Asrock N100DC-ITX - Almost Perfect! But...

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Get started with Notion, sign up for free or unlock AI for $10 per month: ntn.so/WolfgangsChannel *Corrections:* - At 14:40, the N100's iGPU is not just 'playing back' the AV1 content, it's transcoding it to H.264 - Intel i3-6100 is a dual core processor, not quad core (15:25) *Links:* Asrock N100DC-ITX geni.us/ECsSoNr (Amazon) Jonsbo N2 geni.us/8rpN (Amazon) ASMedia ASM1166 M.2 SATA Controller geni.us/FL52EAe (Amazon) Trendnet 10Gbit SFP+ Adapter geni.us/wASn1 (Amazon) DC Jack to block terminals adapter geni.us/CFMe (Amazon) 4-pin ATX extension cable geni.us/Q26G (Amazon) PicoPSU geni.us/nX6uO (Amazon) Sharkoon SilentStorm SFX Bronze 450W geni.us/wKg3i3 (Amazon) As an Amazon Affiliate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

[@OlindoPindaro]

I had problem with my Asus n100 and hevc playback

[@IOTWVUVWTOI]

ASUS H170i Pro mini !!!! Please! As a home server and as a router

[@misterhat5823]

No.

[@mullthedroneguy]

If I manage get a 24 Pin ATX to 4 Pin ATX, or 24 Pin to 8 Pin then 8 Pin to 4 Pin, will that work? Would it be safer than just hacking the 24 Pin to jump the power?

Why not full SSD build? It seems way simpler to power, lower consumption, quiet, smaller & possibly faster. Is it just HDD/SSD capacity vs. price consideration, or am I missing something?

[@Adam-qc6mg]

I've learned a great deal from your videos, and I've been a UNIX/Linux systems administrator for 25 years (back to the days when I had to download a new kernel image over a 14.4Kbps modem and compile it - hours! - just to get a 3Com Ethernet adapter working). Keep up the good work.

[@con-f-use]

6:52 the electrically and mechanically more safe option is to crimp the two pairs of cables together with a two-cable crimp each, before screwing them into the barrel jack (or rather its terminal block). But that's just a nit, I think your block is rated for multi-strand wire because there's a tiny metal plate between screw and cable, so it won't damage the strands. Still better crimped.

[@legendaryz_ch]

Major hickup for me (network engineer and electrician) too haha glad im not the only one

[@MartinZeitler]

Not a problem while they're nicely aligned parallel, so that the clap inside presses both down equally.

[@legendaryz_ch]

@@MartinZeitler nah its fine wires not one big one. You always have to put a crimp on them otherwise it's a fire hazard especially if it's higher current!

[@einfachmanu90]

How do I know what is positive and what is negative? Can I tell somehow from the plug? I'm afraid of breaking something :(

[@con-f-use]

@@einfachmanu90 just image-search for something "4-pin ATX cable pinout", it will tell you which wire is connected to which pin on the connector. If the wires are colored, black is ground, yellow is 12V, red is 5V, usually. You will want to double check and measure with a multi-meter if you can. A standard barrell-jack connector is center-positive, but the brick should tell you that, too.

[@anlumo1]

Those screw terminal barrel jack connectors are usually only rated for around 600mA, so I'd recommend to use a soldered connector instead.

[@TommyThousandFaces]

I got the N100M exactly because I would've needed to hack a standard PSU to power the DC version and it has significantly less room to add cards. I think it's a pretty nice platform to work with, really power efficient and flexible. About the SSDs I would advise againt splicing in more connectors from the on board JST connector because, even if they use less power, it's pulling from 5V instead of 12V so it's using a rail with less current available then 12V. It's also weird seeing it not idling down to C10. My N100M with TrueNAS Scale goes to C10 and the NIC is not giving me that issue. Last but not least, if cooling is sufficient, you can bring the short and long TDP to 30W and get better transcoding performance since the long TDP on the board is just 10W.

[@aliancemd]

I have a few N100 boards and all show over 96% in C10 state - the worst being the Proxmox server. Edit: I think I might know why his CPU didn't go to C10 state. I just read the 12th Gen processor datasheet and it says that the dependency for that is "Display in PSR or powered off" - none of my servers have a display attached and powertop even says GPU "Powered On 0.0%". It might just be that in his case, he had the iGPU busy, which doesn't allow it to go from C8, to C10.

[@wildefyri]

Well no consumer SSDs use the 12V rail on SATA molex connectors... So your reasoning there for not using the connector is not really valid.

[@TommyThousandFaces]

He said "the only case in which I would recommend this solution is if you're building an SSD only NAS, since SSDs need less power than hard drives". Power is a product of voltage and current. If the connector can only output 2A per pin and there's only one 5V pin the connector supports a maximum of 10W. Which is not a lot of power if you wanna use more than two consumer SSDs. Usually SSDs are rated to use 1A, so even when using SSDs you're limited to two drives unless you want to risk it. And, if you just didn't know, that connector carries 12 and 5V but only 5V is used for SSDs.

[@janreal84]

got myself the same one and I'm pleased with it, too

[@trixniisama]

How low in power consumption can the N100M get in the C10 state?

[@pertsevds]

iperf3 before 3.16 version is single-threaded and can't saturate 10G by default. In order to saturate 10G you have to run multiple iperf3 server processes: iperf3 -s -p 5101&; iperf3 -s -p 5102&; iperf3 -s -p 5103 & and run multiple clients: iperf3 -c hostname -T s1 -p 5101 &; iperf3 -c hostname -T s2 -p 5102 &; iperf3 -c hostname -T s3 -p 5103 &;

[@erikmagkekse]

Yes 100%, jumbo MTU might help here to, but the issue here is more likely that his PCIe 10G sfp+ card can only do PCIe 2.0 which limits to 2x4 GT/s

[@5467nick]

@@erikmagkekse Video shows it hitting over 8Gb/s at 11:17. Also he claimed it has a new chipset.

[@mzmatze]

@@5467nick But even the latest Version (TEG-10GECSFP (Version v3.0R))is only PCIe 2.0 which would be a bottleneck if you only have two Lanes. However, the RJ45 Version (TEG-10GECTX (Version v3.0R)) has got an PCIe 3.0 Link, so two Lanes would be sufficient to saturate the 10GbE Network. This Info is directly from the Trendnet Homepage.

[@finzic]

Great channel, Wolfgang, really great content! I really do appreciate the drive to find power-efficient build parts!

[@silaseinhorn6765]

I use the N100M as main working PC. With 32 GB RAM and Debian 12 it is more than enough for programming with nodejs. With the low power consumption I can power it entirly from solar (island-system). An best of all... silence... I use two case fans but they only run on full cpu load. This is the first low power mainboard where I can configure the case fans for 0% on low work load. I love working on a complete silent pc :)

[@The_Mup]

They make a micro atx version of this board called the N100-M, which has a full size pci-e slot and uses a standard ATX power supply.

[@maxarendorff6521]

Awesome video dude. Thanks to your tip my N100 NixOS home server is finally running at C8 and not C3 like before.

[@clockfort]

re: low networking throughput from the NIC the AQN-100 supports up to 8 parallel queues ( AQ_CFG_VECS_DEF ) to help balance interrupt handling / work over multiple CPU cores [even while the workload is only a single TCP connection]; it might be a little hobbled by only being on 4 kinda slow cores since it can't fully take advantage of the existing hardware parallelism a similar TDP processor with 8 real cores to service hardware interrupts in parallel might achieve better throughput, even if the individual cores were somewhat slower

[@patrickdk77]

also double check what congestion control algo is being used, on a direct connection over 20gbit fiber, it can change my results with iperf3 from 3gbit to 19gbit, I mostly use bbr

[@rickysargulesh1053]

Do you know how many parallel queues a X520-DA2 has?

[@robertlorey4605]

Hey, the barrell jack adapter does not have spring loaded contacts, so you want to crimp your wires before screwing them in. If you don't they can come loose during operation and this is a fire hazard.

[@einfachmanu90]

How do I know what is positive and what is negative? Can I tell somehow from the plug? I'm afraid of breaking something :(

[@robertlorey4605]

@@einfachmanu90 It should be documented in the manual. Usually outside is Negative (GND), but i have seen the other configuration as well...

[@aliancemd]

Just read the 12th gen processor datasheet and one of the requirements to go from C8, to C10 is: "Display in PSR or powered off". You could potentially go to C10, if you make sure the iGPU is not busy with work. All my N100 servers(which don't have displays attached, btw) are in C10 state. Just a wild guess but it might work.

[@ppn7]

with VMs, it's almost impossible to avoid iGPU i guess ? That's why i prefer using a headless OS with all containers in docker.

[@LiebJohnson]

Have been tracking your channel for a while. Great stuff. Looking forward to your build video. Immediately bought three of these for my new low-power, quiet Ceph cluster.

[@itssoaztek4592]

Very good work. Thank you for sharing. Loved it from start to end. Only potential omission (from my point of view) is a short mention of relevant BIOS settings (in addition to the Realtek NIC) to minimize power consumption.

[@Raintiger88]

I migrated my old NAS to a N2 with my old N6005 board. All I can say is that I love it (now). It's purely a NAS running nothing else other that TrueNAS core. I've not even considered an upgrade to N100/N300 as I do not believe it will offer any additional benefits. Great video, otherwise. Learn something new every day and I have met that small challenge. Thanks for the effort you obviously put into this video.

[@5amba]

Dude, having Notion as sponsor is quite cool. Not the usual boring squarespace bs or whatever. I really appreciate that you don't sell your soul 😄

[@shanent5793]

If you must poke wires into a power connector at least use a resistor to limit the current if you make a mistake. Deburring and grommets are a good practice if you route wires through sheet metal

[@Beatleman91]

I just built this. The problem is not only the DC pins can handle only two amps but the on-board DC-DC converter is only 90W (basically on board picoPSU). I don't have that many data, so I am fine for now, but I was thinking down the road I can get those external HDD power supplies (give you a molex with 12 and 5 Volts) OR since I have some soldering skills - make a little DC-DC PCB from 19 to 12 and 5 Volts and power everything I need from one beefy 19V laptop adapter. But then again, by the time I will fill up my 14 Tb, some new board like N500 will come out, that would have a more powerful DC-DC converter on board with more PCI-e lanes and more SATAs.

[@Beatleman91]

Sorry for spam, was trying to comment multiple times, but yt doesn't like me mentioning some chinese ali-shop

[@ionmihai79]

there was a misleading information about the N100 vs I3-6100 performance.. Because you calculated the TDP of 6 vs TDP of 51. I'm pretty sure that the N100 goes above 20W when running Cinebench R23. I dont think it will be 8.5 times more efficient at the same performance. Can you please measure? Thanks. Love your videos!

[@v0ldy54]

Tbf I wouldn't be too comfortable running a "hacked" psu instead of the provided one, especially if you have to buy one just for that purpose it kinda defeat the premise of the motherboard in the first place. I think something like the N100I-D D4 would make more sense, even if you have to ditch the 10Gb card.

[@I_Evo]

Small point, this board doesn't come with a power supply.

[@kyounghoecho]

I really thanks your video and all of video comments. It will help my current nas build. and I learned wire need crimp.

[@ravagingwolverine666]

I've seen that situation with iperf3 before. I was just recently looking at some MoCA videos and decided to go with that to improve my mesh system, and in one video it was pointed out that iperf3 wasn't using the full gigabit connection, but with the parameter for parallel streams, it did reach gigabit speed. I had the same experience once I set up the MoCA boxes for myself. You're definitely not alone there. This was an interesting build as I've been thinking about looking at what N100 boards would be like, especially for power consumption, for something like this.

[@fedefede843]

Ok. I was expecting to see more NAS related stuff. ZFS, truenas, unraid? configurations and performance on those sata ports. Looking forward for that.

[@thezfunk]

Open source version of Synology OS

[@jackipiegg]

9:12 May I know what's the 12V power supply you used for picopsu?

[@LeminskiTankscor]

I have this board! It sits under my TV. Also it's nice for someone like yourself to review this board and show off the capabilities. If I get some drives, I'll probably upgrade mine to a very similar setup to yours, though likely 2.5GbE.

[@MrMoralHazard]

Do you by any chance use the onboard audio with the 3.5mm ports? I am looking for a cheap board that I can directly plug my (cheap old) 5.1 System into directly. If you tried it, how was the quality? Not looking for high end, but it also shouldn't be terrible.

[@LeminskiTankscor]

@@MrMoralHazard sorry! I'm using only the HDMI for audio. I would test, but I literally lack the "ear" to tell you if the 3.5mm is worth a damn or not.

[@DaemonForce]

6W quad core, swappable single channel DIMM in server style that allows direct airflow, NVMe, dual sata, an OPEN PCI-E x2 slot....Yeah this is pretty much what I need. My home server is a 2009 era eMachines with a single core 1.6GHz 2650e, 2GB, dual sata 3gbps, PCI-E g2x1 (empty) and g2x16 (10GbE SFP). This looks like a more than suitable replacement in speed alone.

[@huajunwen7307]

To be honest, N100 can be configured with higher TDP.As for certain N100 Box configured with 25w TDP with 16G DDR5 4800 RAM, its Geekbench6 score can achieve around 3300, which is quite close to skylake 4 cores i5 :D But it performed a lot worse when it's configured with 6 watts TDP, though. :) I was using it with Windows 10 back then with my N100 box, changing TDP between 6w and 25w in BIOS really made a huge difference :) Thanks for your great videos and they help me save my power bills a lot :D

[@guillaumep.7206]

Perfect timing. I am considering a n100 board for a NAS too. Curious if you would recommend this board over a N100M with more expansion or the Cwwk / Topton N100 boards. My goal is low power, not necessarily high network speed

[@andrewparsons1041]

I'm also interested in how the Asrock N100DC-ITX compares to the CWWK and Topton motherboards N100 boards.

[@M4XD4B0ZZ]

I second this

[@Eujanous]

The problem is that Cwwk / Topton N100 boards have the JMB585 chip, which prevent the system to reach deep c-states which result to higher consumption.

[@fwiler]

@@Eujanous That needs to be compared to see actual results. If jmb585 is more efficient than it may not make much difference.

[@kaicurry]

Topton now has a 8505 board that works great as a NAS (and/or router) because it has more PCIe lanes and in addition to Quicksync, it has quickassist. For around 200USD it can handle M.2 4.0x4, 6 SATA, 1*PCIEx4, 4*Intel i226-V 2.5Gb ethernet and dual channel DDR5... Oh yeah, it can also do a 4*3.0x1 NVMe adapter board.

[@ManelRodero]

A very interesting video for all those who want to buy efficient hardware. Now, for those of us who already have hardware, and at the moment cannot change it, the software part would be very interesting. Do you have a video where you explain that setup with Unraid and different containers? The tricks and ways to configure the Dockers of delugevpn, prowlarr, booksonic, cloudflared, invoiceninja, nextcloud, paperless, photprism, radarr, recyclarr, sonarr and vaultwarden would be very appreciated. Thanks for everything Wolfgang.

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

What you could do instead for the power IMO is put a female barrel jack in those two wifi antena openings and use a small jumper cable to connect that to the board power. The whole "pull 4 cables from inside the case to plug into something outside looks a bit botched IMO.

[@arouraios4942]

I built a system based on this video and it's awesome! N100DC-ITX, 32gb Ram, bequiet! Sfx power 3 450W, 2 18Tb Sata drives (more on the way), one usb nvme and a boot ssd. No Pcie card. I had to manually set the DDR4-3200 CL16 stick to DDR4 -3000 CL 16 since I don't think the board has XMP and DRAM Voltage can only be set to 1.26V. My stick is running fine (no memtest yet). With Proxmox installed and several containers (vpn, jellyfin, ...) idling powertop shows 73% at C10 and 7% at C8 which sounds great (I don't know much about Linux power management). A Wall-plug power meter shows 28 Watts on idle, up to 80 watts under full load. I think the bequiet psu was a bad choice, it alone draws 10 Watts when the board is powered down, but I found out about Wolfgangs PSU Chart too late. All in all I'm very happy tho. Great video on a great board, thanks for the content Wolfgang!

[@bzuidgeest]

I think for me the most valuable data was right at the end. I never know where exactly to place these CPUs like the n100 in relation to their bigger brothers in the core i-something series. So the performance and performance per watt graphic really helps.

[@arouraios4942]

Keep in mind that's a 6th gen i3. So we don't know how it compares to a current gen cpu

[@bzuidgeest]

@@arouraios4942 yes, but it still is a reference to something I'm more familiar with. Let's take Intel's atom CPU, it never came off that favorably, compared to it's bigger brothers, not even a generation offset.

[@DanKotowski]

That’s how the Aquantia hits 10G, by doing MAC teaming in the firmware. It’s actually a 4x2.5GbE interface pretending to be a 10GbE interface.

[@sangmun]

I don't think it is pretending as much as it seems to be running a channelized 10g connection. Optical networking was geared more towards enterprise networking rather than consumer so there are different channel schemes. You could have 10x1g connections or concatenate 3x1g connections to make a 2.5g which would handle SONET OC48. Similarly at 100g (ODU4), you can have 4x25g channels. I don't know how much control the manufacturer of the NIC provides but Wolfgang may be able to change to a full 10g connection but since this networking is across the ISP (to parents home), the ISP would be the ones that would limit the workable configuration. I think it is likely max 4x2.5g for the ISP and asking them to switch to full 10g would mean extra money.

[@vibrolax]

I've been running my Nas on an asrock q1900dc-itx since 2014. I started with FreeNAS, and it's now running TrueNAS Core. I've got 2x 2 TB Seagate Nas drives, and I added 2x 4 TB WD Red plus drives. The PSU is a 60w ThinkPad brick from ~2010. I don't run any services besides NAS on the system, because I don't want to add any complications to its management. I ran FreeNAS 9.2 from 2014 until TrueNAS core was a year old. Maybe I'll migrate to truenas scale, if core gets discontinued. But more likely I'd only do that by building a new NAS on something like the n100dc-itx. I love having a 10 year old NAS with industry standards parts that I can maintain without any particular vendor staying in business.

[@VitaliiPustovyi]

Shout out to Wolfgang's parents who apparently have a 10 gig network at home.

[@legendaryz_ch]

But a German Internet connection 🤡🤡🤡 50M DSL max kekw

[@Lollllllz]

In some ways i kinda wish the manufacturers for the n-series motherboards are crazy enough to cram basic IO (SATA/LAN/USB3) onto a single pcie lane and expose the remaining 8 as pciex4 slots

[@zack.123.]

Re: the network speed. We ran in to a similar issue at work with one of our windows servers. The fix was to enable smb multichannel.

[@cyberdusttv]

I wouldn't be surprised if the NIC just overheats, since this is the exact same issue I had until I strapped a little Noctua fan onto the heat sink of my 10G NIC. Might be worth a shot

[@legendaryz_ch]

Have a passively cooled Asus 10G in my PC still which doesnt overheat at all... Its due to iperf not taking advantage of multiple cores i think. Had the same issue on a low power Intel pc but between my zen 3 and zen 4 40w+ ryzens it's fine

[@WhynoMoral]

Van you pls do a video on how to make existing hardware more efficient. Your videos are nice but keeping your old stuff is cheaper and some people cannot afford buying a new motherboard every time you do a video. Very informative video

[@RaytheonTechnologies_Official]

To improve power efficiency you need to reduce the distance between transistors on a chip, so there is less electrical resistance between them Typically this is done by shrinking the manufacturing node from say 14nm to say 7nm. So you'd need to buy a new chip to take advantage of that. But what big tech doesn't want you to know is that you can shrink the distance between transistors yourself by just pushing really hard on the sides of the chip. My trick is to take my CPU and put it in a vice and then squeeze as hard as I can. Using this method I've turned a 28nm Xeon v2 into a 7nm Epyc 7002 (although the pressure did make some transistors pop out of the side).

[@allitthings]

Can't wait for the build and setup video. The power consumption on this beast is brilliant! Please also mention the cost of the build.

[@dc37009]

Nice update to your last Serv-Nas-Homelab build ! ~Evilcorp crippleware hack, brings tech to the masses !

[@reinekewf7987]

1:15 of course there is the j5040-itx it can handle 4 drives and has also a pcie connector and a m.2 wifi port. it supports 2 4k streams and is also passive cooled, has dual channel ram with max 8gb per channel. pared with a 12v adapter and a pico psu you can go low as 5w on idle.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

The PCI slot on it is 2.0 x1 - which is the main reason why I prefer the N100DC-ITX board, as mentioned multiple times in the video. Besides, it costs almost the same as N100 boards new and comes with worse performance and an older iGPU

[@veer66]

I'm convinced by this video, and I almost forget that I don't want to build a NAS.

[@wchorski]

yes plz a run down of how you do offsite backups at your parents. I have a similar set up but would like to compare how you'd set it up. Would like to know a good 'set and forget' setup

[@danieldbird]

Another great video. Thanks mate. I saw a glimpse of Traefik in this video. Would love to see a setup of it like you did with Nginx Proxy Manager.

[@lampofthestreet]

The sybylant sound at 9:33 scared my cat

[@ppn7]

i thought for a long time about going for an asrock or asus n100 card but finally, i bought a tiny pc hp prodesk mini, i5 8500t, 8gb ddr4, 256gb ssd nvme for 95€. I just added 2x16gb ddr4 and 1tb hdd sata + 1tb usb hdd. With all this added, idle power consumption is 5w on Debian 12, C10 pkg (no monitor, no mouse, no keyboard) Of course I don't have parity, but that's not crucial in my case.

[@dennisolsson3119]

Thank you for your channel! It is a really nice resource when shopping for hardware. I was contemplating a N100DC, but chose a N100M with separate Pico PSU because of availability. I would like more cheap alternatives with ECC, but that is just my preference.

[@bbrice100]

I have a similar setup. I am running 6 HDDs and 2 SATA SSDs off a Lenovo P330 Tiny. Using an HBA card. The Lenovo mini PC uses a 20V power supply. I have a 650W ATX gold PSU powering the drives. What I did was cut off an old usb cable, connect the power leads to a 5V relay module and connect the N-O of the relay to the PSU's jumper pins. This let me power on and off everything together. 😁

[@rayncadiana]

I recently started experimenting with a bare M920x board (they could be configured with a dedicated graphics card using the custom PCIe slot) and soldered to exposed PCIE_12V and 5V pads. The PCIE_12V line should be able to source at least 30W - should be enough for 2 to 4 drives (maybe more) depending on their startup characteristics.

[@antoine6521]

@bbrice100 which drive case are you using? Which hba card also?

[@rayncadiana]

@@antoine6521 I am using a M.2 Wifi to NVMe adapter board (one with a long FPC cable between them) and a ASM1166 based m.2 to sata card. When i write a short report on it i will try to remember to link it here :)

[@BrentRWong242]

​@@rayncadiana Looking forward to it

[@JasonLCN]

Soldering will help to improve the DC connector, as you solder directly into the board.

[@shabadabadoo4326]

Hi Wolfgang Wolfgang! - lol, that made me chuckle….

[@marklewus5468]

Very interesting build but I would warn that running power wires through grounded holes in thin metal is a fire hazard. The drives cause substantial vibration, and over time this will degrade the insulation. Rubber grommets are advised.

[@JasonsLabVideos]

Good video man !

[@loetzs.878]

Very nice NAS-project! Because of the bandwith-issue, i once had a switch (some TP-Link if i remember correctly) that listed in the specs that it would auto-adjust the framesize, but this actually nerver worked. After updating the switch, i could set this setting manually and actually enable jumbo frames.

[@mmuller2402]

Managed switch from tp link? Nice 😊

[@loetzs.878]

@@mmuller2402 i think the model name was something "jetstream ". it actually was not mine, i just made it run for the customer...

[@alfonsneumann1878]

Despite what the manual says I have a N100 running with 32GB, runs like a charm.

[@shapelessed]

"less than 20$" - The cheapest M.2 SATA adapter I found was 50$. Middle of Europe, I might add...

[@zyghom]

25 on amazon, based on JMB585, I used it for some time - not bad but I am not sure all 5 disks can do their max over it (and the M2)

[@shapelessed]

@@zyghom Amazon has literal 30$ shipping fee to here. We don't use it because we already have better (and our own) alternatives - and even those are expensive.

[@cadmiral3d146]

N100m video?

[@joels7605]

The Avoton/Denverton based boards are really, really good. I think they check all the boxes for what you're looking for in a small low power motherboard. Those chips were designed from the ground up by Intel to perform exactly the function you're trying to achieve. Plus they support ECC memory, which is awesome. I used to have an AsRock C2750D4I. Mini ITX. 8 core Silvermont/Bay Trail generation low power Atom processor, with four DDR3 slots supporting ECC. 12 SATA ports. PCIe-8x slot. IPMI onboard with a dedicated ethernet port, plus two additional onboard gigabit ports. And they're old enough now that you can probably get them for cheap. The newer Denverton based boards are probably significantly better, but I haven't had direct experience with those. The only reason I got rid of the C2750D4I was because I moved to 10 gigabit fibre and the poor little Atom cores couldn't push more than about 190 megabytes/second over rsync when I was doing backups between servers.

[@marsovac]

You are off the mark. Those atoms cant transcode 4k/hdr in any serious way

[@ObiWahn007]

Thanks for the interesting video! I was wondering at the beginning why you didn't use the "ASUS Prime N100I-D D4", but if you need the higher PCI-E speed for a 10gb network card, it's clear again. Presumably the external power supply of the Asrocks board also needs less power than the ATX/SFX power supply of the Asus board, right? I have seen a very similar construction proposal at "Elefacts" and am still thinking about it.

[@theWSt]

From a tinkerer's point of view, this might be a nice solution, but I would still consider this M.2-to-SATA card a workaround. However the Intel N100 seems to be the perfect fit for an energy efficient NAS. The first turn key solutions are already round the corner, I will wait for one of these, I prefer to tinker with software over hardware. 😁

[@JeffDM]

Unfortunately both Asrock N100 boards mentioned here are unavailable except from a couple sketchy sellers on Amazon and one on Aliexpress.

[@sharedknowledge6640]

Nice video! It would have been interesting for you test real world network file transfer speeds with Truenas, etc. as that’s what really matters to most of us.

[@NeptuneSega]

Be careful, some ssds together can pull more power than that morherboard can provide as well. Speaking from personal experience 😢

[@hallsofvalhalla1749]

Looks awesome. Explaining computers did a really nice miniPC build with a N100 board. Think it was different to this one. Also Supermiro has an awesome relatively low power (for the number of cores etc) epyc ITX board. This is great if you want more lanes. Also, it should last forever. Obviously, it is more expensive......

[@hallsofvalhalla1749]

I didn't check, but bifurcation on the PCIe slot is a really good option for addition drives. Not all boards have this though.

[@ollymilly6173]

I built a desktop with LMDE running on ASRock N100M with an NVME SSD and 16GB Kingston memory, almost like Explaining Computers did, except I use HDMI output to an LG TV. Everything would be fine, but to my huge disappointment the system tends to freeze or reload spontaneously. I have tried Debian as well as almost all available Debian-based distros with different desktop environments, Fedora desktop - with no effect. Finally I ended up with LMDE that seems to be more stable on my hardware. As for working as remotely controlled NAS or home server -- N100M MoBo worked with no issues at all. It seems the problem is somewhere with video output/drivers.

[@thienlo]

This board's LAN is 1Gb/s. So you need to buy PCIe LAN 2.5Gb. Intel N100 has PCIe 9 lanes max.

[@peterlastname9293]

I would love to see you build the ultimate Unraid-Plex home server with 5-6 SATA HDDs using the new Minisforum MS-01 taking out the motherboard and putting in a small case and also putting a cheap graphics card that can easily handle at least 4x4K streams with transcoding!

[@Kfoo-dj4md]

*sees nixos* I see you are a cultured man

[@RealLordy]

This pulled me over the line. Been looking at this board for a while now, but was doubting about the performance. Think I am going to acquire an N100M for new NAS

[@SuperFredAZ]

As long as you were doing a bit of custom cables, you could also use your 19 V power supply to branch to a straight through 19 V to your motherboard and 2 cheap-ish buck regulators, 12 V @5V, and 5V at 6A both available on Amazon or ebay for under 20 usd add a SATA power cables. A little more involved, but may less intimidating (perhaps cheaper) than working with a 120/240 V power supply.

[@evanvandenberg2260]

I don't think the buck converters + 19V power brick would do much for the efficiency. Given that the bulk of the "active" or spun up power draw is 12V & 5V for the HDD, you'd be loosing allot via those buck converts.

[@SuperFredAZ]

@@evanvandenberg2260 it wasn't for efficiency, the idea was not to use a 240V supply.

Yep, there is no replacement for this board, if we talking about support for 10Gbps NIC, but to be honest Asus Prime N100I-D D4 is also not that bad, at least it has second M.2 e-key port with PCIe (Asrock M.2 e-key port hasn't PCIe), so it can be used to install AI accelerator or „slightly” slower 2.5-5Gbps NIC, and it's a bit cheaper.

[@billmurray7676]

Who needs 10Gbps on a home server anyway, that's kind of a meme tbh. Even the usefulness of 2.5Gbps could be questioned for a computer that can only transfer to and from SATA ports.

@@billmurray7676 SATA can handle up to 6Gbps, single HDD is capable to saturate 2.5Gbps... IMO 1Gbps NIC is just slow, even from regular SD card I can read data faster than that.

[@billmurray7676]

it doesn't matter what sata can support, it matters what you put on it : you put HDDs on it, so that's about 200Mo/s, which is 1.6Gps. So no, you won't saturate 2.5Gbps with your HDD. That means 10Gbps is clearly useless on a home server. And 2.5Gbps, well, like I said, it's a questionable investment or reason to buy hardware in pratice.

@@billmurray7676, fastest available hard drives are reaching SATA limit, RAID in NAS is common thing, it's possible to achieve this limit even with standard hard drives and we haven't even started talking about modern SSDs used as an buffer or main storage. It's 2024, 1Gbps NIC should be considered as an obsolete for anything above low-end NASes.

[@billmurray7676]

You said HDD, so obviously SSD are out. Also, that would be pretty stupid to build a RAID for performance in a NAS since, by essence, you're supposed to build for data safety. You can't have both in a RAID. 1Gbps, although not ideal, is clearly not obsolete, 2.5/5 are options, but 10Gbps is definitely useless, which means that PCIe x1 is fine, and you shouldn't sacrifice other benefits for PCIe x2 or x4.

[@p-c]

These black/green DC-jacks you have used to connect the power supply are a serious fire hazard, please make sure you exchange them for something proper ASAP! I used them to power a small 20W 12V LED strip, but that was too much for them and they got so hot they melted! Not joking, these are really crappy connectors for power delivery.

[@ggorg0]

Why not just get the N100M instead of this one? Only the price?

[@djlalorocks]

Great video! if you don't mind some pronunciation help. You said "I am still working on a test suit for home specific ..." think you meant suite ( pronounced like sweet). - English is tough and I didn't know until you said in this video that it isn't your primary language. Your English is superb in that case.

[@RaytheonTechnologies_Official]

TBH I know plenty of native English speakers that pronounce it that way.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Thanks! I’ve no idea why my brain processed it as “suit” and cringed every time I had to hear it when editing 😁

[@Airbag888]

If ONLY it had 2 m2 slots... we could have both the additional SATA ports AND a nvme cache drive for max throughput on the NAS front when using 10Gbe SFP... also man you just dropped that new AQC100 chipset on us as if it was "no biggie" when you no so well how we've been waiting for this for ages haha. Love it though thanks a bunch. Visiting EU soon so I'll use your links

[@Beatleman91]

There is a slot for a wifi card, isn't there ssd's that can fit into that?

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Nope, it doesn’t carry PCIe signal on this board

[@Airbag888]

@@Beatleman91it's probably USB 2.0 so A+E I think... so a coral m.2 A+E would fit in there.. (if you can buy one that is)

[@Dragonheng]

Can you also take a look at the AMD 8000G series if that's possible, the 300€/$+ without a mainboard is a bit more for a small channel..

[@yodal_]

I feel like the lack of drive connectors is a problem with a ton of "NAS" motherboards. This one is definitely worse than most, however.

[@fanlessfurmark]

Please please please please please do......! In the pcie slot and the nvme slot put a 16GB optane nvme, these are actually 14GB each. Put them in raid, put the swapfile on this raid, put the os on a sata drive. Test with 4GB ram plus 28GB raid0 optane swapfile against 32GB ram with no swapfile and 4GB ram with no optane, just sata ssd swapfile. Also, safe to run n100 off eee pc power brick 12v x 3A = 36W?

[@user-eq2fp6jw4g]

Maybe ok with ITX formfactor. But if you want/need smaller and more energy efficient. Go with odroid m1. It has pcie 3.0 2-lanes and can handle same JBM585 etc nvme adapters without issues.

[@chromerims]

Great video 👍 9:26 -- ASPM (active state power management) setting, thank you. Kindest regards, friends and neighbours. P.S. Please do *_not_* do a UGreen NAS video.

[@sourcilavise3788]

The power draw is amazing though, I tried a friendly elec nas board with RK3588 and topped at 13W if I remember. They say that x86 consumes more but well, it all goes to CPU manufacturing (7nm in this case), motherboard connected devices etc... Can't wait to have the equivalent of N100 but in 1nm in 2027 !

[@paulv2411]

I went in a different direction. Bought the Aoostar R1, added 2 20tb drives for storage, bam low power media server running at 10 watts from the wall with the hard drives spun down, plus you can set the bios to run the N100 at 15w tdp for more performance at a max temp of 70c.

[@JetBlackRage]

ECC? 😢 Edit: Nope, sadly a deal breaker... "Supports ECC UDIMM memory modules (operate in non-ECC mode)"

[@sirpawelm]

Great stuff. I was asking in the comment about Mellanox Connect -X3 which is terrible. My server needed more horsepower so I went with i3 14100. Bought Intel X710 (dual port) for 100EUR with 2 transceivers. It goes down to C8 and there is a 10G speed always. Server is just one thing. Got RACK with 2 switches (8x10G SFP+ and 8x1G (4x POE+)), shutdown server with ipmi and 18 cores, 1x router, 1x wifi 6 AP, 1x camera, above i3 server and UPS. Previously with server based on this 18 core xeon total idle consumption was 136W, went down to 69W with i3 which is still a lot. So there are also unoptimized things like camera (15W!), ups (not measured) and IPMI (5W), probably networking could also do better.

[@kevinpeters5000]

In the UK, the cheapest I could find one of those 10G NICs was for just over £80 from Misco.

[@barneybarney3982]

7:14 you don't need a thick wire, you are connecting the signal pin to the ground, a random paper clip will do the job just right.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

The thick wire is there to fit snugly into the female ATX pins

[@barneybarney3982]

@@WolfgangsChannel ok, fair point.

[@mariuskiessling]

Thanks for the great video. The board is really sweet. The idle power consumption is amazing. It's a shame that there are not more PCIe lanes to go around. There are simply not enough lanes to get to SATA6 speeds while also having 10Gbit networking. That might be fine for spinning disks but I am still looking for the 'perfect' 6-8 disk, all flash NAS. It's a real shame that all those efficient Fujitsu boards are incredibly hard to com by.

[@yungdeano]

Thanks for this video. I had a SF750 laying around so thought i'd give it go. I haven't been able to achieve 10w at idle though. The lowest i've got to is 19w with 2xSSD and 3xHDD, the ASM1166, 32Gb RAM and 2x Noctua fans. No PCI-E card used, all drives but the appdata ssd spun down, l1 aspm enabled for the realtek and powertop auto tune. Were you able to achieve 10w with unraid? I also tried using a picopsu with an old xbox brick, changing the RAM to 4Gb, disconnecting all fans with little to no change. The power consumption between the picopsu and the SF750 is around 1-2w. Also used tips and tweaks in unraid to set the cpu scaling to power save.

[@audigex]

Yeah I think you've nailed the weakness of this board: I wish so much that this board had either 6x SATA or 2x M.2 On my NAS I love to have 2x SSDs as a cache and half a dozen SATA disks, but there's no sensible way to do it with this board I guess I could use the M.2 to SATA board you use and a PCIe x4 to 2x NVME card? But that seems like I'd be relying on adapters more than I'm comfortable with

[@WolfgangsChannel]

Yep. And since this board doesn’t support PCIe bifurcation, you’ll have to go for an NVMe adapter with a PCIe switch. Which would cost more than the board itself. By the way, CWWK finally brought out an N100-based NAS board with the ASM1166 controller (as opposed to JMB585): www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007001584335.html

[@ietsmetcomputers]

I have one of those Chinese NAS N100 boards. I'm running Ubuntu and was wondering if you knew of some guides or tips to cut down power consumption more than standard, if at all possible.

[@dwgray9000]

If your going to wedge a m2 to sata card in it, try a m2 to pci adapter, and one of the crazy million pcie sata adapters

[@jonathanchevallier7046]

Good video. Thank you.

[@FunkyDeleriousPriest]

All these "NAS" boards being advertised with zero ECC RAM 😵‍💫

[@OGAuror]

Just a general FYI. Despite Intel's N100 spec sheet, I've been running a 32GB 3200Mhz DIMM on this board without issue for 7+ months. (TrueNAS Scale)

[@james2749]

What about the Asus Pro WS W680M-ACE SE??? I know its not cheap but its probably cheaper than trying to find a C246 these days and its much more modern, has ECC support, 10gb networking and you could get a nice new low power intel chip with quicksync

[@user-im8bv8po2w]

love your videos ! i bought a used hp sff business pc for £50 to use as a minecraft server, i feel like it's unbeatable for home servers

[@Labombab]

Nice video, will you be adding the achieved transfer speeds with the 10Gbps network card and the 5 drives to the build video?

[@brentonbills5946]

Curious about the wire strippers you used? They look cool.

[@kevinrineer5356]

Who did your video transcription? They did great

[@s0me1newithhand7s]

Basically ZimaCube but DIY. for clearance - i'm not saying that this build is trash, i mean that ZimaCube IS trash bc of marketing that trying to sell to us Pro version with much beefier CPU. this build is actually THE good one.

[@WolfgangsChannel]

AFAIK, ZimaCube (at least in the version that was shipped to creators) has major problems with power efficiency, due to the PCIe layout