Meet Your Next Home Server - Aoostar R1

this little server does everything okay well obviously not everything but it does do a lot of things really well you can turn this into a Naas a router a home server or even use it for some gaming in this video I'm not only going to use this little PC to do all of those things but see if they can all be done at the same time and have some fun in the process so stay tuned it's time for the holidays so why not give yourself the gift of grooming and self-care with the performance package 5.0 Ultra from today's sponsor manscaped this latest bundle features the allnew lawn mower 5.0 Ultra which includes an upgraded trimer Blade with longer and wider rounded teeth they're tough on hair but gentle on your skin but the trimmer blade is just the beginning with the new foil blade trimmer you can achieve an incredibly smooth shave there's also an upgraded LED light so you'll never just be guessing about what's going on down there the bundle also comes with my personal favorite the weed whacker 2.0 this thing literally makes nose hair a thing of the past as it works in just seconds both it and the lawn mower are ipx7 rated and come with standard USBC ports there's also some goodies for well your goodies like the crop Soother aftershave and the crop preserver ball deodorant you'll also get my favorite pair of underwear the boxers 2.0 and the shed 2.0 this is the perfect travel bag and a great way to keep your entire group setup nice and tidy if you're wanting to join over 9 million men and step up your grooming game head on over to manscaped.com to pick up your performance package 5.0 Ultra today plus if you use my code Hardware Haven at checkout you'll get 20% off plus free international shipping this Mini PC is the R1 from AAR and it features the revered Intel n100 CPU this little chip has four Alder Lake ecores and only a 6 wat TDP but can hold its own with most modern-day tasks it also comes with 16 GB of ddr4 and a 512 GB NVM SSD with Windows 11 pre-installed but that's not really what's interesting about this this Mini PC has a pretty awesome design that makes a lot of sense in my opinion if you pop off the top cover you'll find two removable 3 and 1/2 in Drive Bays that slide out the top wedged in between the two Drive Bays is the single board computer with the n100 RAM and nvme drive at the bottom is a 92mm fan that pulls in air from the bottom of the case and pushes it out the top and this design is simple but I think it's a really great use of space on the back you'll find ample IO especially compared to anything else with the chip like the n100 there's a variety of USB 2 and USB 3 ports both an HDMI and display port a USBC 3.0 port a TF card reader and dual 2 1/2 GB NYX there's a DC Barrel Jack for the included power supply but you can also power this via the USBC port with the two Drive Bays dual NYX and the n100 this already has a lot going for it but I think one great feature is just how it looks my amazing wife is usually really supportive if I ask to for example put a NZ in our kitchen which has actually happened but with something like this I probably wouldn't need to plead too much to pop it somewhere in the house it's clean and simple the only thing that really stands out is the little yellow tab on top that I think some people might find annoying however I think it looks like a cute little cic and I even popped some googly eyes on the front just to appease my her child with solid specs and a clean aesthetic I can see how something like this might be the perfect package for someone looking to get into some simple self-hosting with something like unraid and that's actually what I decided to check out first to do that I needed to open it up and remove the SSD that had windows installed getting this thing open is really simple you just remove four screws to take off the bottom plate and then the internals of the system slide out the top one little thing that I love are the feet they don't just stick on but also have these little Nubs that fit down into the screw hole to give it some structural rigidity this might not seem like a big deal but as someone who removed these feet at least 10 times while making this video I appreciated that they didn't just fall off once the adhesive was worn down there was an annoying issue with getting the case off though the cable for the system fan was just ran along the outside of this Frame rather than through what appeared to be a routing hole this meant that the cable got caught on the power button when sliding the outer case off not a huge gripe but I'm a little bit worried that if you took this case off a bunch it might actually fatigue that fan header with the internals out you can see the ram socket Wi-Fi card and m.2 slot and this actually brings up probably my biggest complaint with the R1 now first of all there's actually a very similar system from AAR called the r s as well as some older versions like the N1 Pro these both have dual nvme slots I mistakenly thought the R1 also had dual nvme slots but sadly that isn't the case this is probably due to the n100 being limited to only nine Lanes of PCI but I think AAR could have found ways to make it happen only having one nvme socket really hurts the r1's ability to operate as an unraid machine for example since you can't make a mirrored cash pool it's not the end of the world but running a system like this with an SSD cache could lead to data loss only having one drive regardless I threw in a 1 TB nvme SSD to set up as a pool and for the main storage I dropped in two 4 TB hard drives with no issues getting them out later was a bit tougher though the fit on these is really snug so it required a good amount of force to pull these drives loose now while these little Drive sleds never broke they always felt like they were about to now maybe it's just an incredibly great design but I wouldn't necessarily trust these caddies to survive a bunch of Drive swaps the BIOS on the R1 is easy to use with a decent set of features and no annoying stuff like what I dealt with on the terror Master f223 for example I booted into unraid without any issues and set up the array with both drives and made a pool with the SSD I also set up some apps like jelly Fin and crafty and everything worked great by default the 2 and2 gbit nicks were set up as a bonded interface and I pretty much saw the expect 2 and2 gbit speeds when doing Drive transfers the only issue I actually ran into was that the nvme SSD was getting pretty toasty I think this is mostly because the SSD is crammed right up next to a hard drive it seems that auar realized this since they had a heat sink attached to the nvme drive that came with the system normally gen 3 NV ssds wouldn't need any extra cooling so I'm assuming they noticed this and just used a quick and easy fix I also think the system fan might be a bit of an issue I never ran into any other temperature issues in my testing but I still think AAR could have slightly reworked the design and fit a 120 mm fan down here the 92mm fan in here is a bit on the Wimpy side and to make matters worse there's also no control of the fan speed the included fan is plugged into a four pin header but only has two wires so the lack of any sort of control makes sense however even when I plugged in other fans I couldn't get pwm control and the BIOS didn't show any fan connected this didn't make any sense to me until I noticed another header on their motherboard labeled CIS fan cn1 this isn't an actual four pin header you might expect but some other JS type connector but I'm guessing that's what the BIOS is referencing because the fan header in use is actually located on the SATA back plane that's connected to the motherboard with a pcie connection I think that header might just be supplying 12 volts with no RPM or pwm control so the fan is a bit disappointing however as long as there was a heat sink on the nvme drive I never noticed any other temperature issues and the system was nearly silent now since this system does have the two Intel 2 and 1/2 GB nxs you could really easily install something like open sense or PF sense to run your own firewall or even run proxmox and a virtualized router like what I did in this video here but at this point I didn't see any reason why this wouldn't just work so I decided to just move on to what I really wanted to try out with this system which is building the everything PC essentially my idea was to have something like what we already did with unraid with network attached storage and containers and such but also something that could function as a home theater PC for streaming media games and really just anything else you might want to do with a desktop PC now I don't want to upset anyone watching so brace yourselves I ran [Music] windows I know I know Windows is terrible and realistically could have used Linux but I wanted to do this in a way that might be more appealing and frankly realistic for the average user I also have never used windows for network attached storage or server stuff and I thought this might be a good chance to give it a shot I reinstalled the SSD that came with the system and just reused the existing Windows 11 install I set up the two hard drives as a mirrored volume and then shared a folder within the volume to the network and well Nas it's not sophisticated and there are definitely some features missing that you would get with a dedicated operating system like open media Vault or traz but it worked I also got jelly fin installed and working without any issues setting up Hardware accelerated trans coating and toone mapping worked without a hitch and honestly was way easier than anytime I've set that up on Linux and that's perfect for a slightly less experienced user once I had that working I popped it into my living room where I feel like it Blends in pretty nicely actually used it to stream the office for a bit while shooting some b-roll and even played some games while you can get away with some light gaming the n100 shows its weakness quite a bit here and you're much better off streaming games from a local gaming PC I used parseek for this and streaming games from my desktop was a breeze I also set up retro arch for some emulation and this handled NES N64 and even some GameCube titles without any issues now I didn't dive super deep into emulation but ETA Prime has some videos on similar n100 systems and it seems like these can often handle GameCube and even PS2 UL fairly well I did have a couple crashes when running retroarch when for example closing games but it never happened in the middle of a game and is most likely just the fault of retro Arch or Windows I could have tried running some other services like home assistant but that was going to get a bit messy on Windows realistically installing Linux would have been a better option for this and would have allowed the everything PC to do a bit more of everything however there are perks to running Windows and I think a really basic PC like this might be perfect for somewhat techy people to dip their toe into the self-hosting waters while still having a PC that fills other practical roles the R1 is pretty cool but there are some things I don't like I mentioned earlier that the system only has one m.2 slot and the system fan is underwhelming however I was also somewhat unimpressed with its efficiency and performance I knew the n100 wouldn't be a Powerhouse of a CPU but I was still let down at times and noticed that it would never jump up to its Max 3.4 GHz clock with normal settings I tried to improve performance by enabling the power modes both in Windows and the BIOS this allowed the CPU to boost up to its maximum 3.4 GHz when needed but the entire system was idling at 28 Watts lowering the power settings only brought the idle power draw down to 21 Watts regardless of whether it was on normal or the lowest settings possible so if you decide to get one of these I would recommend keeping the settings on normal unless you really need to get that extra bit of performance now obviously the 21 wat power draw I mentioned includes the hard drives but even if you disconnect the hard drives the system idled it around 10 watts when I reviewed the cam ruy ak2 which also has an n100 that system idled at only 6 watts to see if I could get the r1's power draw even lower I actually tried disconnecting the system fan to see if that was the culprit but it only Drew about one watt so I'm not really sure what the difference was perhaps it's the SATA back plane or the Dual 2 and2 GB NYX but it's a little disappointing that the R1 Drew 50% or so more power at idle compared to the cam rui system now realistically 3 or 4 Watts isn't that big of a deal and it's probably worth it for the two Drive bays and dual 2 and2 GB Nix there's a lot to like about this system it's got a good amount of features in a reasonably small and good-looking case it's quiet and pretty efficient and it's currently priced pretty well compared to similar options the closest alternative I could think of is the terramaster F2 223 it has dual 22 GB Nix two Drive Bays two m.2 sockets but it does have the older and slower n4505 dual core celon that Chip's going to be fine for basic Nas tasks but definitely won't be able to run as many services or handle desktop usage nearly as well as the n100 at the time of writing both the terramaster and the AAR R1 are Priced Right Around $260 the R1 is listed higher on Amazon but has the option for a $60 coupon obviously pricing fluctuat from time to time and region to region so make an educated decision on whether or not something like this makes sense for you there's also the R7 from AAR with the ryzen 5700 U and two nvme slots for just $100 more that might be a much better option if you still only need two 3 and 1 12 in Drive Bays but want more solid state storage and significantly more CPU horsepower if you're interested in any of these systems I'll have affiliate links in the description that also help support the channel and if you're interested in learning more about the n100 CPU maybe check out this video here that's about it for this video though so as always thank you guys so much for watching stay curious and I really can't wait to see you in the next [Music] [Music] one

Channel: Hardware Haven

Views: 62,391

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Id: pvsg86HGcbQ

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023