The Home Server I've Been Wanting

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Music (in order):
"Wallflowers" - @badsnacks
"If You Want To" - Me
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Timestamps:
0:00 The Aoostar WTR PRO
1:47 Sponsor - Odoo
2:51 Disclaimer: I can say what I want
3:09 Specs
5:25 Quick Teardown
6:57 Price (as of filming)
7:17 First Boot And OS
8:07 Cinebench R23
8:54 Power Draw
10:18 Booting from M.2 E Slot
11:10 Proxmox and Power Draw
11:26 Jellyfin and Transcoding
12:30 SATA PCIe Pass-Thru and Drive Caddies
13:20 TrueNAS VM and Bare Metal
14:07 Full-Featured USBC
14:56 My thoughts

[adamswire]

Synology and QNAP etc are going to have to (finally) sort themselves out with all these new higher specced AND lower priced NAS devices coming on the market. About time too.

[Andy-fdfg]

Hot-swap drives = higher cost
I don't think the majority of people buying this will be too concerned it doesn't have hot-swap drives.

[유자-uz]

There's a more gentle way to remove a hard drive from this drive carrier.

Lift the black plastic part that is in contact with the hard drive, then push the drive (in the same direction you inserted) can remove it.

I wish I can attach photos to comments...

[harrkev]

This looks like it might be perfect for my needs. The big problem with building something yourself, is that you will either wind up with something more expensive, or something that's physically a lot bigger, or both. I love the functionality you get from that little of a case.

[stuffwhy]

By any chance are you able to check Plex transcoding on it? I've heard support for AMD APUs has improved recently, but only here and there and I haven't looked into it closely. It MAY be better than this Jellyfin performance.

[MarcoGPUtuber]

Hardware Haven brings the content I've been wanting.

[cheeseisgreat]

Man, $400 for a 4-Bay NAS with a more powerful CPU where I can bring my own SSD and RAM? That ain’t bad at all. Synology charges $600 for a 4-bay, so that’s definitely a very tempting offer for me.

[TheZonni]

I own one, bought it on release of N100. The box comes with all features I wanted from home NAS host. The computer runs TrueNAS on Proxmox with passthrough of SATA interface, with additional Kubernetes node. The possibilities are wide, you can also run router software thanks to 2 LAN ports and basically any software you want. I am huge fan of this form factor of computer as it is perfect for small homelab. Perfect middleground between closed NAS systems and custom NAS case. Strongly recommends, our guy received is as a gift and didn't mentioned very good post-buy support which isn't common dealing with chineese brands, but aoostar is a bit different I guess. Btw. I really hate how you remove drives here, you have even shown it, it's basically once installed never disassemble, it's very hard to extract disk

[darklord]

I've following this mahince for a while and here are some additional info:
1, It has a re-purposed board from one of its mini PC thus with all it plugs side way, and probably help reducing cost.
2, You can adjust CPU power from BIOS up to ~60w, which will unleash its full potential with rating as shown in Passmark's site. Down side is that head sink can't catch up and will throttled some while later.(Heard that ~50w is the sweet spot)
That said it's pretty powerful among recent China made NASs and good for AIO homelab + NAS

[eocoe]

This is very compelling. I bought a 4-bay Sabrent USB 3.1 DAS to connect to a repurposed old computer and—after many emails with customer service—determined that the 5V rail (stepped down from the 12V PSU) is directly connected to the USB 5V in and easily overpowered by a desktop chip, glitching the USB 3.1 controller and resulting in USB 2.0 speeds. I was actually told that this was *my* fault because I used add-in cards and it seemed to work fine with a laptop. It is really encouraging to see a system that is more capable and expandable and reliable like this for close to the same cost of that DAS and what I could get for my older system! Thank you for taking the time to review this!

[jetsonian]

I'm really surprised we haven't seen a M.2 video encoding accelerator card.

[techheck]

8:54 thank you for including power draw - so many dont include it, and with energy prices as they are here, it matters a lot

because of that, ive been thinking of using a mac mini as a homelab. it sounds quite dumb but the M chips have extremely low power draw, it comes with 10gbe, and the thunderbolt ports provide 3x pcie 3x4 on the low end, and 3x pcie 4x4 on the higher end (though thunderbolt 5 adapters dont exist yet since its so new). the main problem would be software, but as far as i was able to tell, macos supports docker & vms, and most homelab-level software already supports arm due to raspberry pis... if you were up for it id love to see a video trying to implement this - but i understand if its cost-prohibitive/simply not something youre interested in.

[doze]

Man, I'm so happy I saw this video 2 days after finishing setting up my new Ugreen NAS

[username]

honestly this is exactly what I wanted (ideally a bit cheaper since you can get full n100 motherboards for 120$), but it being energy efficient, silent and holding 4 bays makes it great.

[kingneutron]

Thanks! Really wish they would have made it hotswap (this is almost 2025 after all) but this would make a nice little Proxmox PVE or even Backup server.

[peterm.eggers]

Hotswap drives.
On Linux OSs, you should be able to force a single hard drive scan after removing the drive from the software raid array and then physically swapping hard drives. This 3 step procedure (remove drive from software raid, hotswap disks, force disk rescan) has worked on a number of Linux systems without BIOS and hardware support before, though obviously not guaranteed.

Please try, and let us know your results.

[rodolfonetto]

Awesome little device! Good price, also. And the little badge covering the LED is just perfect!

[fierce]

Okay, that cut at 3:28 made me snort laugh out loud. Nicely done!

[jlnrdeep]

9:24 the doggo really had opinions but it wasn't convinced they were relevant enough to the video, that's why the sideeye.

[mjsvitek]

14:39 depending on the wattage a power bank is capable of, it might actually work. And some power banks can pass power through them, so this could actually be a somewhat effective UPS, provided you find a powerbank powerful enough to run it and capable of output while being charged.