Yet Another NAS Build
I was poking around trying to find my ‘grail’ tiny home server: ECC, 4 3.5" bays, igpu for transcodes, low-ish power consumption at idle. All of the off the shelf options give up one or the other thing, or multiple things.
Then I tripped over the Odroid H4 / H4+ / Ultra boards. They support in-band ECC since they’re embedded processor SKUs (give up some ram capacity and performance for ECC support using normal udimms), can drive four sata ports, have two 2.5GbE ports, and - if you flash the bios to do so - can take a breakout board to split the m.2 Gen 4 x4 socket into four m.2 Gen 4 x1 slots. Gives up sequential speed for capacity, but even at x1 it’s still faster than the NICs are. And, after poking around in the Dasharo user group stuff, there’s even work being done to bring coreboot to these boards. Win!
Base parts list:
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| SBC | Odroid H4 Ultra | $220 |
| Case | Audheid K3 4-bay | $80 |
| PSU | FSP Flex Guru 300W | $120 |
| ITX Adapter kit | Odroid | $15 |
| m.2->4x1 board | Odroid | $15 |
| Motherboard front panel extension cable kit | NOYITO amazon special | $9 |
| Molex Y-splitter | Startech | $6 |
| – | Total | $465 |
Add RAM and drives to taste, as with anything. In my case, 48GB RAM, and the SSDs and HDDs can come out of the spares pile and/or machines I’m not using. This sounded perfect. Alas, the implementation details matter 
The first big fail:
The 4x1 breakout board for the m.2 slot is too tall, and physically interferes with the structural support on the case. Given the design of the 2x2, that one is also likely to interfere with it. This is a case specific issue, but also even amongst Odroid’s cases you’re likely to need a net card-capable case, and at least at present I haven’t found much for aftermarket or even 3dprinted case options. Not that I have a 3d printer (yet.. )
But I was so looking forward to having metadata special vdev and a l2arc on this build. I suppose there’s always a dremel.
The second big fail:
The performance is not as good as I was hoping. I ran that CFD Benchmark ( CFD-Multiphysics Benchmark for x86 and ARM (Windows/macOS/Linux) - #42 by Molly ) on it, and it took north of 3 hrs to finish. Is it a workload specific disappointment? Yeah, probably – Passmark seems to think an N305 is as strong as my X99 system, for example ( Intel i5-8350U vs N100 vs i3-N305 vs Xeon E5-2630L v4 vs AMD Ryzen 5 5600H [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software ). But it also was only pulling 30W from the wall during that CFD test run, whereas the X99 box struggles to be under 100W at idle nevermind when doing work.
Other minor fails:
These are just my inexperience, as this is my first SBC. I’d forgotten to double check on molex connector count on the PSU, so had to get a y cable as the HDD backplane and the SBC needed one. Cue a couple days of waiting. Then realized after that arrived that the front panel IO connector (which on the case is the standard 9 pin) doesn’t line up with the GPIO on the board. Cue another couple days of waiting for wires. 
The other part is the Audheid case comes with a 2 pin DC fan that is both plugged into and wax sealed into place the HDD backplane they’re using. Bizarre choice, annoying to remove, but I’d swapped it out with a PWM fan I had in the spares pile. I have no opinion on its noisiness or not, as I pulled it before first boot. Amazon reviews do have opinions about the fan, mostly negative.
Speaking of fan noise: the FSP PSU’s fan is definitely audible. I don’t find it annoying as it’s a “yeah there’s a computer in the room doing work” noise, but if absolute silence is the goal I wouldn’t recommend this. Now if someone can explain to me why a 40mm fan is okay but GPU coil whine drives me up the wall…
The wins?
BIOS updating was dead simple to do, their wiki is great. There’s work on coreboot for this platform, which is really exciting. And it idles around 14W while running Proxmox, the 120mm fan, and a 2.5" SSD. The majority of the system’s ongoing cost is going to be in drive selection. And, the iGPU supports SR-IOV, too, from testing it out for another thread ( Intel Arrow Lake for homelab? - #12 by Molly ).
Other than that, Technitium has been perfectly serviceable these past few months. I have more issues with lancache monolithic not starting up correctly than I do with DNS. The way things should be.