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CWWK NAS mini-ITX motherboard features six SATA connectors, three 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports
(www.cnx-software.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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I've been putting off building a new NAS for (going on) 3 years now. Power draw was a concern since I've been trying to downsize and become more efficient with each refresh cycle. This looks really promising, and I love that it has two 2.5 Gb ethernet ports on board.
Edit: The press release says 3x 2.5 Gb ports ~~but the Amazon listing only says 2~~ Povoq's right. The Realtek is the third. The way it's listed in the Amazon description just made it hard to find. ~~Either way, that's plenty for my use case.~~
The Realtek one might be only 1gbit, but I agree it doesn't really matter.
If you order one let me know how it goes as I am also mildly interested, but for now I don't really need it.
Will do!
I'm still trying to decide if I want to build a pure NAS with a board like this or go for something more powerful that can also handle transcoding and run my media server. Currently, I'm about 60% in favor of a pure, lower power NAS and keeping my media server separate (like my current configuration).
I really do need to make a decision soon, lol, as I'm very close to capacity on my current storage.
This CPU has quick sync so should not be a problem. I doubt you will need more than 3-4 4k to 1080 transcodes if you are remotely considering this board so it should not be an issue.
My only concern with these one off mb manufacturers is driver support in your os of choice including Linux variants.
True. I wasn't factoring in Quck Sync. My current media server uses that for transcoding, so should be fine on that too. Good point. Yeah, 3-4 streams is the most it ever sees at once, usually 1-2.
Also good point. Cursory checking shows the JMB585 SATA interface, i220-V intel NIC, and RTL8125B NIC should all have in-kernel driver support in recent Linux releases. Not sure about any other motherboard peripherals, but at least those seem to be supported. Definitely something to keep in mind. Thanks!
if you need any questions about something basic about CWWK boards, i can probably answer some of them. I made my own media/NAS board out of a n100 based CWWK board about 2 months ago
Cool! I don't have any specific questions (yet), but I guess in general, what are your impressions with it?
outside of the few hiccups of starting to integrate various distros of linux into my life (had used ubuntu like back in 2017, but only recently used debian for this NAS, and loaded an arch-based distro onto my Framework 16) its doing pretty good. The whole purpose of my usecase was to make a tiny NAS so I needed an ITX board with at least 5 sata ports and the board fit my goal (ontop of the extra being power efficient).
I haven't tested the limits of how many users could be streaming content off my system simultaneously yet. Ive heard ~10 1080p streams if GPU encoding is enabled (in my usecase, had to use debian testing since the current kernel of debian 12 does not include hardware acceleration for the n100).
If I had a single thing I wished it had, I wish the chips had arc based media encoders for AV1 support, so if there was one key feature that would make future variants of that line of cpus desirable in the future, it would be that.
Yeah, the arc encoders would be nice to have. My current setup struggles when it has to transcode AV1 streams. At least it can use HW acceleration for the encode phase.
Someone mentioned driver support may be iffy. Sounds like you didn't hit any major issues there? I'd also likely be running Debian on it and using ZFS for my filesystem/LVM. Probably boot it from NVME and use all 6 SATA connectors for the pool drives.
yeah you just have to be aware that debian 12 might not by deefault, have the correct kernel needed for hardware acceleration, so youd have to go into debian testing to compile it yourself. If you attempt to cpu encode your way through things, you'd only get a couple of streams before it bogged itself down.
Gotcha. Thanks.
I'm not 100% sold on running my media server on the NAS. It's currently a separate box, and I'm still mostly leaning toward keeping it that way and letting the NAS just be a NAS.
if youre doing strictly NAS, yes, would highly recommend the cheaper cpu variants because that's not required for it.