12gen N-series Nas motherboard (topton, cwwk, ... )

[chripo]

Although the ethernet controllers are showing ASPM L1 enabled, I can’t help but wonder if disabling three of them could net some power savings.

I agree, that might also help with power consumption. Personally, I'm not sure yet whether I will use one or more of the ethernet links later on.

Does the linux kernel in Unraid have full support for Alder Lake-N power management? The current Unraid release uses kernel version 6.1.64 yet I have found articles such as this that state kernel version 6.2 is needed for improved power management.

Could these tests be performed with Ubuntu or something with the latest linux kernel to see whether idle power consumption is decreased and wake on lan functions correctly?

Well, I could try to come up with a power consumption comparison on Ubuntu (maybe next weekend, but no promises). Since I never used WOL in the past, I'm not familiar with it. Maybe somebody else could step in here and test this.

 

[m11k]

The

Does the linux kernel in Unraid have full support for Alder Lake-N power management? The current Unraid release uses kernel version 6.1.64 yet I have found articles such as this that state kernel version 6.2 is needed for improved power management.

Could these tests be performed with Ubuntu or something with the latest linux kernel to see whether idle power consumption is decreased and wake on lan functions correctly?

I think the bulk of the Alder Lake-N power management support was merged in kernel 6.1: intel_idle: Add AlderLake-N support · torvalds/linux@65c0c23. Not sure how much additional improvement has come in later kernels.

 

[T!ger]

Hi all.
Just got the n100 BKHD board from AliExpress. My goal was to build a low power homelab with pfsense maybe in the future.
This board has enough sata ports and 2 nvme + the 4 2.5gb intel ports.
This is the official site.

BKHD Mini-ITX Motherboard Inside N100 processor 6 SATA slots 2 M.2 High-Speed Storage 1264 NAS MB

BKHD 1264 NAS motherboard with built-in Intel N100 processor, quad-core and quad-thread, equipped with 4 Intel 2.5G Ethernet ports, 6 SATA ports and 2 M.2 ports, suitable for network storage, big data network transmission, remote access and mini server

www.bkipc.com

There is a bios available for download but the motherboard already ships with this version.
Idle power consumption with only 1 nvme and no sata, 16gb ddr5 4800, connected to 1 Gbit port is 14w in unraid.
Not great. Messing with the bios settings doesn't do much apparently. Applying powertop autotune results in unraid crashing.
The big no go for me though is the fact that doing wake on Lan after sleep the system freezes (no boot sound, no signal on monitor, it just hangs). Don't know if it could be drivers or bios settings.
If it continues like this have to send it back.
Also there is no possibility to control the CPU fan. Stays at max speed regardless of temps.
Nice hardware I guess but software or support will be 0

Does the bios allow to set PL1/PL2 powerusage?
What type of power supply are you using to achieve a consumption of 14 watts?

 

[homebyte]

Hey guys, what do you think about the below? It is a NAS board using a 12VDC power supply brick. I am not very tech savy, would you see a problem with it when using multiples HDD (4 or 5)? Do they need power or SATA will deliver it.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006457518065.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.main.41.a9c7667eKU8nJV

 

[chripo]

I was trying to see if you had an idea of the sound dampening ability of the case. Open/closed = 50% softer or such. The only cheap drived in my region are enterprise and just concerned about noise. Paying more for lower capacity, "NAS" drives is always an option though....

Sorry for being late with my reply - my impression is that the HDD cover of the Jonsbo N3 has nearly no influence on the noise level of the system.

 

[mikecsmith]

Hi all,

I've got this board and I've definitely had a few issues with it - it's been a bit of a time sink so far...

- Couldn't get it to work with 1440p 144hz display - no output at all. Thought the board was DoA until I tested it on a 1080p Dell.
- Unraid install repeatedly crashed when running parity checks with 2x 14TB drives plugged into the JMB585 ports - was also a royal PITA getting the USB to boot.
- Moved to Ubuntu Server 22.04.3 to roll my own NAS using NFS and SMB shares, attached an 8TB WD Black external HDD formatted as exFAT but couldn't even get the HDD to register in `dmesg` as having been connected when I plugged it in (suspect its because it wasn't drawing enough power?).
- Shucked the HDD and installed it directly into the case in SATA1 (native) and got it to mount immediately.
- Have tried copying the contents of the 8TB to one of the 14TB drive so I can format the 8TB as XFS - has led to computer freezig/crashing in a very similar way to UNRAID.

I'm currently trying another copy from the 8TB drive after diving into the BIOS and finding that Aggressive Low Power Mode was enabled on the SATA controllers - I'm hoping that's the cause of the crashes.Without wanting to jinx it, I disabled it and the transfer has beaten its previous best run time by about 5 minutes now.

If anyone has any other recommended BIOS tweaks I can make I'd very much appreciate it and can't wait until I can get my hands on a BIOS to silence the POST beeps.

Cheers,

Mike


CPU: n100 version
Fan: Noctua LH-9i
RAM: Corsair 16GB DDR5 SODIMM 4800mhz
PSU: Corsair RM550 (not X)
HDD: 2x 14TB No Name SMR drives, 1x H320 8TB Enterprise drive
SSD: 2x very cheap 512GB M2 NVME drives from a Chinese manufacturer
Case: Node 304

 

[chripo]

- Couldn't get it to work with 1440p 144hz display - no output at all. Thought the board was DoA until I tested it on a 1080p Dell.

Are you sure the N100/N305 iGPU is capable of 1440p@144Hz? On a Windows 11 test installation with up-to-date drivers for the board, iGPU and monitor the highest refresh rate I get advertised is 120Hz at 1920x1080 (2560x1440@60Hz is working fine).

- Unraid install repeatedly crashed when running parity checks with 2x 14TB drives plugged into the JMB585 ports - was also a royal PITA getting the USB to boot.

No problem here with Unraid parity sync on 4x12TB HDDs. It took about 20 hours though. Booting Unraid from USB was no problem at all. But because I had some issues with the Unraid USB Creator program on Windows, I simply used the manual installation method.

- Moved to Ubuntu Server 22.04.3 to roll my own NAS using NFS and SMB shares, attached an 8TB WD Black external HDD formatted as exFAT but couldn't even get the HDD to register in `dmesg` as having been connected when I plugged it in (suspect its because it wasn't drawing enough power?).
- Shucked the HDD and installed it directly into the case in SATA1 (native) and got it to mount immediately.
- Have tried copying the contents of the 8TB to one of the 14TB drive so I can format the 8TB as XFS - has led to computer freezig/crashing in a very similar way to UNRAID.

Have you tried all of this with default BIOS settings? I'm asking because I experienced some problems with my drives (4xHDD, 1xSSD, 2xUSB) after adding an additional NVME PCIe drive today. With default BIOS settings both Unraid and Windows seem to run fine with all drives. I will try to find out which of my BIOS setting changes was responsible for my problems.

If anyone has any other recommended BIOS tweaks I can make I'd very much appreciate it and can't wait until I can get my hands on a BIOS to silence the POST beeps.

Are you sure you have the CWWK board (not BKHD/other vendor versions)? I could PM you a link with my test BIOS then, which allows to disable the POST beeps.

 

[heyelly]

Hi everyone,

my CWWK board with N100 has just arrived. Got some issue with Corsair RAM (memtest86 failing after a couple of minutes), after replacing it with Crucial everything seems good so far. Power consumption is not that good anyway, about 14-15w when not in use with just unRAID loaded with a couple of containers, 1x NVME and 2x eth connected, no video and just a Zigbee stick. I am using a picoPSU. The same configuration idles at about 8-9w on a Terramaster F2-423 so 6w less than this board.
Any suggestion? I tried enabling C-states but nothing changes at all.

Are you sure you have the CWWK board (not BKHD/other vendor versions)? I could PM you a link with my test BIOS then, which allows to disable the POST beeps.

Could you please PM me that link? I would like to disable that beep. Thanks!

 

[mikecsmith]

Thanks @chripo - all of this tested with the stock BIOS and it's definitely the CWWK variant. If you can send me the BIOS you've got I'd very much appreciate it!

After stock BIOS tests I ran some tests turning off anything power saving related - i.e. ALPM and ASPM which seemed to help - but unfortunately it's still crashed after transferring 1TB of data - double the previous best runtime but still only 25%. Have run smartctl tests on the drives and they're OK - disabling ALPM in particular also made them sound much healthier.

I haven't run memtest86 yet and seems like @heyelly has had problems with Corsair RAM so will give that a go next.

 

[heyelly]

I haven't run memtest86 yet and seems like @heyelly has had problems with Corsair RAM so will give that a go next.

You should definitely run it, I know these chinese boards are picky with RAM brands so your issues could be caused by that. Let us know!

 

[mikecsmith]

Looks like the Corsair RAM might be the issue. Reset the BIOS to defaults and set memtest86+ off this morning. Completed a single pass successfully so left it running as I know it needs a couple of passes and took the kids out. I’ve just come home to a black screen.

Time to order some Crucial RAM and to see what happens.

 

[mikecsmith]

48gb stick of the Crucial 5600mhz ram arriving tomorrow. Hopefully this passes the memtest86+ test.

I’ll probably go TrueNAS Scale with ZFS if it does.

 

[mikecsmith]

Just checked on the NAS as I didn't have time to reboot it after it failed. Super interestingly it reboot itself and automatically booted back into memtest86+ which has now detected an error on the second test. Looks like this board does not play nicely with Corsair Vengeance RAM.

 

[chripo]

[...] I'm asking because I experienced some problems with my drives (4xHDD, 1xSSD, 2xUSB) after adding an additional NVME PCIe drive today. With default BIOS settings both Unraid and Windows seem to run fine with all drives. I will try to find out which of my BIOS setting changes was responsible for my problems.

It turned out that the board doesn't like ASPM settings enabled in BIOS for the NVME PCIe device (WD Red SN700 2TB) I installed in port M2M1. So in the BIOS I had to disable the ASPM/Substates/L1 Low options for PCH-IO PCIe root port 10 (which is the corresponding BIOS entry for M2M1). Now my new NVME drive is running fine in Unraid together with my 2TB SSD drive in a ZFS mirror setup as cache pool.

I'm currently also thinking about adding another 2TB SSD to the cache pool and run the three drives in a RAID-Z1 configuration. That would give me a total of 4TB of fast cache storage while one of the drives could still fail. But I would need to connect the SSD to my last free SATA port on the JMB585 controller, so it would share its bandwidth with the other four HDD drives.

I don't expect that during normal use the HDD array and the SSD/NVME cache will both run at the same time very often. This will happen mostly at night, when the Unraid Mover copies files from the SSD cache to the HDD array. I'm currently also thinking about using ZFS snapshots on the cache and replicate these to a ZFS drive in the HDD array, but that would also happen at night.

BTW, I know that I could add a 2nd 2TB NVME, which would benefit from its own PCIe3x1 lane. But I would also lose the option to use the PCIe slot for future updates. This is something I would like to avoid right now to preserve at least some flexibility for future updates of the system.

So what do you think, is it a good idea to add another SSD to the Unraid cache pool in my case?

 

[mikecsmith]

Sorry @chripo - I'm still fairly new to NAS and working with file systems (SWE/DevOps in my day job) so I can't help you much with your query. I did notice I got better performance out of my machine with ASPM disabled across all the PCIE devices though so I'm not surprised by the post.

I'd definitely take a look at the Aggressive Link Power Management (APLM) setting too - my HDD's were much quieter/smoother with that disabled and it's enabled by default in the BIOS.

 

[heyelly]

It turned out that the board doesn't like ASPM settings enabled in BIOS for the NVME PCIe device (WD Red SN700 2TB) I installed in port M2M1. So in the BIOS I had to disable the ASPM/Substates/L1 Low options for PCH-IO PCIe root port 10 (which is the corresponding BIOS entry for M2M1). Now my new NVME drive is running fine in Unraid together with my 2TB SSD drive in a ZFS mirror setup as cache pool.

I also noticed that enabling ASPM options for port 10 causes issue with the NVME drives. Is there any way to find out what it's related to each PCI root port without trying one by one?

ASPM settings turn to default as soon as I edit something inside the bios, so this is pretty useless at the moment.

 

[chripo]

I also noticed that enabling ASPM options for port 10 causes issue with the NVME drives. Is there any way to find out what it's related to each PCI root port without trying one by one?

I did just that – disabled all the PCIe root ports one by one. It would have been a good idea to document the results and post them here, but I didn't – sorry

[...] Got some issue with Corsair RAM (memtest86 failing after a couple of minutes), after replacing it with Crucial everything seems good so far. [...]

I haven't run memtest86 yet and seems like @heyelly has had problems with Corsair RAM so will give that a go next.

You should definitely run it, I know these chinese boards are picky with RAM brands so your issues could be caused by that. Let us know!

Looks like the Corsair RAM might be the issue. Reset the BIOS to defaults and set memtest86+ off this morning. Completed a single pass successfully so left it running as I know it needs a couple of passes and took the kids out. I’ve just come home to a black screen.

Since both of you had stability issues most likely related to RAM, I started another Memtest86 run on my build (with a Crucial CT48G56C46S5 5600MHz 48GB stick) yesterday and stopped it after running for 14 hours without any errors. I also started Prime95 Blend tests (mix of CPU + RAM tests) about an hour ago and will let it run again overnight.

I also made sure that the memory is running at 5600MHz, because Memtest86 only showed 2800MHz. But that's okay, because double data rate (DDR) RAM does two transactions per clock cycle. So 2800MHz, as shown by Memtest86, is indeed the correct "physical" RAM frequency, but board and RAM vendors commonly use the "double" value of 5600MHz (for marketing reasons).

 

[m11k]

This board has been pretty unstable for me. I think I'm going to return it to the manufacturer (a pain with Aliexpress). I can only get the board to boot Linux (>= kernel 6.1) with one of the two following changes:
1. Add a kernel command line option: 'intel_idle.max_cstates=2'.
2. Disable Turbo mode in the BIOS

Without one of these two mitigations, the board hard resets (power off/on) right after the kernel starts booting.
Disabling Turbo mode has a pretty significant effect on performance, and I don't like the idea of needing to modify the kernel boot parameters every time I install an OS (it also seems like something that might stop working in a future kernel version). Kinda sounds like a marginal signal or power integrity problem on the board.

Its unfortunate. I do like this board otherwise, but I don't want to put something into production that's going to be unstable (that's the problem with my older ARM-based NAS and why I'm replacing it). The CWWK aliexpress site is out of stock on the N305 boards, so they can't send me a replacement. I could buy another one from another vendor, but the price has gone up by about $70 since I bought this one, so I'm not sure if its worth it. I'm thinking about buying one of the N100 boards. I don't need the performance, as this is a NAS-only. I'm not running any compute workloads on it. However after this experience I'm also worried about the stability of the N100 boards. Hoping that I just got a bad one, and if I buy another one it will be fine. Also debating buying the Asus N100I-D instead of this one, but I would need to add a SATA controller, would need to buy DDR4 RAM, and would be stuck with gigabit instead of 2.5GB.

 

[heyelly]

This board has been pretty unstable for me. I think I'm going to return it to the manufacturer (a pain with Aliexpress). I can only get the board to boot Linux (>= kernel 6.1) with one of the two following changes:
1. Add a kernel command line option: 'intel_idle.max_cstates=2'.
2. Disable Turbo mode in the BIOS

Without one of these two mitigations, the board hard resets (power off/on) right after the kernel starts booting.
Disabling Turbo mode has a pretty significant effect on performance, and I don't like the idea of needing to modify the kernel boot parameters every time I install an OS (it also seems like something that might stop working in a future kernel version). Kinda sounds like a marginal signal or power integrity problem on the board.

Its unfortunate. I do like this board otherwise, but I don't want to put something into production that's going to be unstable (that's the problem with my older ARM-based NAS and why I'm replacing it). The CWWK aliexpress site is out of stock on the N305 boards, so they can't send me a replacement. I could buy another one from another vendor, but the price has gone up by about $70 since I bought this one, so I'm not sure if its worth it. I'm thinking about buying one of the N100 boards. I don't need the performance, as this is a NAS-only. I'm not running any compute workloads on it. However after this experience I'm also worried about the stability of the N100 boards. Hoping that I just got a bad one, and if I buy another one it will be fine. Also debating buying the Asus N100I-D instead of this one, but I would need to add a SATA controller, would need to buy DDR4 RAM, and would be stuck with gigabit instead of 2.5GB.

This board is becoming a real nightmare, pretty unstable for me too. The seller on AliExpress wanted me to ship it back to China (quite expensive from Italy) and refused to pay for the shipment so I opened a dispute on PayPal.
This morning I was not able to access the unRAID gui anymore and unRAID itself won't start unless I disabled CPU c-states. I tried installing Proxmox and it doesn't even boot with c-states enabled. I wasn't able to boot even with them off. I had to phisically remove my second NVME from the second slot. That is pretty incredible, this board sucks.

Let's see what happen with PayPal.

But now, I don't know what to do. I need to replace my Terramaster F2-423 ASAP. Any suggestion?

 

[chripo]

I also started Prime95 Blend tests (mix of CPU + RAM tests) about an hour ago and will let it run again overnight.

I just finished the Prime95 run after 23.5 hours and had no errors at all So I guess either the board is really picky with RAM sticks in general or some of you (@heyelly @m11k @mikecsmith) had really bad luck with faulty boards. Fingers crossed that you all find good solutions to your problems!

Edit: I also successfully did a full parity rebuild on my Unraid array (4x12TB HDD) about two days ago, which again took about 20 hours. No problems at all.