I have speculatively ordered this: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/325...o.order_list.order_list_main.5.21ef1802idiOKn (actually a couple that are similar but different manufacturers) and a female/2 male barrel splitter. Will let the thread know how that goes but given Aliexpress, could be a while.
12gen N-series Nas motherboard (topton, cwwk, ... )
- Thread starter Steffe
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I have today finaly ordered this psu (to replace thermaltake from 2008) i got mine for 48.48€ with free shipping, ill recive it next week. How are you happy with this psu, is fan speed constant or is it change depending of the load?
I placed my order for the CWWK version. A few of the reasons I went with that one over the BKHD:
1. I've had great luck with CWWK in the past. My CWWK OPNsense box has been running 24x7 and 100% solid for more than a year. There has been not a single hiccup.
2. I spent a long time comparing the CWWK and BKHD boards from pictures. Functionally they seem to be the same but the CWWK version appears to be a higher quality PCB with some nice details, like heatsinks added for warm components. I like seeing that because to me at least it shows some care for longevity vs minimizing cost.
3. As support for #2, the BKHD version uses an extremely cheap OEM cooling solution. The fan is even 3-pin so there is zero control. It just runs full speed all the time. Just like others here with the CWWK version I will be adding a Noctua L9i cooler and with the copper block it should be mostly passive until it hits a high load.
A couple other notes:
- I do wish the N305 was a cheaper option but I couldn't justify the cost. I am sure the N100 will be fine for what I need.
- I asked CWWK about including RAM and they quoted me $45.66 for 16GB and $86.41 for 32GB. As of today, that's right in line (slightly higher) than the price of Crucial SO-DIMM. I'll just go Crucial.
1. I've had great luck with CWWK in the past. My CWWK OPNsense box has been running 24x7 and 100% solid for more than a year. There has been not a single hiccup.
2. I spent a long time comparing the CWWK and BKHD boards from pictures. Functionally they seem to be the same but the CWWK version appears to be a higher quality PCB with some nice details, like heatsinks added for warm components. I like seeing that because to me at least it shows some care for longevity vs minimizing cost.
3. As support for #2, the BKHD version uses an extremely cheap OEM cooling solution. The fan is even 3-pin so there is zero control. It just runs full speed all the time. Just like others here with the CWWK version I will be adding a Noctua L9i cooler and with the copper block it should be mostly passive until it hits a high load.
A couple other notes:
- I do wish the N305 was a cheaper option but I couldn't justify the cost. I am sure the N100 will be fine for what I need.
- I asked CWWK about including RAM and they quoted me $45.66 for 16GB and $86.41 for 32GB. As of today, that's right in line (slightly higher) than the price of Crucial SO-DIMM. I'll just go Crucial.
I can see that being true. The CWWK one has USB-C, which would require its own PCI-e lane, whereas the BKHD one leaves out USB-C entirely. That tradeoff could let them dedicated PCIe lanes to both slots instead of sharing.
That's a good price, I ended up paying in the region of 60-70eur, though I went the lazy route and just picked an amazon listing.
PSU itself is perfect, fan is silent (though I haven't really drawn above 50W). Depending on your setup you could find yourself limited with cabling, there's 2 chains of 3 SATA connectors, 1 chain of 3 MOLEX connectors and a single PCIe 8 pin (plus 24pin and CPU pin)
As for my board, looks like my HDMI out is still sketchy (though I have been hopping OSes, so that could be causing it). CWWK sent me a BIOS iso to use though I didn't make much progress with it since my system doesn't really match their documentation. I'd also kinda like to back up my current bios in case something bricks. Does anyone have good guides for this stuff? A cursory search didn't pull much up.
Power use is something that's been in my sights too. It's idling at ~21W, which is on the high side for what I'd like. I imagine once I move the drives I'm going to see that spike back up to 30W. Which puts it almost exactly in line with my last machine. I guess the N100 GPU is better at transcoding than a 6600K in any case.
I'm running proxmox right now, but powertop just crashes when I try `--auto-tune`, and the power scaling refuses to go to anything other than `performance`
I `echo "powersave" > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu{0-3}/cpufreq/scaling_governor`, verified that it worked, then after a reboot it resets itself back to `performance`. Is there a BIOS setting for it? Or is this proxmox screwing with me?
Honestly proxmox has been nothing but a nightmare, I'm strongly tempted to just stick ubuntu on it and be done with it like I did with the current NAS. I did get powertop to show once, atleast, and it told me that the Cstates are working as expected.
This is a challenge of being on the cutting edge. Getting these boards and PCs from AliExpress we are getting hardware a few months before major manufacturers roll them out in products and we stumble into the bugs*. There was recently a major crash/panic bug in Proxmox with another one of these boards that they finally fixed once enough people had the hardware.
There have been a few other examples too of having to wait for various Linux and BSD distros to add support for this hardware. Some distros are of course faster than others.
* Even though the N100 is making it into consumer products, many of them are portable applications and not typical VM boxes. We are outliers.
Good news! This does work for this board (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SZ66W3Q). I was able to power up an SSD and an HDD
Thanks for verifying. Nevertheless I think I will be paranoid and wait for my split power lead solution with a dedicated pico PSU. Asking two tiny connectors on the motherboard to carry load for 6 spinning drives just seems crazy. Glad it's working with your smaller load though!
So i have some news for BKHD boards, if you go to Bios and then go to Chipset---->system agent configuration--->graphics configuration and set "yellow screen workoround" to enable, you will unlock all settings in bios.
Have been playing around with the BKHD-1264-NAS board. The eventual goal is to run proxmox with:
* opnsense
* TrueNas Scale
* Home Assistant
* Ubuntu server with Syncthing & Minecraft server
The board runs fine with 32GB (CT32G48C40S5) ram.
At this moment I have managed to pass through the sata ports completely to TreuNas and disks go in spin-down
The other VM's are not configured yet. But at this moment the system idles in 20 watt. In my opinion this is a little to much.
Tweaks done so far:
pvestatd stopped
powersave for the cpu
powertop --auto-tune
Anyone some bios tips? Thanks for @bugmenot so I can access all settings, but most are unclear to me... :-(
* opnsense
* TrueNas Scale
* Home Assistant
* Ubuntu server with Syncthing & Minecraft server
The board runs fine with 32GB (CT32G48C40S5) ram.
At this moment I have managed to pass through the sata ports completely to TreuNas and disks go in spin-down
The other VM's are not configured yet. But at this moment the system idles in 20 watt. In my opinion this is a little to much.
Tweaks done so far:
pvestatd stopped
powersave for the cpu
powertop --auto-tune
Anyone some bios tips? Thanks for @bugmenot so I can access all settings, but most are unclear to me... :-(
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I wanted to buy also picopsu but i plan to attach like 12 hdd's. But im glad that you manage to lower power consumption. I tested my board without all case fans connect to psu, and all hdd's spin down exept one cache ssd (running 8 dockers) and run that system with my Corsair rm850x from my main pc and i manage to get 18w idle running unraid. Now im waiting cooler master MWE 400 to test that in permenent setup.
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I recieved my BKHD n100 board the other day. All setup and running, only issue i found is that my ssd would only work in one slot (the m.2 SSD slot, not the m.2 NFF slot).
Unraid installed and its working well. Its unbelievable at transcoding. 4 streams 4k to whatever and its fine.
Anyone experienced similar with the m.2 slots?
Unraid installed and its working well. Its unbelievable at transcoding. 4 streams 4k to whatever and its fine.
Anyone experienced similar with the m.2 slots?
I'm not using the NVMe/NGFF 2280 SSD slot at the moment. But will test it later and report it back.
Update on the bkhd. I am running 6 3.5"s (12 parity, 10, and 4x 4tb). I have two nvmes. All in a fractal node 804.
Running unraid (plus).
It just works. Plex works for the kids, it transcodes to their tabs brilliantly. Home assistant has been moved to it, nice and snappy. Sabz, *arrs all working well behind a vpn. Backups configured. Google drive sync configured.
Mobo £115 (AliExpress)
Ram £45 (16 GB integral)(Amazon)
Case £80 (awd-it)
Cables (6x SATA) £5 aliexpess
Hard drives all from exiting server
PSU from existing
Power draw with disks spun down = 21 watts (about 1/2 my old ts140), it goes to sleep at night, so about 0.25 consumption per day)
If it lasts.... Perfect home nas.
I have a tbat 8 pro mini pc (Aliexpress - £95) running off-site backups in the annex to a 14tb refurb that works well. Set it up with promox to mess around with
Running unraid (plus).
It just works. Plex works for the kids, it transcodes to their tabs brilliantly. Home assistant has been moved to it, nice and snappy. Sabz, *arrs all working well behind a vpn. Backups configured. Google drive sync configured.
Mobo £115 (AliExpress)
Ram £45 (16 GB integral)(Amazon)
Case £80 (awd-it)
Cables (6x SATA) £5 aliexpess
Hard drives all from exiting server
PSU from existing
Power draw with disks spun down = 21 watts (about 1/2 my old ts140), it goes to sleep at night, so about 0.25 consumption per day)
If it lasts.... Perfect home nas.
I have a tbat 8 pro mini pc (Aliexpress - £95) running off-site backups in the annex to a 14tb refurb that works well. Set it up with promox to mess around with
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I received my CW-ADLN-NAS today and struggled with it for hours. Just like Elber posted.
- Not posting (no beep) at first startup.
- Leaving it there for quite some time, giving me a black screen and no "beep".
- Testing the RAM (Corsair 32GB 4800MT) with my Topton N100 MiniPC (proxmox and OPNsense. and it worked just fine .
- Ended up removing the SATA SSD and the 115x Thermalright cooler (maybe shorting it out? who knows....).
- Used 3 different monitors on HDMI (ended up with my 7inch RBPi-screen).
- Nothing worked.
Then I just googled and googled until I found this thread, reading it from start to the end.
I took a DP to HDMI dongle and connected my 7inch raspberrypi screen to the DP port and I finally saw the BIOS screen!!
At first I thought I received a dead board and thanks to this thread it was the HDMI-port.
Thanks!!
Now I need to set it up for TRUENAS, reconnect my old drives and my X550T1 10GBE adapter.
- Not posting (no beep) at first startup.
- Leaving it there for quite some time, giving me a black screen and no "beep".
- Testing the RAM (Corsair 32GB 4800MT) with my Topton N100 MiniPC (proxmox and OPNsense. and it worked just fine .
- Ended up removing the SATA SSD and the 115x Thermalright cooler (maybe shorting it out? who knows....).
- Used 3 different monitors on HDMI (ended up with my 7inch RBPi-screen).
- Nothing worked.
Then I just googled and googled until I found this thread, reading it from start to the end.
I took a DP to HDMI dongle and connected my 7inch raspberrypi screen to the DP port and I finally saw the BIOS screen!!
At first I thought I received a dead board and thanks to this thread it was the HDMI-port.
Thanks!!
Now I need to set it up for TRUENAS, reconnect my old drives and my X550T1 10GBE adapter.