The Topton N6005/N5105 and Jonsbo N1 Are An Awesome DIY NAS Combination!

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Am I trying to win Brian Moses’s DIY NAS 2023 giveaway?!

Brian Moses DIY NAS 2023 Edition

Have you seen this thing? It looks both amazing and adorable, and it packs so much hardware into quite a tiny, power-sipping package. I exiled my homelab server to a shelf under my network cupboard on the opposite side of the house. If I had Brian’s new build, I would definitely need to make room to show it off somewhere in my home office!

If I win the DIY NAS: 2023 Edition, what would I do with it? What sort of problems would it solve for me?

Well, duh, Brian! I would do everything I am doing today, but I would do it better and faster while using less power and generating more heat!

What do I have running on my homelab server today?

I still call that first VM a NAS. I don’t actually run Samba or NFS on there anymore, but I just don’t have a better name. It runs a Seafile client to pull down an additional copy of all my data from my Seafile server at Brian Moses’s house. That extra copy is stored on an encrypted btrfs partition that takes automatic hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly snapshots.

We are generating well over a terabyte of video footage every year, and I am starting to run out of space!

What is wrong with my old homelab server?

I want to say that nothing is wrong with my old homelab server. It is doing a fine job, but it is getting quite old. I only have two mechanical hard disks connected to my server, and it still idles at more than 70 watts. That old FX-8350 is a real pig of a CPU.

DIY NAS Cartoon

In most ways, that old FX-8350 is faster than the Celeron N5105 in Brian’s new NAS build. They benchmark about the same when it comes to single-core performance, but my FX-8350 has twice as many cores, so it pulls way ahead when fully loaded. The problem is that my homelab starts pulling more than 250 watts of electricity at the power outlet when it is under full load.

That awesome new Celeron has a TDP of 15 watts. It isn’t going to be heating up the room when it is thinking really hard.

Those 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports are awesome

I pass almost all my personal data through my Tailscale network now. That means everything I move around is encrypted, which also means that I eat a lot of CPU cycles encrypting and decrypting data. My FX-8350 tops out at around 900 megabits per second when passing data through Tailscale’s encryption.

The N5105 in Brian’s DIY NAS build for 2023 has much more modern AES instructions, and it easily beats my FX-8350. I believe the N5105 can manage nearly 1.3 gigabits per second when pushing data through Tailscale.

That is fast enough to need more than my homelab server’ss gigabit Ethernet port. Do you know what the best part is? My FX-8350 has to pull more than 200 watts from the power outlet to push 900 megabits per second through Tailscale. I bet Brian’s N5105 doesn’t even make the room warmer.

Those 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports will cost me a lot of money!

I don’t have any 2.5 gigabit Ethernet gear in my house, but the prices are getting really competitive!

I would have to spend $30 putting a 2.5 gigabit Ethernet PCIe card in my workstation. I would need to spend $110 to add a 5-port 2.5 gigabit Ethernet switch to my office. Then I would need to buy a second switch to put in my network cupboard.

Winning Brian’s giveaway will cost me at least $250 in network gear!

Why you should want to win Brian’s DIY NAS 2023 giveaway!

This year’s NAS build is delightful. I have seen it. I have held it in my hands. I am envious of whoever manages to win this year.

That Jonsbo N1 Mini-ITX case is diminutive, looks awesome, and is packed as full as it can be with hard drives and other components. You can’t fit much else in there, and it would look absolutely amazing in my office.

Excited to win the DIY NAS

I have already written about how excited I am about the Toptop N5105 motherboard. Topton has packed so many amazing features into such a tiny package. That power-sipping Celeron packs a lot of punch for 15 watts. It has six SATA ports and a pair of M.2 NVMe slots, so you can pack in a ton of storage. I am probably most surprised by the FOUR 2.5 gigabit Ethernet ports. I am impressed that you can get so much from such a tiny motherboard for under $300.

It is an amazing, power-sipping, compact NAS build this year.

Conclusion

It doesn’t specifically state in the rules of the giveaway that I am not allowed to win the giveaway. It says right there in the rules that ANYBODY can win. I count as an anybody, don’t I?!

I didn’t discover the Topton N5105 motherboard or the Jonsbo N1 case, but I definitely encouraged Brian to build this year’s DIY NAS around these components. I know that Brian would agree with me that it wouldn’t be fair for me to win the NAS. He doesn’t even have to feel bad about it, because I am doing my best these days to own and operate less server gear and fewer hard disks. I would have to have to buy a stack of disks that I don’t need to fill the Jonsbo N1 to the brim!

I hope my entry into the contest encourages you to enter as well. This year’s DIY NAS build is quite badass, and I think anyone would be proud to display it among their homelab gear!

https://www.ebay.com/str/briancmosesdotcom/ “Topton N5105 NAS Motherboard on eBay”

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