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 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.
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.
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.
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.
@@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.
@@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
@@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.
@@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.
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.
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!
@@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.
@@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.
@@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.
These are all DDR5 SODIMM now. Received mine yesterday. Boards also now feature only 2x SATA, there are only 4 lights (total) for the 10G ports and they're right next to the ports. The two ports are also touching sidexside now without a space between them.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
@@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.
@@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.
?? confused here on how you can 'review' a small 'firewall' or network type use case without showing what type of network performance you can get. I.e. in routing, what is the max throughput can you put through the systems before cpu bottleneck? What about routed frames/second (Mpps)? what if you're doing NAT? Or have a defined rulebase as a test case? The 10G SFP+ one is most interesting to me (as I have some experience using E5-2637v4 cpu's for small firewalls in the past). And using the 10th/11th gen cpu's are *much* preferred than anything later (using different core types is BAD for firewalls/routers/switches as it causes latency, just like frequency changes). Also to comment that one thing I find really missing in these small units (aside from the derth of 10Gbit sfp+ cage models ) is lack of ECC ram support. Looking for firewall/router type use cases and reliable operation is important not only in uptime but in the data path.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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$.
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 i dont get it, what i see on online every test values are dominating. according to those i5 235u is way more powerful than n305? can you please explain that? I was actually certain on this device just by CPU performance plus the nics are much more and sfp+. But because you wrote you prefer n305 , now i went where is started. ???
Patrick, have you gotten to adding in some data SSD's yet via those Molex and Sata ports.... curious if it is do-able.... as i have a couple and can re-use them instead of upgrading the base 128GB NVMe mine is coming with... use the SSD as the storage for logs etc. Also ordered one based on the new I335U processor with 32GB RAM and 1TB NVME as a Proxmox or XCP-ng host ... I see a new Intel U300E chips is now available... love the single thread numbers... for pfSense platform,
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.
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.
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 :) :)
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.
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.
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 )
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.
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.
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?
@@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?
New models with updated processor are avaible now. Considering how a core 10 series is doing, It would be interesting how a 12th or 13th gen would do. But most importantly, this unit can have a LAN extension board, or a dual sfp+ extension board. Since the riser should be a PCIe2 4x, the maximum throughput of the riser should be of 2gbit/s per direction (correct me if I'm wrong and it is a newser PCIE version please, I don't know for sure!). It means that should be almost ok to use both port for input/output in homes where the fiber arrive at 2.5gbit/s because it can do 4gbit/s in/out, because you lose 500mbit/s per direction. But what about using a 10gbit/s connection? Or all four 10gbit/s LAN ports? It would be intresting a network test to see if this unit bottleneck! COnsidering that some comments report bad behaviour of the motherbord it would also be interesting a revision of this unit with the updated processor or at least if something changed with this old one. Maybe a bios update?
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?
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.
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
@@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.
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.
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
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
This would be perfect for me with a couple exceptions and changes. I do not like the design. - Option to rack mount it in 1-2U of space. - Yes, not everyone has a home server rack, but for those of us that do - not having a rack mount option basically disqualifies this from even being considered. & if you are one of those that don't have a rack, simply don't use the rack option and pop on the desk rubber feet. - The IO is great - One option I would like to see is the ethernet ports be 10G each and on the SFP+ model - two of the ethernet ports should be POE. I'd like to see a power switch on the front alongside the networking ports, and the power input out the back. - Three seperate input sources would be preferable, with a way to prioritize them in software. - 1. AC Barrel Jack. - 2. DC Wires from alternative 12-56v source (such as solar) - 3. Battery - With integrated charger, pulling from the first two sources if available. This way with a connected battery, no funny voltage AC -> DC -> AC -> nonsense conversion chains need to be used. And IF AC power goes off, or is switched to a lower priority in firmware. Then Solar can be used as a primary, while keeping the battery charged and ready to provide power if the system looses power and sunlight at the same time. Routers need this redundancy to stay on and operational ALL the time. & A decive with these features at a low price point can and will have a huge advantage over many others. With POE and SFP+ out, one could power up a remote POE Switch and link two 10G lines bonded together from the router to the switch. With the switch pulling power from the Router it could be placed in remote locations that only have a fibre and and ethernet cable to it. - If the switch needs to be reboote - toggling on and off the POE+ Power from the router, would effectively be pulling the plug and forcing a reboot. With the seccond 10G POE Port powering up a local access point. Leaving two open ports for any other direct links, such as ISP routers, or other devices. Ideally, one more power option would be nice - POE In on one of the ethernet ports, allowing upstream power devices to drive the router. This cuts down on power costs, by eliminating as many power bricks as possible. Any time one goes from AC to DC one looses power in the conversion. (Granted its a small ammount, but every little bit adds up). Having a small device like this that would fit into half width of a 1U rack with the capability of connecting two of them side by side, one with the SFP+ Option and one with the multiple ports with a way to internally bridge them together over a fast backplane or similar link would mean be groundbreaking. A short small system like this that is high speed and modular, while being as low power as possible allowing an individual to run whichever firewall software they like OPNSense pFsense etc whatever. With a modular system like this using two routers one running as primary, connected over an internal buss and backplane to two modular switches with different connectivity options all powered from the redundant upstream power sources. The whole home switch router network infrastructure needs to be re-thought by designers from the ground up taking into consideration advances in technology, and the usecases individuals in an advanced home installation might want to use. The first company that really does this - that crowdsources it's design to fit what people would like to see - and makes it modular so individuals can use whichever pieces they need for their system will definately have an advantage. Picture the senario where you add a router to your rack, then need a switch for home networking - so you pickup a 10 port switch and link it to your router. If that switch was modular - and connected directly to the router over a fast backplane link providing power and fast networking then all the ports on your switch that are RJ45 are open and available to be used. While all the ports show up in whatever router you are using as aditional ports. However the special thing about them is, any traffic on the switch and the switch alone can stay within the switch chip - and doesn't need to be passed over the internal CPU of the router - unless additional filtering is needed. Giving one the benifits of using a switch for fast file transfers, with the convenience of managing only a single device all integrated together in one rack, taking up as little rack space as possible. Need to add more switch ports, you can upgrade to a newer switch with faster ports and swap it. This way, swaping switch chips and ports is all that's needed to upgrade to the latest speeds. Wireless access points at the local rack can be hot swapable and added into the chain with a simple plug and play backplane system. Nothing like this for the home consumer is available at a price point and power consumption / noise level that is reasonable is available - and it should be. You'd start to see them pop up everywhere and eat into the main competitors, because they would give power users what they want - enterprise type networking at a consumer prices and scale. MikroTik and Ubiquity do this to a limited degree, and their solutions have been widely used and implemented everywhere. There is however much room for improvement and redesign and re-think of how a home network infrastructure should and could be built.
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.
It boggles the brain that they don't make them more 1u in hight and just make them wider. It would improve airflow and provide space for additional drives. I wonder if you can source that motherboard by itself and just buy that and an 1u enclosure and build something a bit more interesting
Nice set of features for the money, but what about security? These small form factor boxes are proliferating and what concerns me is their use as routers and firewalls. Imagine thousands of compromised gateway appliances providing back doors to every network they are attached to. Someone needs to do a comprehensive security audit of a sampling of these devices to look at the BIOS and any proprietary chipsets, ROMS. Face it, you’re buying a security appliance from a country that actively uses its private sector for surveillance.
@ServeTheHome If GeekBench resets the system at the exact same time, I think that it's likely that due to some Hardware, Firmware or Microcode issue, the CPU might triple-fault which results in an instant CPU reset: "When a CPU exception handler, such as a page fault handler, cannot be invoked because it is missing or defective, the CPU will try to invoke the “double fault” handler. If the double fault handler is itself missing or defective, that's called a “triple fault.” A triple fault causes an immediate CPU reset."
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
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 ?
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.
@@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.
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
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
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?
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.
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 think you should have tested the power consumption of these units with more of the networking in-use. Half of the top ports + half of the bottom ports seems fair. It is a bit unrealistic to use them with a single net-port in-use. Why pay for one of these units if you aren't going to use all that networking?
Interesting board, but kinda disappointing that theirs no bigger version where you can install HDD. BTW could you make some more content around NAS that could run trueNAS
You could de-shell SATA SSDs and shoe-horn them in there if you really wanted to. Modern SSDs are mostly plastic case. The board inside is usually smaller than a 2242 drive. The cables themselves would take up more room. Look at the side-view shots with it opened up. There is PLENTY of room in there.
@@Zeric1Sure. But the NAS box that this board was designed for wouldn't have had ECC either. ECC is a good idea, we should use it when we can. But it isn't a hard requirement. Especially so for a bodged together solution.
Honestly I would prefer 4 10GbE ports, like anything else in my home that I don't even want 10GbE on usually if fine running over WiFi or even preferred on WiFi.
A word of advise for anyone buying this unit. I bought mine November 2023, but the fan did not last a year (August 2024) and their warranty/return policy only last 3months. I asked them for a replacement unit (20$), received the wrong fan model and the correct model is out of stock. So yeah, this awesome pc did not last very long
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?
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.)
@@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
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
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 got me a 6x 2.5GbE fanless system with an i5 - I think 12th gen - and I used a 120mm USB fan mounted to the top with 2 screws into the aluminum fins since I thought that this will be easy to replace if a fan breaks. Runs around the clock in OPNSense no issues. I found I may have overspent because this processor basically runs on idle, but I have no NAS attached yet, so, who knows.
