Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

Would be nice to see what those little N100 / N150 (or big brother N305 / N350) can do with all that NVMe. Raw throughput is pretty whatever but hypothetically if the CPU isn't too gating, there's some interesting IOps potential.

Really hoping we see 25/40GbaseT start to show up, so the lower market segments like this can do 10Gbit. Hopefully we see some embedded Ryzens (or other more PCIe willing contendors) in this space, at a value oriented price. But I'm not holding my breath.

The problem quickly becomes PCIe lanes. The N100/150/305 only have 9 PCIe 3.0 lanes. 5Gbe is fine, but to go to 10Gbe you need x2.

Until there is something in this class with PCIe 4.0, I think we're close to maxing out the IO of these devices.

Not only the lanes, but putting through more than 6 Gbps of IO on multiple PCIe devices on the N150 bogs things down. It's only a little faster than something like a Raspberry Pi, there are a lot of little IO bottlenecks (for high speed, that is, it's great for 2.5 Gbps) if you do anything that hits CPU.

This is what baffles me - 2.5gbps.

I want smaller, cooler, quieter, but isn’t the key attribute of SSDs their speed? A raid array of SSDs can surely achieve vastly better than 2.5gbps.