The EVERYTHING $300 Fanless Home Server

this fanless Mini PC has four 10 gig ethernet ports five 2 and 1/2 gig ethernet ports it has a port on the back that can turn it into a Nas inside there is room for a ton of different SSD options the processor is an 8 core processor with builtin Intel quick assist acceleration and maybe the best part is that they start at under $300 making them well over ,000 less than the equivalent pfSense units we have so much to cover so let's get to it hey guys this is Patrick from s and this is the quotum Q 2033 2G 9- S10 and while that might be a crazy name some people are going to think that this is by far the best homb Nob that they've ever seen the reason for that is that instead of using a consumer grade chip whether it's an Intel Core an AMD ryzen or some of the lower-end alter Lake end processors or something like that this uses an Intel denverton processor which is the Intel Atom c3000 series The a core processor that's inside of this has things like builtin SFP plus 10 gig networking this was really designed for the 10 Gig Generation firewall Appliance era it also has plenty of connectivity for things like discs nbme ssds and in this particular unit we also get five 2 and 1 half gig ethernet ports and beyond that this also includes Intel quick assist acceleration if you're looking for something that's really a server and not a consumer platform that you're making into a server then this is definitely something that you should be looking at so you might be wondering why we have this Q 4bay Das over here well the reason for that is that this has an external storage port and I'll show you how this connects in a little bit but you can also turn this into a Nas while you're also running this as a router and by the way the cost of getting this setup is less than getting a tress mini X+ so I think a lot of folks are going to be excited by this one and before we get too far in this I just want to say thank you to all the s YouTube members who help support the St YouTube channel by subscribing down below if you could do that that helps a ton when when we go and buy all the stuff that you're going to see that we're going to put in this system I I think you guys are going to be shocked with that like always let's get to the hardware okay so taking a look at the front of the system you're going to see some things that are normal and some things that are definitely going to raise some eyebrows the first thing you see is a little power button and frankly one thing I don't like about the system is that it is pretty hard to tell when it's on next you get a VGA port and that's the display output so I mentioned earlier that this is more of a server platform rather than than a consumer desktop PC and this is a really good example you don't get HDMI ports you don't get display port anything like that you have an old school VGA port because this is made to really be headless the GPU if you can call it that that's powering this is an aspeed as 2400 now we ran geekbench and geekbench won't even go and show like uh you know any any compute benchmarks or anything like that because it doesn't doesn't have those kind of engines to be able to do that so if you're looking at something that can also be partially a gaming PC or you know display things via HDMI outputs or something like that this is the wrong option for you also and very important here is that the Intel Atom series doesn't have an integrated GPU so you don't get things like quick sync video or anything like that with this this is really designed to be a server platform not a you know like transcoding platform okay moving on we get a SIM card slot more on that in a little bit then we get a USB type-c port and probably more exciting about this by far is this sfff 887 Port now if you know the difference between sff 887 and sfff 888 this is the wrong port for an external connection these 887 ports are generally used for things like internal connectivity however it's on the outside of the chassis and the fact of the matter is that you can go and connect a short cable and use it for a Das which is what we're going to show you in a little bit you can find that section down below okay flipping the system over there are some uh some more interesting things so first off you'll see that we do have Wi-Fi antenna lead spots but we don't have a Wi-Fi card in here or wireless card in here we'll talk a little bit more about that when we get inside now the next thing that you're going to notice which is kind of fun is that over here we have four SFP plus ports now if you want to look for you know if a Nick is supported or something like that these generally are because this is an old enough platform where you know the Nick support is there but it's the Intel x553 is the Nick that this uses and so you can just plug your SFP plus adapters in here and you can get 10 gig ethernet and up to four ports now next that you're going to see that we have five ethernet ports these are Intel i225 V ports and these are V3 ports and so these aren't the i26 which is kind of a bummer frankly but on the other hand you do get better support because our it25 still the Intel it25 V uses slightly more power than the it2 6V and so this is just something that is kind of a bummer that we don't have the newest NYX okay now next to this we have USB ports we have USB 2 Port USB 3 Port you can see one is blue and one is black and so to set this up what we did was we uh you know we used a little wireless keyboard and also a ventoy disc and so the original thought was we put the little USB receiver for the Logitech wireless in the USB 2 port and then we would put the USB 3 key with ventoy in thep top USB 3 port and when we did that the wireless keyboard and mouse just did not work and so what we did is we flipped them using the wireless controller for the keyboard and mouse in the usb3 port and then the SanDisk in the usb2 port and everything worked fine and we were able to go install os's and all that kind of stuff it's just one of those little tiny quirks that we found while going through the system okay but let's keep going here there is a console Port now this is a Serial console this is not an ipmi so although this has an aspeed a 2400 this does not have ipmi out of band management that's kind of a bummer I wish did but on the other hand that would probably raise the idle power consumption by another five or six Watts or so and also increase the price of the system by $25 to $30 next to that we have a 12vt DC power input that is something that we're going to talk a lot about in the power section it's um the power on this is a little bit different than you might think but at least it's easy to go and get a 12vt DC power input if you ever need one one day okay now looking at the rest of the exterior of the system you're going to see that this is a giant heat sink case and uh it is pretty darn I mean this thing is uh definitely pretty heavy what you will not see on this unit is you won't see a fan and frankly it gets pretty darn hot to the touch it still works no problem and the Intel Atom c3000 series was designed for extended temperatures because it is an embedded part but on the other hand we ran it for 2 weeks without issues so I wouldn't say that it's something that necessarily freaks me out too too much and so looking at the bottom of the system real quick uh we get a like little made in China sticker one of the first ones that we've seen on one of these systems but then uh you know get little rubber feet that you can go put on which is nice there is a little Visa mounting uh you know like pattern here and they give you the standoffs to be able to do that you don't get a nice bracket or anything like that but I guess if you wanted to short you could but of course you want to see what's inside the system so let's get to that next okay so opening up the system you're going to see uh a couple things so the first off is that you can see that we got a envme SSD with this we got a configuration with 16 GB of memory and 512 GB nvme SSD it's a PCI gen 3 SSD it's a fisen controller SSD and one of the stranger things about about this is that the SSD is actually covered and this is done in a lot of cases for things like you know if you have embedded products it is actually a requirement that your uh ssds are actually covered like this so that way people can't like go in pull out like these things get deployed at the edge right they can't like go in pull off the Nan chips and then like reconstitute them later so that's kind of a weird little embedded thing and I wasn't really expecting to see that here also in the system you're going to see that we have two ddr4 so dim slots now a couple things first off this came with a single Kingston dim now the Atom c3000 series is a dual Channel platform number one and the second thing to keep in mind is that it did support ECC memory in fact this processor not only supports ECC memory in sodm ECC sodm format but it also supports ardm so if you have like the big motherboards like from Super Micro or another vendor that we've reviewed on the St main site you'll see that those have slots and you can actually go put registered like R dims in there and use ECC like really good CC memory in it since everything's a little bit weird with the move we ended up only putting two 32 gig dims in here and you can see that we get 64 GB no problem that is a differentiator however against some things like the n100 n305 like all those kind of Alder L end systems where you get a single channel of ddr5 you also tend not to be able to go put 64 gigs of memory in there so if you do want more memory capacity you can do that here so let's talk a little bit about the expansion first off you know we already talked about the envyme SSD that's in here but you can put a lot more underneath the two SSD slots there is another slot which I think is really for like a wire wireless card or something like that so we we don't have it configured we didn't actually test it out but that is something that if you do want to go explore it's here the next thing that you see is that above that we have our two nvme m.2 slots now we thought that they might be by four slots but they actually aren't when we did the testing or performance testing of them you can see in Crystal disc Mark that these are actually only running at pcie gen 3 by two speeds not pcie by4 speeds now aside from that we also got this little Sata cable and it provides both data and power connectivity to a SATA drive so we put a 2 tbte SATA drive in here and you can screw it onto the bottom of the chassis frankly there's not a lot of air flow on the bottom of this chassis so it does make me a little bit nervous but we did run all this stuff no problem in it so I I don't know what to tell you guys it somehow worked and let's talk about the processor in this one for a second so this is the Intel atom c3758 which is an8 core processor there's another version of this which has the Intel atom C 3758 R and then R was a refresh upgrade so we covered this on the S main site it was a refresh upgrade and there are things like more highspeed IO Lanes so if you want that I guess you know that's something that you could get to be frank though the performance difference between the two was less than 10% by far so they're pretty equivalent I would just say that there's a big jump between getting the 8 core variant which is the 3758 versus the four core variant which would be the 3558 and just talking about the processor for a second this is still a 14 nanometer processor from Intel so it is an older generation processor compared to what out there today and these processors are absolutely everywhere you find them in things like you know 100 gbit switches you find them in firewalls you know we mentioned already the neate pfSense firewalls those are good examples of where you find them you find them in things like the you know trass Minis and mini exls and all those kind of things by far one of the coolest things that this processor has in it is Intel quick assist acceleration now the quick assist is a hardware accelerator for crypto and compression and you can see we've done a bunch of stuff on this on the sh main site and one of the things that allows you to do is do offloads for those crypto and compression tasks so when you're doing those tasks you don't need to be using your CPU cores instead you can be using the accelerator and that could be important if you're using things like pfn Plus or using OPN sense or something like that that support qat by just checking a box out of the box I mean that is a huge benefit to these you can do things like run IPC VPN at a much faster speed because you have a processor like this okay now in terms of performance of this there's a couple things I think folks definitely want to know so of course you can go look up benchmarks there's tons of benchmarks out there for the Intel atom C 3758 and 58r processors you can find those all the heck over the place s has them other places have them so go look there the other thing though is that the OS support on these is awesome because they are kind of older and there's just tons of these processors out there the driver support is very good we've run pretty much everything on this we've run Windows we've buun to proxmox we've run OPN sense pfSense and trass both trass and trass scale and a nice feature is that because we are using the it you5 Fe and also we have the x553 10 gig Nick in here you have everything that you need to be able to go and run this and one of the nice things is because we are using the i225 V we have the x553 Nyx and the older generation processor that means that we are supported in just about everything now of course the performance of this Atom c3000 series processor is not going to be the same as what you'll see from something like an alder Lake n or the c5000 p5000 series of embedded processors it's definitely an older generation and in this line of embedded processors the generational upgrades is they're often not like 10 15 20% usually the upgrades in these come and they're like 70% upgrades gen on gen so that's just something to keep in mind that getting a new generation Atom Processor definitely gives you a lot more performance than we're seeing here on the other hand there are some things that you get that are nice you get a Core so you can go use like one or two for your hypervisor you can go run one or two for something like a uh like a firewall or something like that and you can run a Nas off of the others or Storage off the others so there are definitely a lot of course here and that gives you enough performance to do pretty much whatever you want now I know a lot of folks are going to say like hey can this be running my 1 gig or 2 gig firewall or something like that and of course it can if you go look at the neck gate 88200 that 8200 has the sameish processor that's in here and if you go through and you just kind of look at the numbers you're going to see that the routing performance is somewhere in the 11 to 18 gbits per second this is just slightly slower in terms of clock speed but you're going to get about the same speeds as as NE got in terms of the firewall performance you're seeing anywhere from 5 to like 18 G bits per second so you know you can pretty much use this as like a 10 gig firewall which is pretty awesome for like 300 bucks right and the other thing is if you do have access to the quick assist acceleration in whatever firewall platform you're using you can often get IPC VPN performance well into the you know over a gigabit per second range so overall the performance of this little box is absolutely phenomenal and it is way too much for a lot of folks which means that you can also do things like virtualize and then run you know different applications all on this same platform okay next let's talk about power consumption okay so the power consumption of this was uh not as good as I thought it was going to be so the overall power consumption we've seen somewhere in the 16 18 Watts at idle depending on the configuration you can easily push that into 20 you know if you're putting a lot of like nvme drives in there and dims and all that kind of stuff you're going to see about 20 16 to 20 watts as your idle and if you totally Jam this thing like 100% at a using a stress test tool or something like that you're going to see that your power consumption is going to go up into that maybe like 32 to 34 watt range so it is a little bit more than a lot of folks are going to be putting on something like a pee like plus splitter or something like that you're just not going to be able to power that cuz it's going to go a little bit too much on the other hand this is really the power behavior of the embedded Parts because the embedded Parts tend not to have like that crazy swing that you see between like you know TDP and what the actual power consumption is like you don't get those like you know 50 60 watt from like idle to Max you're getting something that's more like 10 12 15 watts or something like that between your mid and Max right so is is a a platform that can go up over 30 Watts but frankly most folks are not going to run this at 100% on a stress test 247 so you're probably going to see something more in maybe the 16 to 25 watt range in your normal operations next let's talk about this thing over here and our key Lessons Learned okay so for our key Lessons Learned I really want to talk about something that we did using this sff 887 Port so let me just kind of show you what we have have here this is a little uh qap tldd 400s which is a forb external satad Dash enclosure right and so you have your four sat Bays up here and they are hot swappable and then on the back here there's really not that much going on but there are a couple things like the big things of course that you want to know is that there is a fan to cool your drives then you have a power input but the big feature is this one right here which is an sfff 887 port and normally how this kit is sold is that you get this little qap card with an as media uh four port static controller on it which goes to your sff 888 which is this cable right here and that sff 888 cable is what you would use to connect to both the card as well as the Das but of course because we're a little bit in funky town here with these little systems we don't have an sfff 888 which is an external SATA connection on the quotum box instead we have an sff 887 so this is the sfff 887 and this is meant for internal connections really this is an sfff 8888 you can see it's a more robust metal connector it has a better latching mechanism and stuff like that it really is made for external connectivity and when we set this up everything just showed up it was super easy there was no drama no we didn't have to go in the Bios and set anything or anything like that it just worked out of the box the only thing that didn't work was one of the Western Digital 18 tab drives which decided that today was the day that it would decide to stop working we instead replaced it with a 20 terab Drive which somebody would completely give me a lot of junk if we showed a you know 18181 18 20 screenshot so we're just going to show the 18s all here but we replaced that drive and everything worked fine now one thing to keep in mind if you're thinking of a setup like this is that adding a Das like this will add a ton of power this total system when we had it all connected you can get over 60 watts of total power consumption because the Das with four Drive Bays uses about as much power as the entire system here the little quotum system but when we do the Mini PC reviews and we talk about them in terms of servers or the tiny mini micro reviews the one liter PCS and people we we talked about those in servers people always ask for things like oh I wish I could put an external 3 and 1 12 in drive for more capacity or I wish I had the ability to have multiple 10 gig Network ports or some more 2 and a half gig Network ports or if I had just you know lower power or something like that and guys this checks all of those boxes we took a screenshot in Windows where we had four 18 tbte drives we also had two nvme ssds a SATA SSD and 64 GB of memory all in the same system I mean that is an absolutely Monster not just nass not just firewall but it could easily run both now a lot of folks give me a lot of junk because they always say like you know I wish your systems had more of something and this has pretty much everything you need for a home lab setup and the total cost of this entire setup I think this was something like 300 bucks uh we spent probably a couple bucks for the cable and then we got this configured you know without the extra ssds and all that kind of stuff for uh just a little over $300 so you're talking about $700 all in but you don't have to go and buy a firewall plus a Nas device you have have it all in one and it may not be the most compact but it's actually pretty easy to work on and something else that I do want to point out that is that if you do have a like workstation or something like that where you know you want to have a Nas and you want your drives to be connected to that Nas most of the time but then maybe you want to go do a little import you want to move data or something like that well if that were the case the extra parts in this the little qap pcie card as well as the sf888 dual-sided cable right that would allow you to do that you could literally just shut this thing off pull the Das enclosure off and then go you know if you had your workstation you could plug it directly in there I mean that is a pretty cool that is a pretty cool capability guys hey guys I hope you like this look at what might be the coolest little home lab system by a long shot this has just about everything you need especially if you want to have plenty of network connectivity and also storage connectivity well this this has everything you need all in one little bundle and hey if you did like this video or you know somebody that would like this video well why don't you share it with them but also give the video like click subscribe and turn on those notifications so you can see whenever we come out with great new videos as always thanks for watching have an awesome day

Channel: ServeTheHome

Views: 284,319

Keywords: servethehome, serve the home, pfsense, firewall, router, opnsense, truenas, proxmox, virtualization, proxomox ve, vmware, intel, atom, intel atom c3758, intel atom c3758r, c3758, c3758r, qotom, qnap, qnap jbod, windows, server, home sever, homelab

Id: AKUTzjA1grE

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2024