I’m looking to build a mini NAS, and run it on Truenas Scale. I found a board that has everything I need, including the low power draw I need, but it is an n100 processor.
Topton N18 N100 (also now n305 so I may change my mind). I really want at least a single 10gbps connection on the board, no room for a card in the chassis I have on hand. Topton N100 10GbE NAS Motherboard Review (MW-N100-NAS) – NAS Compares Is there something else I should be looking for?
Is an n100 good enough to drive 6 SATA in raid z1 or raid z2 and give me 6+ gbps throuput? This is for my lab, I’m trying to scale it down to all mini PC and want mini sized storage chassis too. Power, heat, and noise are factors (cost too). I see that I don’t need to buy used rack mount servers to get enough performance out of a hypervisor to test things and learn things.
Other details: I have an Icy Dock 5.25 to four SATA, plus a 3.5 inch bay for another two SATA drives, need an OS drive connection or I drop back to 5 drives in the array. Want to go to 1TB SSD or maybe 2TB SSD if I catch a good sale. I can power by small ATX or DC input, not partial to either. Case is an old Shuttle SV25 which needs some work to fit everything, but I have it and if the board takes it, a 20 pin ATX supply inside. I also have a pile of DDR3 RDIMM and a few different sizes of DDR4 SODIMM if something works with those.
Just found that. Went to the new forums and they are speaking about this nic like we do of Realtek nics… I think I should go another road for more money and more certainty. Going to give that choice another hour or so to bake before buying. One of the Supermicro D processor boards with dual 10gbe, the age of this board has me kind of taking second thoughts, but pretty much guaranteed to work as I have some of these X10 in service right now.
Might be able to cut around the card slot and get a four slot NVME card going too, faster than SATA by a bunch. Easy if it supports bifurcation on the single PCIe slot.
[edit] only supports x16 or two x8 bifurcation, need four x4 for that plan.
Seems like a waste to spend $200+ for 2.5 inch SATA drives at this point when I can spend the same $200 for NVME drives that could be used somewhere else if needed. Granted adding that PLX controller is costly, unless I can find a mini ITX that support 4 x4 mode on the slot. Have to look around a bit more. 4 nvme would certainly be way faster than I can move data on a pair of 10gbe connections. If I can find a board that supports 4 x4 mode, then I already have a cheap “adapter” for that.
This is far too difficult, in the rackmount server mode I’d have multiple choices to build this thing.
Still going back and forth with this, but think I’m going to buy the n100. Getting kind of expensive, DDR5 SODIMM is expensive compared to DDR4 for the same sizes.
I decided that an old Xeon D was too old and going with an Atom C38xx or C39xx was going to lead to much more expense. Even with the “cheap” atom build I’m going to be more than $600 unless I use old spinning drives, which might be a better plan for right now (because I have them on hand in a box).
Just need to measure for a power supply and start spending money, definitely not the bargain build I was hoping to do.
