Not another Jonsbo N1 Build

[cat2devnull]

Country: Australia

Price: $1070AUD or $740US (excluding drives)

Workload: Unraid (NAS, NVR, PVR, Home Assistant, Time Capsule, VMs and so much more)

I thought I would put this post together to show a real world example of a SFF home server and NAS built around the Jonsbo N1. Obviously original credit for the idea goes to the Linus team for their video but I wanted to take it further. I have seen a few other people do similar but no one is jamming in as much NVMe and there has been a lot of talk about it not working or having terrible thermals etc.
 

I originally had a SilverStone CS381 case running my home server but it was taking up 90% of the available space in my small rack and had surprisingly poor thermals.

It was running an Intel 11400 so it made financial sense to keep as much of the existing setup as possible and just migrate to a smaller case.

In the end, all I bought new was the ITX motherboard, case, a half height quad NVMe card and some flexible SATA cables. 

 

Parts:

• Jonsbo N1 Case - $199
• ASRock Z590M-ITX/ax Motherboard - $327
• Intel 11400 CPU - $229
• Noctua NH-L9i - $79
• Seagate IronWolf 12TB SATA Drives x4 - $359 each
• TeamGroup MP34 4TB x 2 - $440 each
• Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB x 2 - $245 each
• G.Skill Ripjaws 3200 (2 x 16 GB) - $129
• Glotrends Quad M.2 PCIe NVMe Adapter - $79
• ADCAUDX SATA-III Cables - $20
• Jonsbo M.2 Radiator - $5 each

A couple of interesting hardware points with the build:

• I chose the ASRock motherboard because it had dual ethernet, one for management of the Unraid host and the other is setup using VLAN trunking to talk to all the other networks (Cameras, IoT, Guest, Admin, Home). Also dual NVMe on the front of the board which is much better for access and cooling.
• The Jonsbo N1 has a limited space behind the drive backplane for routing the SATA cables. I found that standard 90deg SATA cables still put a lot of strain on the connectors. So I switched them out for thin/flexible cables from ADCAUDX.
• I considered going a PICO PSU but I couldn't find one that could supply enough current on the 3.3V line to drive 4xNVMe. Most top out at 6A with 8A peak and all high end drives use 2.5A each under load.
• There were limited choices for the Quad NVMe due to the need for half height and length had to be no longer than the ITX board (17cm).
• The choice of Intel 11400 was for the iGPU to allow for Plex transcoding in hardware (plus I already had it). I have also capped PL1 to 35w and PL2 to 65w which helps with power consumption and heat.
• I could have gone up in generation but even ignoring the additional cost of the new parts the 600/700 chipsets only support x8x8 bifurcation which reduces my expandability.

AMD would also have been an option but again, more money for all new parts and the APU models are also limited to x8x4x4 so again no advantage over the z590.

 

With an ambient air temp around 25degC, case on (but without the solid front faceplate), I get the following temps (idle / sustained load);

- CPU: 45-50/75

- NVMe SSDs: 35-40/60

- SATA Drives: 30/40

I did add an extra 120mm case fan mounted to the chassis above the motherboard to help. It sucks fresh air through the ventilation holes in the side panel and the warm air is vented out holes in the back above the motherboard IO shield. Without it the NVMe drives would sit in the high 40s when idle and go to 70+ under load. I suspect that the VRMs were also toasty. Without that case fan there is nothing to really push warm air out of the motherboard compartment. Another options would be a different CPU air cooler that sits up against the case side panel and thus only sucks in fresh air, as that would achieve the same result.
 

 

In reality there is nothing that this system does that puts it under sustained load. Everything expensive is offloaded to dedicated hardware (transcoding to the iGPU and AI to a Coral TPU).

 

As for why use all the NVMe drives. The pair of 4TB drives are in RAID1 for redundancy and host all my critical dockers, VMs and cache all the regularly accessed PVR content (the main SATA array is spun down 99% of the time). The other two 2TB drives do not need RAID and hold the NVR camera feeds (shout out to Frigate) and a Time Capsule backup of my family's many Macs.

So far I am extremely happy with the build. I don't feel like I have lost anything by stepping down from mATX to ITX. Yes the z590 motherboard came at a premium thanks to the fact that z590 is EoL and in short supply but it was still cheaper and easier than switching to something like AMD B550/5600G.

 

I've included some photos for anyone interested in building something similar.
If anyone has any thought or suggestions, feel free to comment.