Minisforum N5 Pro NAS

Frozennova said:
Well this all sent me down a rabbit hole I didn't necessarily need to but I've just pulled the trigger on a DIY Equivalent.

Topton N17 Ryzen 7840HS MITX Board
Jonsbo N3
350W SilverStone Flex Series FX350-G
32GB DDR5 Vengeance Grey
2x 500GB Crucial P3

I just need to decide on a HBA situation but all in all gives me a 8c/16t 8 Bay NAS for a little under £600, and I'll no doubt recoup a little back selling the Gen10 Microserver
Click to expand...
Ohhhhh this looks interesting.
What's the HBA for? Sorry for n00b q.

I have a gen 8 with unraid sat permanently switched off due to the running cost, but if I could combine my n100 mini pc (running virtual machines for home assistant, pihole and crafty Minecraft server) with a better nas solution, if be happy bunny!!
 
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Pickers said:
Ohhhhh this looks interesting.
What's the HBA for? Sorry for n00b q.

I have a gen 8 with unraid sat permanently switched off due to the running cost, but if I could combine my n100 mini pc (running virtual machines for home assistant, pihole and crafty Minecraft server) with a better nas solution, if be happy bunny!!
Click to expand...

I currently have Unraid on my Gen10 Microserver.

HBA = PCIE Sata Adapter

The N17 only has 4 onboard SATA ports so needed something to allow me to utilise 8 disks.

Speaking of which, found an IBM M1015 and a pair of SFF-8087 to 4 SATA which will do the job nicely for £55
 
Frozennova said:
Well this all sent me down a rabbit hole I didn't necessarily need to but I've just pulled the trigger on a DIY Equivalent.

Topton N17 Ryzen 7840HS MITX Board
Jonsbo N3
350W SilverStone Flex Series FX350-G
32GB DDR5 Vengeance Grey
2x 500GB Crucial P3

I just need to decide on a HBA situation but all in all gives me a 8c/16t 8 Bay NAS for a little under £600, and I'll no doubt recoup a little back selling the Gen10 Microserver
Click to expand...
Nice, keep us updated with the completed build please.
 
Frozennova said:
I currently have Unraid on my Gen10 Microserver.

HBA = PCIE Sata Adapter

The N17 only has 4 onboard SATA ports so needed something to allow me to utilise 8 disks.

Speaking of which, found an IBM M1015 and a pair of SFF-8087 to 4 SATA which will do the job nicely for £55
Click to expand...
You'll likely need some airflow over that IBM card; I had one and it got a bit toasty when I neglected to keep it in a breeze!
 
doodah said:
Nice, keep us updated with the completed build please.
Click to expand...

I'll grab some photos tomorrow as I've just quickly "thrown" it together to make sure everything works now that the motherboard has arrived. Ended up sending the PSU back and swapping it for a Lian Li SP750 as the Silverstone is FlexATX not SFF (and I'm slow and didn't realise the difference)

The N3 is tight and has some annoyances.
  • The PSU is at the front of the case with an internal Male to female power lead which means you can't access the power switch with the lid on
  • The PSU being at the front means you ideally need a Molex extension to reach the backplane (The SP750s cable just barely reaches)
  • I wasn't expecting much but the two 100mm fans included are LOUD. 2x92mm and 2x80mm BeQuiet Silent Wings on their way to rectify this, and get some airflow through the top compartment
  • Unused front panel cables can't be disconnected.
The motherboard
  • The combination of PSU and motherboard placement means you need right angled SATA cables to use the onboard SATA ports. No biggie as everything is connected to the M1015.
  • The optional cooler that comes with the N17 doesn't mount the best. There's a backplate for the cooler and the Heat spreader for the CPU and the nuts for the cooler foul on the backplate on the bottom side of the motherboard.
  • The motherboards BIOS is extremely basic.
Otherwise, everything went together well enough. Booted straight into UnRaid detected my existing disks and away we went. I don't really have anything to benchmark the CPU at the moment, but the Gen10 Microserver would peg the CPU @ 100% usage pretty much during a parity check at 90-100MB/s. This is currently sitting doing a parity check with 3-6% CPU Load doing 155MB/s.

The two Seagate Ironwolf drives are sat at 31c with the two Western Digital Reds sitting at 28c while running a Parity check

A very quick settings change in the Plex docker config in UnRaid (and installing the Radeon TOP plugin) and it's using the GPU for transcoding too.
 
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How much airflow do you get over the drives? I saw a couple of comments about the front of that case being a bit form-over-function? Do you think with 8x3.5 spinners in there the middle ones would stay acceptably cool?
 
blueacid said:
How much airflow do you get over the drives? I saw a couple of comments about the front of that case being a bit form-over-function? Do you think with 8x3.5 spinners in there the middle ones would stay acceptably cool?
Click to expand...

I would say the drives get plenty of airflow both with the included 100mm fans. There's 5x3.5" and a 2.5" SSD in there at the moment and the hottest disk during a parity check was 31c. (Forgot there was an a 3.5" not in the array in there and the 2.5" cache drive in my last post)
 
Supposedly Minisforum Tokyo reckon the N5 Pro will be available next month, could be just for the Japanese market but if it means an earlier global/Western release than previously thought - I'll take it.
 
doodah said:
Supposedly Minisforum Tokyo reckon the N5 Pro will be available next month, could be just for the Japanese market but if it means an earlier global/Western release than previously thought - I'll take it.
Click to expand...

Probably going to launch same time as the MS-A2.
 
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