Topton 13th Gen (Raptor Lake) from Aliexpress as a home server?

[Krzysiek]

Hello,

I'm looking for a small form factor, power-efficient, and quite a silent unit which have enough power to run ESXi with a couple of virtual machines (NAS/Plex/HA/Router/Unifi Controller).

I need dual NVME slots + SATA for drives and a minimum of 2 ethernet ports. I want to put 4TB NVME for NAS storage and 2TB NVME for ESXi and VMs. Additionally, I want to put a SATA drive for backups. And I want to put there 64GB RAM.

I've searched for a lot of MiniPC units and this Topton unit looks very interesting:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005640065862.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2pol (i7 13700H version)

It has two M.2 Pcie 4.0x4 slots, SATA expansion, a strong CPU (i7 13700H) with GPU which can do transcoding on Plex, and a Thunderbolt port for external GPU (for future expansion).
The only downside that I can see is that it supports DDR4 instead of DDR5 memory, but I can handle it.

Does anyone of you have some experience with this unit? Will it run ESXi?

 

[vamega]

I’ve been looking at this exact same device. I was thinking of putting it inside my mini-itx case and powering it with the existing PSU I have.

I want to do that in order to be able to connect 4-6 hard disks to it and run it as a NAS.

I got pictures of the mainboard and some kind of manual that I can post later.I don’t have the electrical knowledge to know if what I’m thinking is even possible.

I wouldn’t run ESXI on this, I believe VMware doesn’t plan to support processors with heterogeneous cores for a while.

 

[Zer0_C00L]

I think these are GREAT! But I do suspect we might see something like this with a more 'Networking' oriented designs in the futire.

 

[vamega]

This is the link to the store/product where I had got my questions answered.
Eglobal 2023 NEW 12th Gen Intel i9 12900H i7 12700H Mini PC NUC 14 Cores PCIE4.0 2*LAN Gaming Desktop Computer WiFi6 Windows 11

It has shots of the mainboard, showing a single CPU fan header, and some pins on the left when looking down onto the board.

I was able to get this manual from the store via chat. Google Translated Version below (original in attachment).

The dimensions are: 174*128*45mm
Which I think if removed from the case would be small enough to fit in a 3D printed backplane.

I same someone had built a Mini-ITX adapter for the ODroid, and thought something similar to that could be done here.

I think having a SATA Power daisy chain off the mother board SATA POWER pin should allow 4-6 hard drives.

I don't know how I could get a ATX power supply to power this via the 4PIN header that's present.
If anyone has got ideas I'd love to hear them.

 

[sic0048]

The only downside that I can see is that it supports DDR4 instead of DDR5 memory, but I can handle it.

You likely won't tell the difference in real world use between the two memory types - especially with that processor. Most benchmarks show DDR5 to be between 2-20% faster depending on the usage, but it is highly dependent on the use case/workload it is exposed to and I don't think what you will be running is going to "push" the limits of the RAM speed. DDR5 is also 30-50% more expensive right now, so unless you have some specific need to be running the absolute fastest RAM possible (professional level photo/video editing for example), it just doesn't make financial sense to run DDR5.

Long story short, you will be more than fine with DDR4 RAM in that machine.

 

[Zer0_C00L]

Not that it SHOULD be a real concern with someone using an i7 12th/13th Gen part, but DDR5 does use a fair bit less power to go along with the 20% performance increase.

As for the 4/5 drives, sounds like a job for BTRFS & something like Snap-RAID, just let it only spin up a few drives at a time.

 

[PigLover]

@vamega Curious about your plan to support "4-5 hard drives" with that board. It appears to only expose 2x m.2 and a single SATA port. Were you thinking of using a port multiplier on the single SATA port or plugging a multiple SATA adapter into one of the two m.2 slots? Or even more ambitious using a PCIe switch from one of the m.2 slots to drive multiple NVMe?

 

[Zer0_C00L]

If it were me I'd go with an M.2 to SATA can probably run around 5 mechanical drives at full speed via the PCIe 3.0 x1 link. Then use the on board SATA for a cache SSD. ‍

 

[vamega]

I was going to use an ASM1166 based m.2 to SATA convertor. You could also use a JMB585 based chip, both seem to be pretty well supported. This Unraid post suggests boards based on these chips. No port multipliesrs were going to be used.

Here's a link to one at Amazon, and a similar one at AliExpres for $25 and $18 respectively. Put that in the PCIE 3.0 x4 m.2 slot, and use the remaing PCIE 4.0 x4 m.2 slot for actual storage. You could do the native port for a SATA SSD cache drive, or use the even faster drive in the m.2 slot. Up to you I guess.

PS - I also saw this Thunderbolt to Quad NVME device on AliExpress that could be used to get more m.2 slots out of the thunderbolt slots on the device. It has my mind thinking.

 

[PigLover]

Sounds like a solid plan.

 

[Krzysiek]

Hello,

Thanks for the answer and useful info. Having more than a two ETH sounds great, butright now two are enough for me.
In the meantime I've asked Topton if ESXi will work. I've received that answer:



Is it posiible that VMWare added support from the 8.0 version? Or they lied to me..

 

[Zer0_C00L]

I'd say it's just the older versions doesn't support the newer hardware. Why would VMWare add support for new (& quite different) hardware to older versions of your software. Pretty sure you can find keys on GitHub.