What’s your opinion on this board? Is it worthwhile to use as a home server?

  • aseriesoftubes@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    52
    ·
    3 months ago

    Pretty killer specs on paper. In my experience, these AliExpress boards have a bunch of minor annoyances that add up. Examples of those annoyances from my experience include:

    • a complete lack of support after the sale (you’ll never get a BIOS update, or if you do, you have to get it from some dodgy Chinese Dropbox-equivalent),
    • a lack of 4-pin chassis fan headers,
    • outdated SATA controllers that don’t let your computer reach higher C-states, and
    • non-standard CPU coolers that you’ll never be able to replace if they fail.
    • nossaquesapao@lemmy.eco.br
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      3 months ago

      So true. I’d complement the first point to include a general lack of documentation. Sometimes, we can’t even know some pinout schema without trial and error.

    • Lemmchen@feddit.orgOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      3 months ago

      I own a Chuwi Larkbox X (another N100 device) and I can’t tell it to boot up after a power failure in the BIOS. So that is another thing to keep in mind.

      • SteveTech@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        3 months ago

        Looks like 2x 4 pin fan headers:

        A diagram of the motherboard

        But yeah I’ve got an AliExpress X99 board, which threw all sorts of hardware errors, had no fan speed control (100% all the time), no working hwmon sensors, and I ended up buying a used Supermicro board instead.

  • azl@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    3 months ago

    The features sounded good enough for me to click with intent to buy (as a firewall/router), but no SFP and no PCIe expansion slot means I can’t use it with fiber. And with just one 10Gb port, the maximum it will be able to pass through is 2.5Gb/s (assuming the rest of the board is up to the task).

    Looks like it would be nice for a small home server.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage
    PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
    SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage

    3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.

    [Thread #876 for this sub, first seen 18th Jul 2024, 02:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    3 months ago

    That looks interesting. Does anyone have a link to it? The only thing that comes up in the search results is the liliputing article.

    • agentsac@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      edit-2
      3 months ago

      I think you can find it for sale on AliExpress by searching for ‘Topton N100 NAS motherboard.’

      • Lemmchen@feddit.orgOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        3 months ago

        If you simply search for “N100”, sort by price and scroll down a bit, you will find quite a lot of entries for that board.

  • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    I just got a standard Mini-ITX board with overspecced VRMs and a PCIe slot in the end. Good enough. At least it can sleep and behaves as expected.