Topton NAS mainboard

[ghiglie]

Hi there!
Today I'm receiving a Topton/CWWK motherboard; I've read a lot about it on Brian Moses' blog putting together his DIY NAS 2023 Edition; then, after some aliexpress-fu, I found a discussion on  ServeTheHome Forums about various use cases. Since I'm here as a UNRAID proud user, I'd like to check it with you specifically. You can find the specs in Brian's blog pages.

I'll post my tests ASAP, in the while what do you think of it? I know it's very limited, but it looks perfect for low power build.

Feel free to ask!

Thanks all,
Marco

Curret testbed:

CW-N5105-NAS v.10 (black mask, w/ BIOS string: MW-NAS-N5105 v5.19)

32Gb Crucial DDR4-3200MHz  CL22 kit (CT2K16G4SFRA32A)

2 x Crucial P5 500Gb
4 x Samsung EcoGreen 1.00TB (HD103SI)

1 x WesternDigital Green 1.00TB (WD10EARS-00Y)

 

Edited May 31 by ghiglie
Updated hardware list

[ConnerVT]

Which flavor/processor did you get?  The N5105?  CWWK has been putting out a different model of board each week it seems (and case, and processor...).

 

I am using one of Topton's air-cooled N5105 systems for my bare metal OPNSense firewall.  There is a huge thread at STH forum on these as well.  It has worked well for me, but I don't push my router that hard at the moment.  Waiting for the symmetrical 1G that is supposed to arrive by the end of the year.  But I read about folks running Proxmox, full Windows, etc. on these units.  I'm not sure I would push my luck that far.

 

As a NAS board, it should be OK as long as you keep expectations in check.  It probably would be a good choice as the backup server I just built, considering it just sleeps for 2 weeks, then does less than 30 minutes of rsync-ing.  If I was buying the parts I might have gone this route, but I had enough leftovers for nearly the entire system.

 

The only gotcha I would watch for is there may be lack of driver support and/or compatibility with Unraid/Slackware and the hardware.  FreeBSD (pfsense/opnsense base) just started driver support for the i226 nic (opnsense = yes, free pfsense = not yet).  I'm unsure where Unraid is with this at the moment.  Internal video support?  Not sure.  I've read about folks doing microcode updates for the processor and BIOS updates emailed to them from China.  For me, I would really not wish to get that far into the weeds for a $200 computer board.

 

Looking forward to reading of your experience.

[ghiglie]

Hi @ConnerVT !
I got a N5105 mainboard, it has a CW-N5105-NAS rev. 1.0 watermark on it. Looks well built, I was expecting... well, worse, as construction.

I was looking at that passive board for a Home Assistant baremetal install, but I've ended up staying quiet  on a UDOO X86 that would be out of use. If you don't notice high temps, stressing it a bit more with some VMs wouldn't be that bad.

 

Surely I'll exercize the mainboard for some time; I spare some disks, but I'd need a proper casing... I'll see where it gets! My current build is still solid, but a bit power hungry... but definitely efficient when it comes to PhotoPrism imports, Plex decoding, *arr stack management. I'm having a problem with drives not staying spun down, but I'll keep at least as this platform gets totally trustable.

I really hope I'm not getting into that tunnel too - I could manage it, but I was to point my efforts elsewhere. BTW, the mainboard costed 160€ at the door.

 

As for now...  My SoDIMM banks is not working, so I'll have to grab a memory kit for the weekend

 

[ghiglie]

So, got the RAM!   A kit of Crucial got at the door today, plugged the picoPSU-160-XT with a 90W brick, and I'm ready to go.

First boot took a bit of time, but then onboard beeper gave me confort.
The mainboard came with v1 BIOS, definitely vast as AMI OEM ones... lots and lots of configuration options! I kept it at defaults.

So, start from USB with UNRAID: 32Gb, all disks shows up, even all 4 NICs...! I

Attaching my diagnostics.  

castle-diagnostics-20230527-2059.zip

[ghiglie]

Preclearing 3 disks, I still have two Samsungs apart; CPU temp seems not bad:

[ghiglie]

Ok, now the strange thing: adding the two NVMEs makes the emhttp segfault:

 

May 29 02:27:27 Castle emhttpd: shcmd (378): mkdir -p /mnt/cache
May 29 02:27:27 Castle emhttpd: /sbin/btrfs filesystem show /dev/nvme0n1p1 2>&1
May 29 02:27:27 Castle emhttpd: ERROR: not a valid btrfs filesystem: /dev/nvme0n1p1
May 29 02:27:27 Castle emhttpd: cache: invalid config: total_devices 0 num_misplaced 0 num_missing 0
May 29 02:27:27 Castle kernel: emhttpd[18641]: segfault at 107 ip 0000149fddc0c58a sp 0000149fdd30bbe0 error 4 in libc-2.37.so[149fddb94000+169000] likely on CPU 1 (core 1, socket 0)
May 29 02:27:27 Castle kernel: Code: 48 8d 3d 91 27 11 00 e8 c4 ba ff ff 0f 1f 40 00 48 85 ff 0f 84 bf 00 00 00 55 48 8d 77 f0 53 48 83 ec 18 48 8b 1d 6e d8 14 00 <48> 8b 47 f8 64 8b 2b a8 02 75 5b 48 8b 15 fc d7 14 00 64 48 83 3a

 

If cache is set to a single disk, so it defaults to XFS, all starts normally.

[JorgeB]

Try changing the fs from auto to btrfs before array start.

[ghiglie]

Thanks @JorgeB!
I tried almost all (setting the pool manually, mounting it... format here, format there... ), but I did not try that.... and it worked flawlessly!

I'd try RAID0, since thx NVMEs are linked with a single lane  . It's really a waste, but coherent with a low power / low budget platform.
 

[JorgeB]

3 minutes ago, ghiglie said:

and it worked flawlessly!

It's a known issue, but I only new it to be a problem with Sandy/Ivy Bridge or older CPUs, yours is much more recent, might be an architecture related issue.

[ghiglie]

5 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

It's a known issue, but I only new it to be a problem with Sandy/Ivy Bridge or older CPUs, yours is much more recent, might be an architecture related issue.

Yep, it could be. This mainboard has tons of settings in BIOS, maybe there's something like a "legacy support" enabled.
Now it's Parity-Sync'ing , I'll let it do its job.

BTW... Could you suggest a test?  I'm trying my normal operativity, but can't say if there some much more UnRAID-related test I could do.

 

[JorgeB]

I would just suggest using the server normally as you intend to do, can't think of a specific fits all test.

[ghiglie]

Thanks!

 

[ghiglie]

Besides the fan controller is not being recognized (but it's a Linux kernel limitation), so far so good.
Even Plex transcoding is working normally.

[ghiglie]

Updated to RC7 without any problems.

I haven't any "hard test", but it's quite a shame having those NVMEs at 1x each... I pooled them (BTRFS) but performance is on the low side.

Anyway, for a basic NAS with some docker apps, it's fairly good.... I wonder how the N6005 performs.

[doesntaffect]

Can you share statistics about CPU Load / Disk, NVME temps? 

How many / which docker? 

Power Consumption?

[ghiglie]

On 6/16/2023 at 2:24 PM, doesntaffect said:

Can you share statistics about CPU Load / Disk, NVME temps? 

How many / which docker? 

Power Consumption?

oops, sorry, I really dindnt' notice your message.

I didn't record the data precisely. Using Sonarr/Lidarr/Prowlarr/Deluge + Plex , it's idling at 25W with disks spun down.

CPU load is normally low, but it fulls at 100% with Plex transcoding (1 stream at time, tough).

 

With NMEs getting cheaper, having thow NVMEs disks is quite... useless; it'd work better with a single one but on a single slot with X2/X4 PCI-Ex lanes (hey, mister obvious! :D). A RAID1 isn't that slow, anyway, but quite comparable to SSD on a SATA3 port.

I'm at the end of trial period, I think... lol, still don't know if I'd replace the old config.

 

Edited June 21 by ghiglie

[sjoerd]

Just came across this thread - my cwwk board is still collecting dust after numerous attempts to get it stable... Did you need to hack in kernel parameters or was it stable "out of the box" - if so which bios (or board version if there are any versions)

 

f.y.i. i post quite some items in the topic on servethehome (as Sjoerd obv.)

 

See

 

Edited July 13 by sjoerd

[bretto13]

My board worked fine out of the box with Unraid.

[Janis.S]

What do you guys think about this NAS? It looks like they are using the same n6005 motherboard that is being discussed here. 425€ including shipping and taxes actually sounds pretty good.
I was actually planning on putting the motherboard in a Jonsbo N2 case and would be on a similar price level. But the NAS has 6 instead of 5 HDD slots and 4 fans (probably then also better temperatures than in the Jonsbo N2).
I just don't know if the power supply is any good (1U Huntkey PSU)...In the Jonsbo I would probably install a Corsair SF450 Platinum.

 

[MK_Raiden]

On 8/2/2023 at 8:37 PM, Janis.S said:

What do you guys think about this NAS? It looks like they are using the same n6005 motherboard that is being discussed here. 425€ including shipping and taxes actually sounds pretty good.
I was actually planning on putting the motherboard in a Jonsbo N2 case and would be on a similar price level. But the NAS has 6 instead of 5 HDD slots and 4 fans (probably then also better temperatures than in the Jonsbo N2).
I just don't know if the power supply is any good (1U Huntkey PSU)...In the Jonsbo I would probably install a Corsair SF450 Platinum.

 

 

I signed up to reply to this post, but also because I am building a Topton NAS at the moment.  This "NAS" looks like it is the N5105 motherboard inside the "skyarrow 6-bay NAS Aluminium chassis" (search exactly those terms in ali)

 

I considered that chassis but then I couldn't really verify how quiet it would be without modification. I ended up going with the Node 304 and it's beautiful. One thing I didn't think about was that the USB ports up front would be useless as the N5105/N6000 has no USB3 header to plug it in.

[MK_Raiden]

Oh and further to my previous post, I will be doing some power profiling soon and would love to know what BIOS settings people have used to optimise power consumption.

 

There are so many options in BIOS it probably deserves it's own thread

[enderraid]

What do you guys recommend for rack mounting this Topton board. I'm waiting to get mine, but have not yet decided if I should rack mount it or get something like the Node 304.

I'll need to use a minimum of 4 3.5" HDD.