add-on PCIE cards such that each unit have only 4 base NICs, then compare power consumptions of i5 to i7 to N305?😊

it would have been great if you could have tested network capability though. What throughput can they achieve?

@ServeTheHomeVideo

9 ай бұрын

These are more than capable of driving 10GbE NICs like the X520. The X520 has more offloads than things like consumer Marvell/ Aquantia 10Gbase-T NICs

@massimilianogilli1164

9 ай бұрын

@@ServeTheHomeVideo yeh but they are far from being integrated and compact like this. A x520 costs 130 USD. Do you think this device can handle 10gbps over pppoe?

What's that stress test software?

@marcogenovesi8570

9 ай бұрын

it's called s-tui

tried one with a 10G RJ45 SFP+ module but it was generating excessive heat and ethernet errors. Also it would be nice to have a variant with faster (amd ryzen?) CPUs

@ferdievanschalkwyk1669

9 ай бұрын

Would also like to see some with faster CPU's, something Intel NUC or Miniforum level.

@joansparky4439

9 ай бұрын

why not going for SC optics? Too fragile or what is the catch?

@justthestuff3324

9 ай бұрын

This was my first thought. Can the CPU handle all this ethernet throughput or will that suffer because of a bottleneck. LIke if all the ports were connected at their rated speeds, for example.

I guess they choose comet lake over N300 because the number of PCIe lanes, 16 vs 9. I don't think 9 is enough for an SSD, sata and multiple 10Gbe, even with an PLX switch.

@jorper2526

9 ай бұрын

Or that this has been around for years before the N300 ;). That being said, I would love to see a refresh of this soon. Maybe on the 14th gen.

Patrick says this products CPU would not be good for a firewall that needs more than simple rules. How do we determine the correct CPU we need for a firewall that needs to have rules and how many rules is too many for a specific cpu. I woikd think the i5 and i7 should be enough?

10Gbe trickle drip.. (waving hand to hurry up :P )

Guess I'll just build my own chassis for this and have my next NAS/Firewall/Router all-in-one. 😂

@efimovv

9 ай бұрын

CWWK have also NAS boxes on site.

Truely great stuff Thanks STH team for the great efforts. suggest checking "Qotom Motherboard 5*2.5GLan 4 SFP+ Atom Denverton C3338R C3558R C3758 support Proxmox Mikrotik" specifically the C3758 or C3757R if available. unfortunately, they offer C3338R as a mini-PC but in specification it is mentioned C3558R. i think they are not offering the higher model due to thermal constrains. still, it is a great firewall 4SFP+ & 5 intel 225 not 226 2.5 NIC with IPMI total 172 for MB. thanks a million

@ServeTheHomeVideo

8 ай бұрын

We ordered a version of that maybe a month ago and are still waiting

@jacj2490

8 ай бұрын

Awaiting STH review for the unit especially if it ll be the C3578 or C3578R since thermals will be a great challenge but it is much needed performances Thanks again

Thanks! Dremel the case and get a 5-bay HDDRACK + PC power supply, and you could use at least 5 of those SATA ports for a NAS :^)

@ServeTheHomeVideo

6 ай бұрын

Wow! Thank you!