My fucked up NAS journey (ongoing)
Or: computer idiot drills holes in cheap Chinese PC
Maybe you’ve heard of the Topton N1 PRO microserver/NAS, also called the AOOSTAR N1 PRO, and probably more things besides. It’s a white plastic blobby thing that looks more like a humidifier, or maybe a smart speaker, than a computer. You can buy it from a bunch of different places. I got mine from Amazon for USD 350-ish. It’s got an air intake on the bottom, a grill up top, and also two vertical 3.5“ drive bays up there, like a toaster. I was drawn to it for those bays, thinking it would make a good Unraid box. It also has a pretty respectable AMD Ryzen 5 laptop CPU, which is unusual for NASes. The few NAS boxes I’ve looked at had anemic processors that seem like they would struggle to do anything except be a NAS. So I bought it, it arrived in a sparse cardboard box (with a DisplayPort cable, which was nice of them), and I moved two 3.5“ drives from my big honking tower into it. That’s where the trouble began.
Here I’ll skim over the initial setup. It booted right from its
internal storage, which I didn’t know it had, and launched into Windows
11 setup, which I definitely didn’t know it had. I wonder how
much extra I paid for that license. After trying every key on the
keyboard (I think it’s esc), I got into the BIOS to set the
boot order. If you’re nostalgic for the spartan BIOS screens of the
’90s, you’ll love this one.
I already mentioned the grill up top to let hot air out once it’s passed over all the innards. The plastic drive caddies also have perforations for that same purpose… except they don’t work at all with 3.5“ drives installed! The drives of course fill the caddies 100%, so there’ll be no air flowing through the caddy, no matter how many holes you have. That’s bad news, because the two drives occupy the most of the internal space of the dimunitive little machine. The inside is a sandwich, where the drives form the bread, and the computer itself is the filling. The integrated CPU cooler pulls air from a gap just a few millimeters wide between the motherboard and one of the drive cages. When you put your hand over the top grill, you feel… nothing. But at least it’s whisper-quiet. After some amount of time (I’m not sure how long) at idle, Unraid was showing a temperature warning for one of the drives, which had reached 47° C. (I’d later learn maybe this wasn’t as bad as it first appeared, but the flame icon Unraid uses for the warning doesn’t exactly put one at ease.) I shut it down and started coming up with bad ideas.
To be continued…