CWWK X86 P5 M.2 NVMe NAS Board Review

CWWK X86 P5 NVMe NAS Review nascompares.com/review/cwwk-x...
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Video Chapters
00:00 - The Start
00:29 - The Crowded DiY and BYO NAS Market
01:07 - Storage and Design
01:55 - What is NOT Included?
02:16 - PSU / Power Supplier?
02:59 - How the x86 P5 Manages SATA Storage?
03:40 - Power Consumption
03:56 - How Hot Does It Get?
05:10 - BIOS
05:25 - PCI Lanes
05:44 - Read and Write Benchmarks
06:51 - How the M.2 are Mounted
07:42 - WiFi?
08:01 - Ports and Connections
08:52 - Revirew Conclusion
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[@pconnor462]

I could easily see someone designing a 3D printable case for this that puts a couple SATA drives on top of it, and then a 120mm fan along the back that would actively cool all of the components. Would love to see that come to fruition.

[@Dreadylock9170]

i started work on one but ran into problems problem 1 the fan headers are 1.25mm pin pitch looking for adapters haven't found any except for in china what they (cwwk) recommend is USB fans so now looking for USB headers (2.0 pin pitch) for USB 2.0 found some on another web site , next comes the propriety SSD/HDD header you could break these no replacements,they don't sell them ( could have use a plug like in a laptop, ask them for a cad model they pointed my to some weird can format .x_t looked at at it using e drawings and realized nothing looks professional so i had to measure each port to get locations and rebuild cad model. so i believe this is a waste of money to even get vs a raspberry 5 with a hat for 4nvme drives yeah sure it has more memory and probably more power.

[@krin-san]

Please prepare more videos like this one, about mini pcs turned into a NAS. The options are numerous but they all come with their downsides and finding something good enough ain’t easy.

[@StenIsaksson]

Why does the seagulls fly over the sea? Because if they fly over the bay they would be bagels.

[@picasso566]

I'd rather have this bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy

[@yensteel]

Ha

[@nascompares]

I mean, fair play @picasso566, that's solid wordplay. Respect.

[@itsnahombereket]

i hate that i love this

[@franktothemax]

The I hate seagulls bit gets me every time.

[@RobertoAnile]

i have the i3-n305 variant with the board and 5 (FIVE) nvme attached and running.. 4 nvme on the expansion board (pcie4x4 downgraded to 3x1 each) and the 5th drive in a custom a+e to m-key adapter i built myself. everything works perfectly fine, running proxmox on the 5th drive and with mdadm raid5 array with lvm on top on the other 4 drives.. lan ports are lacp'd so i get full 2.5gb transfer speed, quite happy and sold my old DS920+.

[@cl-be2zs]

Can you make a video/post on how you did this?

[@RobertoAnile]

@@cl-be2zs uhm yeah i guess i could post something about, you mean the 5th drive adapter? or the whole setup?

[@AdamPrtn]

Great review of a very good device, may look at grabbing one of these for homelab use. Also the Seagulls! God I wish I lived near the seaside!

[@nascompares]

I mean..If you saw the work that goes into the audio gating to remove ALL of the seagulls audio in these vids...you would never consider a seaside residency in a million years!!!! I swear, one day I will publish a 20min vid of an empty studio and just the gulls...it's like a David Attenborough blooper real of bird noises....

[@HelloHelloXD]

Yes for more tests. Maybe raid z2 on Truenas?

[@Trains-With-Shane]

I ordered the i3-n305 version yesterday. Going to stand up a NAS and run my home network services off of it. I went ahead and spent the extra money for the 32gb/1tb kit as it was only $2 cost difference than ordering the SODIMM and the NVME drive separately, lol. My usage case for this isn't going to require blistering file transfer speeds. Was hoping you'd have some software testing in this video as I plan to run a ZFS pool for the storage and some proxmox/docker stuff.

[@ivanmalinovski7807]

Just fyi, I've got the Terra Master F4-424 Pro, which also has N305, and is semi-passively cooled. it has a cooling block, but it only has one fan on the side for the whole system, and if it's not super well ventilated, it'll get pretty warm under pretty light loads, unless I ramp up the fan.

[@marconwps]

Mmm terramaster try to install xigmanas ?

[@Trains-With-Shane]

@@ivanmalinovski7807 I think i'll be ok given the fan that comes with it, the open form factor and the fact that there is ambient air movement where this thing is going to live. Hopefully i'll have it in a few days and can tell for sure. The usage case was to find something that pumped out less heat than my 14c/28t xeon with 6x 3.5" drives.

[@Trains-With-Shane]

@@ivanmalinovski7807 I've got it up and running. the little included fan seems to work pretty well. Now I just need to find some screws to actually attach it. The system came pre-assembled but lacks hardware to attach the fan, grill, and filter. I'll come up with something. Also in my testing just using four 256gb NVME drives in a RAIDZ it's able to sustain writes when copying to the device at 1gbt. I haven't tested 2.5 yet since I don't have that part of my infrastructure upgraded yet. It's in the works, though and I have most of the stuff I need. Also forgot to mention that i'm just running Proxmox with Cockpit in an LXC container as the NAS. And just finished standing up an Ubuntu server 22.04 VM and everything is working out just fine. Proxmox is installed on a 2.5" SSD using one of the included adapters so I could utilize all four NVME slots for the storage pool. It'll later be upgraded to either 2tb of 4tb drives. Just picked up the 256gb ones as a cheap proof of concept test set.

[@Trains-With-Shane]

So it looks like this thing is going to be plenty powerful for what i'm going to use it for. Should make for an excellent low power and/or travel server. Just need to come up with some kind of enclosure for it. Or some feet to stand it on, etc.

[@That_Stealth_Guy]

Quite an interesting little board. What has me more interested is the break out board from PCIe 3x4 to four 3x1 slots. Could that be added to a board that is more robust. I have a Asrock Deskmini B760 that has some interesting features. Intel 12-14th Gen 65W processors 1 PCIe 5.0 X4 slot 1 PCie 4.0 X4 slot 2 Sata ports (via similar break out cables) 20 GB/s USB Type C, See where my mind is going with this. It might just be worth the $150ish to get this board and do some tinkering

[@paulwoodward8265]

please do more, can it do raid5, or is that daughterboard not up to it?

[@alfblack2]

very nice board!

[@Spreadie]

I already have the exact same mini PC without the NVME adapter and 4 way daughterboard. I wonder if you can buy them separately...

[@QuincyNtuli]

Very fair review

[@poucha6542]

Hi. This might be a stupid question but, does anyone know if the 2 sata ports inside the board are able to power 3.5 hdd, or only 2.5 ones? Thanks.

[@SambitBiswas]

What’s the closest thing to DSM that we can install on this one?

[@Airbag888]

Maybe get 20 will have 10gb NIC and proper lanes to saturate the link in read and writes :) I'm guessing the SATA connectors are for 2.5" drives and don't provide 12V to 3.5" drives?

[@Andy-fd5fg]

I'm confused.... intel says the n100 and n305 only support gen 3 pcie. The products own specification sheet says the onboard M.2 slot is only gen 3 x2..... where did you get gen4 x4 from? Is that a PCIe switch chip on that daughtercard? If so, all of this would explain the poor performance when writing the the storage.

[@THEG12EG]

Do ypu tbink ypu could run truenas off usb drive??

[@theroboticscodedepot7736]

How much memory did you have in it when you did your tests?

[@AndrewFrink]

Hmm, dual nvme for l2arc, dual sata ssd for os, and one of those asm1166 sata m.2 cards for 6 hdds for bulk storage. Can i get this a itx form factor with a atx psu input. No jmb55 sata because they don't support aspm.

[@roblatour3511]

Thanks for the review. Been looking for a solution to more simply support two 3.5" external hard drives; I assume this will do the trick - is that right? Also, of note, at 8:11 you mentioned it has 2 x 10 G ethernet ports but the link to the device on AliExpress says 2 x 2.5 G.

[@roblatour3511]

@@ymeshulin your right - he said two USB 10 Gig ports - don't know how I missed that - I was assuming he was talking about the ethernet ports

[@tommybronze3451]

Hi, actually I’ve got an idea for testing system like this one: populate it with nvme drives and boot from ubuntu usb or something similar. Make a zfs array (raid5) and copy some large video file to it. Then just copy from one folder to another within that zfs array! That should tell people how goot the cpu is in terms of calculating checksums and parity data. You could setup a ram disk and copy data from the array to ram disk and the from ram disk back total the array - that way we would know the read and write performance for at least sequential data.

[@Aloha_XERO]

I’d like to see something like that asus nas concept but when i saw the thumbnail I was like thats ive been looking for but a controller that slots into a motherboard like a usb external to a evo 850 sata ssd to raid-0 to the mb direct slotusing 1 lane

[@PubgPeaks]

You can remove the seagull sound using spectral editing. Not as simple but can be done or just improve sound isolation in your studio. Btw nice video

[@nascompares]

At this point, as annoying as it is, if I removed the sound of gulls, a small % of subscribers would lynch me.... It's catch 22... So.. I'll settle for leaving them in, but also getting increasingly annoyed by them...that's healthy, right?

[@scottbrooke4896]

I'm running this system with Proxmox without the 4xNVME. E-Key 64gb boot drive at 3x1 speeds and a 2TB regular NVME at 3x4 speed for CEPH only. Putting the fan on the heat sink was required. 32gb RAM works perfectly fine. It's ok as a Proxmox node as long as you don't expect too much out of it. The 4 E-Cores are obvious at times, but normal operation is great. 3 node Proxmox cluster running CEPH for the only storage and about 3-4 VMs on this node at any time.

[@THEG12EG]

What's a e-key?

[@scottbrooke4896]

@@THEG12EG m.2 slots are keyed for different functions. The “WiFi slot” is an E-Key slot. The cool thing about it is it usually has a x1 pcie lane and regular storage will work. Slowly. Regular storage m.2 slots are M-Key.

[@THEG12EG]

@@scottbrooke4896 oh I've always wondered what that slot was called 😂

[@KS-wr8ub]

Been eying that board nog for a coupe of weeks. Would be potential candidate to become a NAS in my RV. But is it a 12 V or 19 V PSU?

[@dktol56]

12V, 3A. He briefly displays the power brick at 2:25.

[@frankwong9486]

I have purchased one also but it looks slightly different The nvme carrier board has an extra brown soft cable And the header on the main PCB is slightly changed on placement The model I ordered is a n305

[@klyxk]

I think that brown cable it possibly a power cable - on the v3 in the video you can see a red/black cable going to the daughterboard instead of the wide brown cable that comes with the earlier models

[@bankruptsee]

A HUNDRED AND FIFTY WHAT?!

[@cl-be2zs]

Would you buy this over the Asustor Flashtor 6 - I know the Asustor is more than double the price?

[@stanislavtrifan96]

This is only board with cpu(you need package and other stuff), asustor is full package

[@gbjbaanb]

TBH I'm not convinced the big heatsink is the bottom. That thing looks like it should be mounted on its side. Then you'd get a bit more heat dissipation from both cpu and nvme.

[@denvera1g1]

I'd love to see someone make a compulab airtop 3 style heatsink grid chimney cooler for this for both the CPU and the SSDs. I'd throw an actual i3 under a small version of that airtop3 cooler, or 2 or 3 of those atom N300s pretending to be an i3.

[@denvera1g1]

On the subject of ECC...... wasnt ECC supposed to be standard for DDR5? Wasnt that the big selling point during the run up to release? Been quite upset with ECC uDIMM support in so many DDR5 platforms. Did anyone catch that it took Epyc coming to AM5 for most motherboards to put any work into enabling ECC? AM4 has had far better ECC support than AM5 up until now.

[@darthkielbasa]

4:17 - heat was my immediate concern. Perhaps the standoffs can be added to the nvme side so that the device can be flipped and maintain silent operation. As you said, for $150 knicker and TWO 2.5 gbe, this is a fantastic deal.

[@hspank]

put this prompt in your favorite GEN_AI (such as perplexity pro): please describe a concrete setup including alternatives with maximum price performance for a DIY NAS setup based on the following settings: The best bang for the buck setup right now is to get a used mini PC (SFF) with enough PCI adapters and USB 3.2, plenty of RAM, and carefully tweak it for a cold/hot storage setup (& cloud backup), Add an usb-C-5Gbe for the sweet spot of NAS performance, then configure the storage pool tiers to your liking with truenas, unraid, openmv, primocache. 64GB RAM - 4 x 1GB NVME SSD - 4 x 18TB (8 x 8TB with refurbished Exos 2x18) 1 x NVME x 4 adapter 1 x SAS adapter 3GB/sec constant bitrate - generous caching wherever possible, assuming home use with few concurrent users, lots of large files, low db activity and random access.

[@felentus]

ok, so the thing about ECC. It is literally a firmware feature, it costs them nothing to enable it. That series of CPUs support in band ecc, that is uses normal dram moduls. You just lose some capacity and bandwidth.

[@axescar]

Interesting, but I decide to go another way. Ryzen 7600 with 4xnvme with x16 bifurcation and +2nvme on board. Will try to minimize power consumption. As a bonus - I can upgrade to ECC memory with this build

[@nascompares]

Sounds great...but it might melt though the desk!

[@axescar]

@@nascompares hope not, will see. Will start with regular PSU 500w platinum, but its overkill - thinking of picopsu. Will measure power consumption from the wall and then decide. Main idea is RaidZ1 array of 5 nvme, 1 bootable nvme for proxmox and one CMR 5400 HDD for backups. Hope to fit in 30w idle and 50w load with CPU limitations in BIOS.

[@wojtek-33]

ECC isn't guaranteed to work just because it's am5 and says it in the specs.

[@axescar]

@@wojtek-33 there is nice video from level1tech about it. So I did some research :)

[@JamesTenniswood]

I was tempted but that m.2 adaptor is so crippled, I think an older optiplex sff would be a better bet

[@denvera1g1]

I dont think those are ZIF(dont look like it but could be) i like this style of connector more than ZIF as i tend to damage ZIF.

[@lifefromscratch2818]

I'm glad to hear the seagulls are still healthy!

[@werecow68]

@nascompares Embrace the seagulls. They are voicing their approval of your videos.

[@BoraHorzaGobuchul]

A couple hundred more iterations, and they'll get it right. Otoh, even Synology might also get it right by that time...

[@Gonzie6]

until you mentioned it I thought the seagulls were around me. yes I also hate the evil things

[@marconwps]

Ugreen psu easy to buy but Nas in my Town it's a mission impossibile 😢

[@ItsNITREX]

I built Raspberry Pi NAS with a mix of SATA SSD’s and 2.5 in HDD’s while I wait on more SSD deals. So far so good, you can get 1Gbps stock speeds and 2.5Gbps with a USB C dongle, if your network allows it. Jeff Geerling had a video recently about it. As for the price it’s within $150-$200 for the system.

[@ItsNITREX]

Oh and also installed an e-Ink display with system stats like DateTime, IP address, CPU % and temp, Mem & Disk %

[@tommybronze3451]

I see ceph node :) Edit: can the wifi m.2 be used for boot ?

[@scottbrooke4896]

Yes, that's how I'm using it. E-key to M-key adapters work fine, but are too tall if you use an NVME in the M-Key slot. There's one place, Cervos, that makes an E-Key NVME stick.

[@tommybronze3451]

@@scottbrooke4896 thanks for the into mate. Yes I'm aware of those exotic A&E key nvme, but those are too exotic for my liking and when things go wrong - it's harder to find a replacement ... and are also expensive and have low write performance.

[@tommybronze3451]

@@scottbrooke4896 BTW, I forgot to let you know, if some thread I've seen guy dishing out a link to an amazon item which was A&E to M-key with a ribbon cable allowing to place M-key socket with mounting PCB relatively easy anywhere in the unit !

[@scottbrooke4896]

Yep, I looked at that. You’d have to rig up something to support the adapter though.

[@tommybronze3451]

@@scottbrooke4896 gaffer tape 😜 you know every bodge that works is permanent 🤣

[@boedilllard5952]

I am pretty sure I'll be dead before we see a graphite battery or an affordable 16tb SSD even though they've been talking about graphite/cabon nanotube batteries for 30 years now (with a new breakthrough every 6 months) or an affordable 16tb SSD - promised about a decade ago. And to be clear while there are 16TB SSDs they are 10 plus times the price per TB than a spindle drive. Waiting for someone to say the average user doesn't need it so it is a niche market. The average person doesn't need at 75" TV, the average person doesn't need a Lexus or Mercedes or BMW, the average person doesn't need a house, the average person doesn't need a park, the average person doesn't need liquor store - doesn't mean there isn't a market for them. OH but they are too expensive - yes - that is the point. Plasma TVs were $18,000 for a 40" 720i TV when they came out - somehow they managed to figure out despite people saying there was no demand that they could sell tons of them when they got the price down.

[@GriffonWalker]

Maybe as a pf box, but come on that drive performance is terrible. I bet Ethernet are limited too. Doesn’t matter how cheap something is if it can’t meet minimum io standards for nas performance then it shouldn’t be one.

[@JamesTenniswood]

Odds are those m.2 ssd's would be faster sitting in sata adaptors 😂

[@jblack3761]

At pcie 3.0x1 they should be about twice the speed of sata, not blazing fast, but plenty for the 2x2.5gb nics

[@zzaretube]

I like the pink wrist watch much more.

[@nascompares]

Funny thing is, it's easier to buy the bloody NAS! Look for the pink Casio with pink facia

[@MrtrenchTrucker]

WTF is a quid in freedom money? 💵🇺🇲 also, what's a "Knicker"???

[@0xKruzr]

whyyyyy do these manufacturers have an allergy to 10G networking

[@TimHunold]

Can I grill fish on that toasty beast?

[@nascompares]

Eventually....probably *sets AJA to do an infinity test of a 16GB 5K file, and prepares the salmon*

[@fcasinhas]

Please can someone explain me the "I hate seagulls" 😅

[@nascompares]

No...and you can't make me

[@DanielBethke]

Reminds me of "Seagulls! (Stop it now)" kzbin.info/www/bejne/i2rXXqaigdFmZqc

[@GroundDwellerStudioS]

If you listen carefully, and somerimes not so carefully, you can hear seagulls outside the studio interrupting his videos one or more times in many videos.

[@Arachnoid_of_the_underverse]

They keep stealing the chips

[@john_in_phoenix]

He has a seagull fetish! 😅 Seriously, they are quite loud and frequently interrupt his videos, thus the animosity.

[@CrazyDriverSwed]

If you can afford 4 NVMe SSDs I think you can afford a better NAS solution than this. With an inexpensive PCIe card you can fit all the SSDs into you main computer skip the NAS.

[@joaomiguelxs]

its a NANO NAS, of course it is.

[@darthkielbasa]

We should normalize “knicker” in place of “bucks” or “shekels” in the USA.

[@nascompares]

I mean, fair play, 'shekels' is EXCELLENT. Haven't heard that in YEARS...might add this and 'bob' into future videos...I'm positive I won't immediately get flamed for that....

[@life-on-earth]

Ooo first view lol

[@gmsipe]

The whole point of NAS is to protect data from a drive failure - which is critical, of course - and data availability. However what happens when this device fails in a couple of years? The company will probably be gone or this hardware no longer offered. Something else *may* work, but may need significant time and effort to recover. This is a big issue when choosing a NAS. FWIW, I use Synology for a variety of reasons, including my belief that they will be around down the road and that I can move my drives to newer (or even used) Synology hardware quickly. This serious issue never seems to be addressed. It also applies to all new entrants into the NAS space and established companies without significant market share.

[@GOVAUS1]

No. This is about uptime, not protection. A proper backup strategy is needed to offer protection. RAID(s) have never been.

[@john_in_phoenix]

For $150, I would order a spare. Admittedly this comes with no memory or storage, but it is in the same ballpark as a current Raspberry Pi. The I/O capabilities are light years ahead of a Pi. Use heatsinks for the m.2 drives and stick a Noctua 80mm or 120mm to blow across it, and you have a very capable device. Splitting the 4 lanes across 4 drives means that the drives will just max out the (admittedly slow) interface with little to no throttling. Just as an FYI, I also own 3 Synology NAS, and I am going to set up a 6 bay UGreen as soon as I spot a good deal on drives.

[@marcogenovesi8570]

it's a mini PC so you can just get any other (mini) PC, install the same TrueNAS or unRAID or whatever NAS OS you were using (he was using UnRAID), and import the array. The issue you raise is relevant only for NAS appliances, that come with their own OS/firmware and interface, which are often proprietary and limit array compatibility.

[@nicklozon]

NAS stands for "network attached storage", nothing to do with high availability. You can have a NAS without any redundancy if you wish, it's still a NAS. This is a compact mini-PC with a custom nvm-e expansion card, it's niche but it has plenty of use cases and is extremely affordable, even if it only lasted a couple years. Your narrow vision of what a NAS can be used for is pretty naive.

[@frankwong9486]

Nas is not to protect data from a drive failure , it is to provide storage which is attached to network 😂 If this device failed what happen to the drive and data ? Well that depends on what you are running, something like truenas / unraid / windows you can move the array disk and import them