What’s your opinion on this board? Is it worthwhile to use as a home server?
Pretty killer specs on paper. In my experience, these AliExpress boards have a bunch of minor annoyances that add up. Examples of those annoyances from my experience include:
- a complete lack of support after the sale (you’ll never get a BIOS update, or if you do, you have to get it from some dodgy Chinese Dropbox-equivalent),
- a lack of 4-pin chassis fan headers,
- outdated SATA controllers that don’t let your computer reach higher C-states, and
- non-standard CPU coolers that you’ll never be able to replace if they fail.
I own a Chuwi Larkbox X (another N100 device) and I can’t tell it to boot up after a power failure in the BIOS. So that is another thing to keep in mind.
The features sounded good enough for me to click with intent to buy (as a firewall/router), but no SFP and no PCIe expansion slot means I can’t use it with fiber. And with just one 10Gb port, the maximum it will be able to pass through is 2.5Gb/s (assuming the rest of the board is up to the task).
Looks like it would be nice for a small home server.
https://www.servethehome.com/everything-homelab-node-goes-1u-rackmount-qotom-intel-review/ would probably be a better bet for a router
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NVMe | Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage |
| PCIe | Peripheral Component Interconnect Express |
| SATA | Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage |
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
[Thread #876 for this sub, first seen 18th Jul 2024, 02:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
That looks interesting. Does anyone have a link to it? The only thing that comes up in the search results is the liliputing article.
I think you can find it for sale on AliExpress by searching for ‘Topton N100 NAS motherboard.’
I just got a standard Mini-ITX board with overspecced VRMs and a PCIe slot in the end. Good enough. At least it can sleep and behaves as expected.
