Mini NASes marry NVMe to Intel's efficient chip

I was about to order that GMKtek G9 and then saw Jeff's video about it on the same day. All those issues, even with the later fixes he showed, are a big no-no for me. Instead, I went with a Odroid H4-Ultra with an Intel N305, 48GB Crucial DDR5 and 4x4TB Samsung 990 Evo SSDs (low-power usage) + a 2TB SATA SSD to boot from. Yes, the SSDs are way overkill and pretty expensive at $239 per Samsung 990 Evo (got them with a deal at Amazon). It's running TrueNAS. I am somewhat space-limited with this system, didn't want spinning disks (as the whole house slightly shakes when pickup or trash trucks pass by), wanted a fun project and I also wanted to go as small as possible.

No issues so far. The system is completely stable. Though, I did add a separate fan at the bottom of the Odroid case to help cool the NVMe SSDs. Even with the single lane of PCIe, the 2.5gbit/s networking gets maxed out. Maybe I could try bonding the 2 networking ports but I don't have any client devices that could use it.

I had an eye on the Beelink ME Mini too, but I don't think the NVMe disks are sufficiently cooled under load, especially on the outer side of the disks.

Which load, 250MB/s? Modern NVMes are rated for ~20x speeds. Running at such a low bandwidth, they'll stay at idle temperatures at all times.

> (as the whole house slightly shakes when pickup or trash trucks pass by)

I have the same problem, but it is not a problem for my Seagate X16s, that have been going strong for years.

How does this happen? Wooden house? Only 2-3 metres from the road?

Yes, it is a cheaply built wooden house, as is typical in Southern California, from the 70s. The backside of the house is directly at the back alley, where the trash bins and through traffic are (see [1] for an example). The NAS is maybe 4m away from the trash bins.

[1] https://images.app.goo.gl/uviWh9B293bpE1i97

Fair point! I agree. The NAS sits in a corner with no airflow/ventilation and there is no AC here. In the corner it does get 95F-105F in late summer and I did not want to take the risk of it getting too hot.