AM5 mini-server: N1 Jonsbo and... may include a bandsaw

I'm working on the perfect Home Server and I keep sort of vaguely stumbling toward something like two groups of three five and a quarter inch Drive bays and after my last video a ton of you suggested the N1 was really what I needed it was uh you know something a little interesting so I decided to see what I could build in this with am5 and I ended up not being able to resist the temptation to visit the bandsaw wait what I use this as a build guide or cautionary tale [Music] this video is brought to you by ingenious which is what I use at home for my wireless which is a very difficult situation I love it couldn't be happier I've tested both the cloud managed and the on-premise managed ingenious Hardware which is different except for now we've got a newcomer to the ingenious family the ingenious fit line of devices here I've got the fit six four by four Wi-Fi six dual band indoor access point ews 377 fit you should definitely check this one out you should check out my full review but this access point two and a half gigabit power over ethernet two and a half gigabit Wi-Fi 6E you could do 1.1 gigabit in the 2.4 gigahertz band and let me tell you this access point excels with a lot of old crafting free 2.4 gigahertz devices setting these up could not be easier even for a mesh and you don't have to decide how many devices you need in the mesh right now you just take it out of the box you take a picture of a QR code and you're good to go if you don't want to use your mobile phone there is a web management portal you can use that instead or you can do total on-premise management although at the time that I'm making this ad that's not quite done yet but that is one of the advertised features of the ingenious fit is being able to manage it on premise the underlying Hardware that ingenious has sort of co-opted for their product is extremely well built and that's what drew me to ingenious in the first place so check out that ad check out the new ingenious fit line it may be more of a fit for what you're looking for it doesn't have all of the features of the higher end access points but they're also less expensive but you still get that 4x4 antenna Hardware it's really just a software change all right on with the video so for this build should be obvious we're going to use a lot of m.2 cheat codes that's literally the name of the video m.2 cheat codes I think and that's where you use a bunch of m.2 connectivity in order to do something a little bit Unholy Jonesboro N1 you can use it in this configuration it comes with feet you can use it horizontally I reviewed this motherboard separately the b650i Oris Ultra and I talked a little bit about this build there this has 3m.2 there are a couple of am5 motherboards that actually have four m.2 but this one with its 3m.2 gives us a lot of functionality but also it gives us four SATA ports this case has five three and a half inch mechanical Drive Bays plus room to add another two and a half inch Drive be they SATA or even be they u.2 optane you can add optane to the N1 yes you totally can even a pcie four speeds with the right m.2 cheat code with the ride m.2 cheat code we can even add more slots we could turn the x16 slot into 4x4 slots although fitting them all in here will be tricky this with the pcie redrivers is what you need in order to drive a Gen 4 drive that could be optane it could be anything in the u.2 form factor three and a half inch u.2 even there's a u.3 version of this as well this is the Gen Z connector so this can technically do pcie five speeds though most of the re-drivers and stuff that you get from AliExpress or Ebay it's just Gen 4 right I'm getting ahead of myself Let's uh let's unpack if you didn't see our other video on m.2 cheat codes you should definitely check that out as I was saying storage networking whatever you need you can do with m.2 this m.2 is also a little misleading it's like I'm gonna have six full performance SATA ports no if you're running SATA ssds through this the best you can hope for through this card is about two and a half three gigabytes per second they can't even really do the full four gigabytes per second of a PCI Express 3.0 interface and it does get a little toasty needs needs some good airflow it will throttle when it gets hot but for running four drives off of the motherboard plus another mechanical Drive off of this card and maybe like two more SATA ssds this will be fine just prefer the motherboard SATA usually versus this kind of unholiness alright so for this build I've got our sff power supply and our am5 motherboard and there's there's kind of a lot crammed in here it's a little bit of a messy build I've sort of left this not in an ideal state to just show you and give you an idea for this video foreign the internal layout of this case I like the tower layout a lot better than I do the desktop layout but it's a little more dangerous if you have a you know pets you probably do want to just use this horizontally it's a lower center of gravity if this turns over like that while it's on it's going to ruin your hard drives you're going to lose whatever mechanical storage that you've got here this case comes with a hot swap Bay so you can sort of pull the drive in and out the original legendary case for this kind of a build was the fractal node 304 and yeah I know fractal's got a Micro ATX version ish of that case but too little too late in a lot of a lot of ways but the node 304 is legendary it doesn't come with the hot swap capabilities and it will hold six three and a half inch drives grouped in sets of two drives which I think was kind of a weakness of the design of that case but it would hold a two slot GPU and you know fractal do a good job blah blah blah this is a better choice for Server build with ITX for a lot of reasons and I can say that now because I've I've built in it but you know it comes with it's a little problematic because I got too much stuff crammed in here and so as I pull the drive out it gets a little caught up on the wires but you're not pulling the drives in and taking them out constantly it's just got little rubber grommets that you use for mounting the drives and if you don't overly tighten it you really don't have to pull on it very hard so okay the rubber thing it works pretty good in terms of sound dampening works pretty good for the problem that it's trying to solve and you get some some bays in here in the front that are hot swap you will probably want to re reverse the fan in the top by default it's sucking air in from the front and blowing it out the back I get why they did that in a tower configuration I've got it flipped so it's pulling air if you're going to use this in a horizontal configuration you don't need to do that I also modified this case a couple of different ways because the expansion card that I wanted to use was not physically fit Synology comes to our rescue here this is the E10 m20t1 this is a pcie card that doesn't require bifurcation support or anything like that in your bios but we'll give you a 10 gig aquantia ethernet interface and two 110 millimeter m.2 110 millimeter assuming you don't have to get to the bandsaw which I'll get to that in a second this is a great card this is fabulous it's meant for Synology nases sometimes you can pick these up on eBay there is a price premium because you're cramming this in here I don't actually recommend that anybody do this I just want to show that I did it and it can be done but I don't recommend it and what I had to do was trim the end of the card because it wouldn't physically fit and even if I could trim the mechanical stuff here it meant that it would block some of the SATA connections on the back plane so I really want my SATA connections the case could be a few millimeters taller okay this makes sense because I want 10 gigabit with 10 gigabit I was able to copy information to our 20 terabyte array you know if it's five drives big I can easily copy at about seven eight hundred megabytes per second at three drives big this is the current configuration I'm using three drives one for redundancy two for storage this gives me about 40 terabytes of usable capacity because 20 terabytes is for redundancy information I'm running true Nas on this we'll talk more about the software stack in a minute but this is mainly not a software stack video now with the aforementioned selection of cheat codes I opted to use one of our m.2 slots for a SATA controller this has six SATA ports this lets me fully populate all five connections for mechanical drives but it also lets me run some additional SATA drives down here that are ssds two and a half inch to be precise so I can have the operating system part of the drive these are just little cheap Inland from Micro Center ssds that are running my operating system but I can cram two of those in here I could probably get more than two but two's pretty easy to cram in our N1 and still have room for this it is kind of annoying that all of the cables are sticking out of the sides and you have to use right angle SATA cables and really for this motherboard setup you're going to need some double right angle SATA cables because of the way that the uh the SATA connections come off of the motherboard if you didn't check out the motherboard review be sure to check that out because there's a riser card that gives you your front panel audio connections your pcie E5 m.2 there's an m.2 on the back of the motherboard and then you've also got a connection for your SATA and that header has four SATA connections on it two that come off in the front and two that come off the top so the ones that come off the front you need some right angle SATA connections that's what I had to do here if you're going to want a special order SATA cables you might as well get the thin foil kind these are really really easy to bend they're easy to tuck in anywhere but these are also really easily damaged a lot of consumer grade SSD cables it's this kind of cable in the wire but there's a really thick plastic coating on it to sort of protect it so just if you get some of these These are server grade SATA cables if you get some of those just be careful with it and uh yeah it is worth the extra effort to order shorter SATA cables so that you're not dealing with a mess like that inside the case because taking the case on and putting it off a little bit of a headache when all the cables are trying to escape constantly be they SATA or other connection cables or even your power supply cables that are stuffed in here now we're using an EVGA 450 watt sfx power supply and that worked out fabulously this thing only draws like 280 Watts at Peak and that's with running an artificial GPU transcode that's on the Linux side it's not something that trunass does properly with jelly fan or Plex or anything with these am5 ryzen processors but that's coming soon I hope long story short the maximum power draw from this thing is well under 450 Watts the nominal power draw is 60 to 70 Watts even with mechanical hard drives in here if you're willing to get your hands dirty with a newer Linux kernel you can actually push that down even a little bit more although at that point when you're really doing that kind of stuff at a system level truenas scale may not be the operating system that you want to use to get that level of power saving I also was able to fit four optane in here usable for a striped mirrored metadata special device if you're not included into using ZFS you should get included into using ZFS it's awesome but one of the features of ZFS that's optional is being able to use ssds in our case optane ssds which are really awesome for wear leveling and they just they shouldn't wear out in it for a very long time four of them packed in here two of them on our 10 gigabit card and two of them on the motherboard so all of our m.2 slots are used here we've got four that are occupied by optane and the fifth one has got our SATA controller in it there's no free m.2 left on this platform but with that I'm able to use all of our indexes and everything from ssds so all of our file storage is on mechanical storage and all of our where is this where is that file allocation table stuff basically lives on our optane ssds and that works out really well for a media server transcode server whatever you want to call it you could use non-optane ssds for caching but I wouldn't recommend it because flash drives wear out and that's some of the busiest area of your storage medium if you do it at least use professional grade or server grade something like the Samsung 980 Pro and hopefully you're not really changing the data on your array all that much you can get away with it there are people that are definitely just using regular old nand flash devices to do it it does work just keep eye on that and maybe run with some extra redundancy you could do a three-way mirror instead of the two-way mirror that I have here but three-way mirror would would probably be a better choice if you're going to use something a little less reliable than Enterprise grade optane of course Enterprise grade optane's on fire sale right now so it's an option now you might be wondering why did I choose am5 why did I choose the 7900 and is this cooler sufficient it's like well this is a little misleading that's actually not the cooler that ships with the 7900 the cooler the ships of the 7900 will not fit in the John's bow case if you get the 7600 that'll fit in here fine but that's also not the cooler from the 7600 this is the cooler that we're using with our 7900 that's in here and it just barely is enough to keep up these are the non-x versions of these CPUs it's got a copper slug in the middle this thing does a pretty good job cooling it I would like to use an aftermarket cooler but that introduces a lot of problems one our b650i Oris Ultra the rear IO Shield is kind of tall so our CPU Cooler doesn't really fit super good with that we also don't have a lot of clearance here for our CPU Cooler be sure to check the the N1 manual to make sure that the CPU that you're the cooler that you plan to use will fit according to the manual I get the scythe I love Scythe for their creative coolers and this is a low profile downdraft cooler it's normally meant to you can you know rotate it and it's normally meant to run over the rear i o or the vrm but it's not going to work on am5 you can turn it this way and this will clear the memory it will only work with the jetect reference ddr5 which is ddr5 memory that's this tall so if you've got RGB or something like that on your ddr5 it's not going to work the other thing with this build is does it support ECC at first it did the b650i Oris Ultra with the F2 bios will post with error correcting ddr5 memory that's what this is if you look closely there's an extra chip on both sides of this dim that's because ddr5 is technically dual channel it's dual Channel but each channel is half the width of ddr4 so the number of bits per dim is the same even though this dim is technically two memory channels so it's faster and fun times uh yeah ddr5 is different just know the ddr5 is different and also know that non-air correcting ddr5 still has error correction built in but its error correction and detection for when the data is in transmission this type of error correction in ddr5 is for data at rest which is why physically there's two extra memory chips as well as data in transmission so if something is written to memory and then sometime later read back this makes sure what was read and written was the same that's something you get just for free with ddr5 as well as while it was stored in the chip that nothing changed it can detect detect big errors and fix one bit of Errors across a uh uh you know across a word boundary I guess is what we're what we're talking about but normal ddr5 can't detect errors that happen while it's stored just in transmission unfortunately with the latest 1005 or newer a Giza on this board the newer board so it's f4b or newer bios this motherboard no longer supports or will post with error correcting ddr5 very unfortunate something I hope gigabyte fixes and if they do look for a pinned comment below because this is one of the motherboards that I'm going to use to monitor the error correcting ddr5 situation so keep that in mind this cooler would work if you use low profile memory on this motherboard and it would work really well you've got just a tiny little bit of extra room in this case but the most practical solution is good old copper slug reference cooler and you can get these on eBay for about 20 bucks Cooler Master has a version of this as well you can check that out use that with this build that works fine now is it a show stopper that you're limited limited to the two and a half gigabit that's built into this motherboard after using this as a media server and book server so I would store all of my books with annotations and media and run a bunch of Docker containers and pie hole and a whole bunch of stuff on this I don't think the two and a half gigabit thing is a real limitation it's 250 megabytes per second which is about the same physical speed as you get from one mechanical hard drive most people are not going to run an SSD home network storage server and if you do it's going to be in something more elaborate than this this is small enough and quiet enough even it's even in this configuration that it would make sense in a living room speaking of noise this fan is plugged directly into this backplane for the drives and this fan runs at 100 all the time it's audible it's pretty loud you've got some extra four pin connectors on this motherboard that come off of a header this this ITX motherboard actually has three usable 4-pin fan headers and so you can plug this fan not into the drive back plane but into the ITX motherboard fan header and set up fan control customized fan profile at that point the johnsbow 140 millimeter fan in the top here is completely reasonable for this build this is the Enthusiast every person Home Server build that you want to do something Fancy with the software something really high-end have a lot of fun with it and go am5 do you need to go am5 do you need something this high-end no you could do this with a Raspberry Pi you really don't need a lot sometimes people just need storage sometimes people need media transcoding what this doesn't do and doesn't give you an Avenue for is GPU transcoding it's unfortunate but it's true it won't physically fit to have a GPU in here and that is the Easy Button solution of course that's also going to use idle power and it's not great the transcoder fortunately that's built into am5 actually very good so this has an igpu you don't need a GPU in here to hook up the console and see everything you don't need the GPU to do transcoding it's just the software support for that and Plex and jelly fan and everything else is not there yet but if this gets to into enough hands I don't think that's really going to be an issue if you like this look and this form factor but two physical mechanical hard drives would be enough for you you might also check out the reserver from Seed Studio we did a video on that it looks aesthetically almost identical to this and it's physically smaller it's just a four core system it uses notebook memory has two physical three and a half inch slots it has two m.2 slots you can still do the optane for your metadata special device with redundancy it's a really fabulous platform to build stuff on it's also very low power and very flexible very customizable it's got 3D printable accessories there's a huge fan base around seed Studios thing for your home server and it also has two two and a half gig nics built in so it's got better connectivity than this thing does out of the box not better with my hacked up 10 gig bandsaw upgrade quantia ethernet connected but you know pretty good I've got two and a half and 10 gig now with this platform all right huh huh yeah yeah now while the 7900 is something special with its 12 cores that is a monster CPU for a Home Server unless your software developer somebody's going to go nuts with software you don't need it the 7600 no X is perfect for this platform six cores 12 threads it is still a single threat performance monster and that will even run circles around a 16 core socket 2011 Xeon like a 2650 an E3 2650 just barely edges out the six core when we're talking about multi-core performance but for transcoding with the hardware assist plus CPU bound tasks plus everything else that dual socket socket 2011 this thing's got nothing on it you want to run 64 gigabytes of memory on this platform that's surprisingly affordable I actually ended up using t-force memory in this that is slower than ddr56000 because it was on sale because everybody wants to get rid of their their kits that can't do ddr56000 and so even though this is 32 gigabytes of memory I was basically free with other stuff that I was buying at Micro Center which is just okay sounds good and yet for this use case performance doesn't really suffer so in summary even if you're kind of a hardcore Enthusiast this ticks a lot of boxes you can rock 100 terabytes Plus in here plus when we've got drives that are physically larger than 20 terabytes you can sort of start out with 40 terabytes as I have here and grow over time could have more redundancy if you want you can have SSD caching if you want you can have a 10 gig ethernet interface if you want you could really do a lot with this form factor it's pretty cool the jonesbow N2 just came out that might be a better choice than this case because it's an improvement it's a newer case check out the N2 over the N1 but the N1 is also on sale so for at the time that I'm doing this video it costs less than the fractal node 304 which was the reigning Champion for like 10 years so this might be a 10-year case or the N2 or John's bow working on this Home Server thing could be an option unless I can take over the universe with the uh six five and a quarter inch Bay thing that can then sort of polymorph into whatever we need because it's got five and a quarter inch Bays I'm just not giving up on the five and a quarter inch Bay option for Home Server that'll give me the best of both worlds with ssds and and everything else with all of the flexibility because hey if you're going to run a rack server don't run an old rack server you can run 256 cores with the h.242 four nodes in here that's how we get our redundancy we just throw computers at it it's like they can't all die at the same time right right now as we march on for our Home Server stuff the software stack starts to look more and more and more generic it's just how you run it trunass is the underlying part and it's important because it gives a ZFS and some other stuff but really up here applications think about like the stuff that you want to run stuff like next cloud and ubiquity or uh Koba or some of the other stuff for your ebooks for hosting maybe you're going to run the caliber book server maybe you're going to run other books you want to host your epubs and PDFs with annotations and everything else plus also audio books maybe you're going to use the bookshelf plugin for jellyfin maybe you want to use jellyfin for your media server maybe you want to use Plex Media Server although I'd really recommend jelly friend at this point so I think we need to do a software tour of what is currently my perfect setup which is jelly fan and bookshelf and some other plugins plus next cloud and how I've got that set up because you can containerize it you can run it natively you can run it in a virtual machine how do you do it how do you make it portable the secret to that really is your file system not ZFS but how it's organized in the file system renaming the directories and everything else like that and for that I've got to introduce you to filebot is there something better than filebot I don't know we got to go on that journey together but not in this video on Windows level one there's been a look at the jonspo N1 and where I ended up for the most over-the-top builds you can do right now and the beginning of uh 2023 for five drives 100 terabytes of storage 64 32 64 gigabytes Ram whatever you want to run 96 gigabytes of RAM with the new dims that are coming out plus also using our m.2 cheat codes if you have any questions or you want to see a variation on this or you want me to try something or do some benchmarks or whatever let me know I'm hanging out in the forums okay I'm signing out and I'll see you there yeah with three mechanical hard drives 500 megabytes per second not really much of a problem over the wire almost 500 megabytes per second on our SMB share with like six percent CPU utilization yeah it's pretty good all right I'm signing out [Music] I've finally come full circle to the original Apple tech support meme one of the recordings was you saw it off the back of the motherboard and it was like yes

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 75,713

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: I60ODdWyiU4

Length: 25min 37sec (1537 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023