Tests and guides arround HTPC / NUC and NAS
HTPC / NUC
Our choice of best hardware for the mediacenter software Kodi.
Self-Build NAS
NAS solutions for almost all needs - AES-Ni, ECC-Memory and energy efficient.
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NAS Advanced 3.0 with Kaby-Lake 4-Thread Pentium, 6x SATA and M.2
This is the third version of our guide for a medium to large-sized NAS. As well as showing a 30 % performance increase over its predecessor, this one also allows you to incorporate an M.2 hard drive as a system disk.The 6 SATA ports now all work to the newest SATA3/6G standard. The new Kaby-Lake architecture is only a slight improvement on its predecessor, Skylake.
Apart from an average of 200 MHz more clock speed and the fact that Kaby-Lake has finally integrated HEVC (H.265) into its hardware, performance per cycle is identical to that of Skylake. The winners are the new Pentium processors which now support hy... continue reading
ASRock J4205-ITX Test – Apollo Lake with HDMI 2.0 and 10-bit HEVC
These are the results of our tests on the ASRock J4205-ITX, the first mainboard with an embedded Apollo Lake Processor, one of Intel’s new processors.Apollo Lake is based on the Intel Goldmont architecture and is the successors of Braswell. Even prior to launching, Intel spoke of an enormous boost in performance of up to 30% with the same clock speed. In the case of the ASRock J4205-ITX at least, the maximum turbo clock speeds of 2.6 GHz are identical with those of the previous model, although Intel has promised processors with considerably higher clock speeds in the near future. The ASRock J4205-ITX replaces the AS... continue reading
Self-Build NAS collection with updated guides for all skill levels
Here you can find an overview of all our Self-build NAS guides starting at a small 4-Bay NAS for 221 USD with a maximum transfer speed of 85-105 MB/s.All of our NAS are easy to setup with a big focus of energy efficiency. We recommend OpenMediaVault and FreeNAS as NAS operation systems.
Both are free and fast. While OpenMediaVault is ideal for simple NAS solutions, FreeNAS offers encryption of your data via AES. You can setup OpenMediaVault to automatically go into standby if no active clients are present in the network.
If in standby, a client is able to wake up the NAS through Wake-On-Lan (WOL). Comp... continue reading
NAS - Expert for up to 6 drives with ECC memory, AES-Ni and IPMI
This guide is for all who place a high value on security. This NAS supports up to 16 GB DDR3 ECC memory for high data integrity.The Intel Core i3-4160 with AES-Ni does de- and encryption via hardware without losing performance. The ASRock Rack E3C226D2I offers 2 Intel gigabit network interfaces and an additional IPMI 2.0 interface wich allows you to boot the system even if it's in off state.
For that reason a display is not necessary - this is also valid for OS installation that can be performed through the IPMI (webinterface). CPU, mainboard and memory This NAS is packed with a lot of nice features. The mo... continue reading
NAS - Advanced for up to 6 harddrives and PCIe 3.0 x16 Slot
The Advanced - NAS is a very good choice if our NAS - Basic for 4 harddrives is not suitable for you.
After a lot of testing and searching arround the web it became clear to me that a 6 bay NAS solution without extension cards is almost impossible to be based on Intels smallest plattform - Bay-Trail.That's the reason why our NAS - Advanced is based on Intels Haswell-Refresh architecture. CPU, mainboard and memory So we're looked for - and found - a cheap mainboard with 6 native SATA ports.
As SATA3 is not required by data harddrives (only SSDs benefit from 3rd gen SATA) it's ok that the final candidate - th... continue reading
