Wood paneling. Neat.
1 Like
I see a lot of Lian Li here, re backplanes, eschewing hot swap in favor of caddies, and so on. I like this design where the drives are on the bottom, which helps stabilize the case. I hope cooling is ok.
2 Likes
The Q26A or B are likely the best small NAS case in the 8-10 disk range that have yet to be designed. Too bad Lian Li couldn’t make enough money selling them, their panel approach is far superior to the later A76 I use now.
JonesBo sells a Lian Li A76 clone, backplanes and all. The major delta is the omission of the lockable front door. Other than that, the two units look basically identical.
1 Like
Almost all of the JONSBO NAS cases would be great… but are ruined by very bad design flaws. The N3 would be the only exception, but it supports only ITX boards.
I’m looking for something more compact than a NODE804 that can host at least 2 3.5’’ and can fit the Gigabyte MC12-LE0 and possibly full height PCIe slots. Possibly with hotswap capabilities.
The JONSBO V4 might be a choice, but again I’m sceptical about the cooling.
1 Like
If 1 GbE is enough, a Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 is the perfect low cost board for a Jonsbo N3: Mini-ITX, RDIMM, 8 SATA, i210 NIC, cheaper than the case.
3 Likes
That’s very nice for sure: 4x SATA ports + a slim SAS connector for another 4 SATA, a PCIe 3.0 x4 for a M.2 drive, IPMI, up to 128GB ECC of either UDIMM or RDIMM, a PCIe x16 slot (hopefully bifucrationable)… there is no SFP+, but that could be added later (though it could be rather wasteful given the low frequency of the CPU)… I guess the Slim SAS port can be connected to the backplane’s SATA ports with cables.
Well, I think we have it guys. Thank you all. will come back to you here in a few months… and if everyone is reading this, please feel free to post your suggestions since nothing is set in stone yet!
1 Like
This is the MJ11-EC0, which exists of course, but the one that has been scrapped to be sold for pocket change by RAM-König is the EC1 variant. EC1 was custom-crippled to be used in a GPU server and sports a single, non bifurcatable, SlimSAS 8i in place of the x16 PCIe slot (there are traces for a second 8i, but it’s not soldered on), and turning that into a usable x8 slot, while possible, is a bit of a pain.
If one understands its limitations, a MJ11-EC1 is the only mini-ITX board I know of which sports 8 SATA ports and can be found currently for less than 100E (including the SlimSAS to SATA breakout cable from eBay China).
Oh, and it should take even more than 128 GB if using RDIMM!
2 Likes
Uhm so, the EC1 motherboard has a useless SlimSAS 8i, a second (usable) SlimSAS 4i, and 4 SATA ports plus the PCIe 3.0 x4, correct?
1 Like
Correct. The 8i slot is not totally useless: It’s fairly easy to connect one U.2 drive to it with a SFF-8654-8i to 2*SFF-8639 cable (no bifurcation, so only one end will work). It is possible to bring the lines to a PCIe slot with an adapter and a 85 Ohm cable but this will not fit in a mini-ITX case (and in a micro-ATX case there are other options…) and the set will cost more than the motherboard (which may be acceptable but somehow ruins the good deal).
That’s why I wrote “if one understands the limitations…”.
1 Like
That’s a bummer… the MJ11-EC0 would have been perfect. But I guess there is no room for perfection in a ITX board that costs less than 100€.
What about something like this?
1 Like
Yes, that (or the equivalent directly out of Shenzhen) and a 85 Ohm SFF-8654 to SFF-8654 8i cable (impedence is key: 85 Ω is for PCI, 100 Ω is for SAS and both types of cable exist).
3 Likes
Mmmh… point is I want two SSDs for my jail/script pool in order to be able to spindown the HDDs: if I were to use the Jonsbo N3 I would not have the space for 2.5’’ SSDs, which means I will need to have at least two PCIe x4 slots/lanes available… I coud use the SlimSAS 4i (is there an adapter?) and the on-board m.2, but then I would waste 4 slots on the case.
Not ideal, but not many alternatives as well.
I will likely use the on-board M.2 slot for a single NVMe for the jail pool and leave the SlimSAS 4i unused for future expansion.
1 Like
If only there was an option with a x16 slot
This card converts a x16 slot (with bifurcation) into 2x m.2. 4x and an 8x slot.
1 Like
Eh, there are none… reasonably priced. I am not going to spend 800€ for a used ITX board.
1 Like
Amazing that I not yet linked the STH thread on MJ11-EC1:
Short take: MJ11-EC1 comes locked with the SlimSAS-4i as 4*SATA. Attemps to cross-flash the board with a MJ11-EC0 BIOS, or to setup hidden varables from UEFI shell, is fraught with peril, and in any case the board appears to be extremely picky with PCIe cables.
For a basic NAS use case of 8 SATA and 1 GbE with boot from M.2 NVMe, it just works and is the cheapest board one can find right now for a Fractal Design Node 304 or Jonsbo N1/N2/N3 case.
So your new build need is for a mirrorred SSD pool (SATA? NVMe?). How many HDDs? 1 GbE NIC?
2 Likes
My objective right now is to find a board that allows me to fully (or as much as possible) use the capabilities of the Jonsbo N3: this means a total of 8+ sata ports sata ports (on motherboard, from SlimSAS, from OCuLink, from HBA), possibly a M.2 slot for L2ARC, and a PCIe slot for a future 10G network expansion card.
The MJ11-EC1 gives me almost all of the above (it only lacks the PCIe for the network expansion card) since it has a total of 8 SATA ports and a single M.2 slot on the board that I will likely use for a NVMe (L2ARC or a single drive pool for my jails, the latter is more likely due to the high amount of RAM installable).
Examples: AsRock Rack X570D4I-NL or X570D4I-2T would be ideal if it weren’t for the prices. I think the MJ11-EC1 remains the best ITX choice I have, especially since the embedded EPYC might not be powerful enough to fully use a possible 10G network upgrade.
Sorry if it’s confusing.
1 Like
I do not see why embedded EPYC would struggle with 10 GbE…
“8 SATA” rules out X10SDV, short of using the x16 slot for a HBA rather than 4*M.2 on a riser card.
A2SDi-H-TF or -TP4F is likely too expensive.
2 Likes
Lower core clock speed impacts SMB performance.
By the way, in the QVL of the MJ11-EC0 I only see memory up to 32GB, even RDIMM… so a total of 128GB; did I understand wrong that each module can get up to 128GB?
2 Likes
@etorix couldst thee holp mine own po’r soul did shed light on this mystery?
“thou” - thee answers the question “to whom is the action directed”, thou answers the question “who does the action”
“help” - holp does exist as an archaic form, but of the past tense
“poor” - I don’t think there is any realistic scenario where the vowel sound in poor would be elided completely, and it’s only a single sound, rather than a combination that could be simplified into something else, e.g. to better fit the meter of what you’re writing.
Just get rid of that, it’s not doing anything.
The overall meter is also kinda weird, but I’ve always sucked at the germanic tradition of stress accent meter, so no advice from me on that one.