if you need any questions about something basic about CWWK boards, i can probably answer some of them. I made my own media/NAS board out of a n100 based CWWK board about 2 months ago
Comment on CWWK NAS mini-ITX motherboard features six SATA connectors, three 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports
ptz@dubvee.org 5 months agoWill do!
I’m still trying to decide if I want to build a pure NAS with a board like this or go for something more powerful that can also handle transcoding and run my media server. Currently, I’m about 60% in favor of a pure, lower power NAS and keeping my media server separate as is my current configuration.
I really do need to make a decision soon, lol, as I’m very close to capacity on my current storage.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
ptz@dubvee.org 5 months ago
Cool! I don’t have any specific questions (yet), but I guess in general, what are your impressions with it?
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
outside of the few hiccups of starting to integrate various distros of linux into my life (had used ubuntu like back in 2017, but only recently used debian for this NAS, and loaded an arch-based distro onto my Framework 16) its doing pretty good. The whole purpose of my usecase was to make a tiny NAS so I needed an ITX board with at least 5 sata ports and the board fit my goal (ontop of the extra being power efficient).
I haven’t tested the limits of how many users could be streaming content off my system simultaneously yet. Ive heard ~10 1080p streams if GPU encoding is enabled (in my usecase, had to use debian testing since the current kernel of debian 12 does not include hardware acceleration for the n100).
If I had a single thing I wished it had, I wish the chips had arc based media encoders for AV1 support, so if there was one key feature that would make future variants of that line of cpus desirable in the future, it would be that.
ptz@dubvee.org 5 months ago
Yeah, the arc encoders would be nice to have. My current setup struggles when it has to transcode AV1 streams. At least it can use HW acceleration for the encode phase.
Someone mentioned driver support may be iffy. Sounds like you didn’t hit any major issues there? I’d also likely be running Debian on it and using ZFS for my filesystem/LVM. Probably boot it from NVME and use all 6 SATA connectors for the pool drives.
sharkaccident@lemmy.world 5 months ago
This CPU has quick sync so should not be a problem. I doubt you will need more than 3-4 4k to 1080 transcodes if you are remotely considering this board so it should not be an issue.
My only concern with these one off mb manufacturers is driver support in your os of choice including Linux variants.
ptz@dubvee.org 5 months ago
True. I wasn’t factoring in Quck Sync. My current media server uses that for transcoding, so should be fine on that too. Good point. Yeah, 3-4 streams is the most it ever sees at once, usually 1-2.
Also good point. Cursory checking shows the JMB585 SATA interface, i220-V intel NIC, and RTL8125B NIC should all have in-kernel driver support in recent Linux releases. Not sure about any other motherboard peripherals, but at least those seem to be supported. Definitely something to keep in mind. Thanks!