 Tom here from Lauren systems and it is February 22nd of 2023 and IX systems has sent us for review This true Nass mini now. This is not a sponsored video, but fold is closure. We are resellers of IX systems We actually resell a lot of their high-end equipment And that's where I like that. They've also made some more Consumer small business-facing equipment such as the mini series now I'm using a mini to edit this video right here And I've been using the minis for a little while I've got a few reviews of them on my channel as they've been released This is the first rack mount mini that they come up with and I'm really happy because there's a lot of businesses and Especially in the video editing market where I think this is going to be pretty ideal That are looking for a turnkey solution not a DIY solution true Nass is awesome for all the DIYers out there Who want to use existing hardware use used enterprise hardware or mix and match and find the best combination? That they want to build but if you're in the creative space and you're a videographer for example your YouTube creator And you're not a tech YouTube creator who doesn't like playing with the hardware as much you're kind of going I want to do all that cool free Nass stuff But I don't necessarily have time to DIY it and that's where the mini series kind of comes in all of them are really Quiet all of them are really solid and of course You know they're gonna work really really well with both true Nass scale and true Nass core because they came from IX systems So I think this is a really good lineup of having this rack mountable system in there So let's dive into the specs. The processor in the mini R is an Intel C3 758 I know someone may notice that's not the newest processor But it's a very power efficient very reliable and still current processor and good for this particular workload And is the same processor as well That's in some of the other mini options that they offer here in 2023 You can get 32 or 64 gigs of ECC RAM. This has a dedicated IPMI We'll dive into that shortly the networking on board is to 10 gig RJ 45 But it does have a PCIe slot that you can use for SFP plus It has one M2 MVME boot device 12 high quality lockable hot swappable drive base But of course you can put two and a half drives in there as well This unit has a 45 DB idle and 52 DB peak noise Therefore, it's welcome to be in my studio without annoying me or making too much noise And I think that's a good sound profile for these much quieter than a lot of other rack mount equipment And finally less than 170 watts fully populated under load This is something that not everyone takes into consideration for some of the small business market Where maybe they don't have dedicated Higher end circuits available to power all the equipment in there Especially when I mentioned the small business or youtube market This may be something that runs in literally a closet or a area of a basement And you don't want something high wattage because you also have to deal with all the high heat that may come in addition with that Or if you have several other servers in there, that may be a problem Now this is not going to be ideal for virtualization targets. It's not going to be ideal for your Truly mission critical workloads because this is a single power supply system with a single boot device on there But for the video editing and the creative space, I think that's actually going to be a really popular space where this fits in Or maybe enterprises that just want a extra copy of data and want to have it in there as a backup in terms of just to have One more copy of all of your backups off of a larger more mission critical system Now let's take a quick look at the ipmi lights out management I think this is greatly convenient whenever you have to manage these systems remotely. This is really handy to have I mean kvms are great But even here in 2023 ip based kvms are just not inexpensive and being able to Sit right here and remotely administer this system Including if we wanted to go and fully remote control it with their nice handy html5 here We can jump over to it right in a web browser control the system and adjust it. Yes, this is scalable It's because I have it zoomed in it's Showing like this, but you can adjust the scaling pull up your virtual keyboard and actually we'll go here and Look at power control set power on power off reset jump over here to preferences Maybe scale the display down a little bit and close. There we go We've scaled this particular display down to make it maybe a little bit easier to see for me a little harder to see on YouTube because of the resolution But you get the idea that this can be completely administered and by remotely I mean, yes, it's on the other side of the wall for me But still this is way more convenient than actually going all the way over And sitting in front of the box because you know who wants to do that Now going on to the server health. We can read the sensor readings So it'll give us a status of all the sensors in the system So we know how they're doing you can also see what those thresholds are and of course there's a lot more configuration options Including if you want to set up SMTP to have it send you an email or notify you So there's a couple different ways you can tie this in to get those notifications sent out So those are options as well And in case if you need to remote load this we do have the option for acd rom image that can be attached So shared host path the host user password You can do a mount get your iso image on here and do a reload if needed without physically having to be at the box Or plug anything in Now this is running the latest version of trunascale 22.12.1 which was released today But i'll let you a little secret iX system sent me kind of a preview release in order to get this tested Because well in this version of scale came the update for the mini r to get a fully functioning So i switched over to that one But i was actually able to test this in preview About a week early and i didn't run into any problems with it But i'll have a review coming soon of 22.12.1 So i've updated a few other systems to it this morning Everything went smooth on all of those including this one here But let's take a look at the enclosure because this is one of the advantages you get when you buy an iX systems mini Versus when you do the diy There's no way to line up in a diy build this Exact enclosure. This is something when they work directly as in iX systems and super micro together They can then put these extras in there And this is just really convenient when we pull these slide these out and knowing where any of them are And we have it showing two pools But we can also have it show status and all are green because they're new drives and nothing's faulted Despite me dumping a lot of data to them didn't have any problems This is the rusty pool as i called it because it has some Wd reds in here So you're spinning rust 7200 rpm drives And this is the flashy pool because it's got some 1.75 terabyte SSDs in here So as i'd mentioned earlier if you're doing a video editing type of use case for this You may want to edit all your live stuff here And once you're done with the project you can migrate it over to here And just be able to swap it back and forth or replicate it within the same pool Or just drag it from one place to another through your file manager Hey, that's going to be really convenient on here Now i didn't run this unit through an entire battery of speed tests because as i said in the beginning This is probably not your most ideal setup for virtualization targets and high performance storage But if you are going to be using it for the use case i suggested such as smb You're probably at least wondering how fast will it transfer smb And i have a setup that well gets the job done So let's first go over here to apps and i want to pull up the web portal here So we can see it in net data because it makes it look pretty So we have that app loaded and i'm going to bring over here some files I have just a few gigs of files on a windows server now This is a virtualized windows server So i know it won't give me the absolute best performance that we'll get out of here But you'll get an idea now my system has the same specs and gets just a little bit faster than this So i get a little bit closer to the 400, but even in this setup here We're looking at a transfer and this is the right side of it at about 300, 325 Now the big advantage with zfs is the read cache, of course Which will give us a much better number if we transfer it back Especially if you keep accessing the same files or multiple people such as in an editing environment But it's still reasonable. So while this is transferring here We can go back over here to net data and see what the cpu load is and yeah, we're loading the cpu up It's definitely peeking up there around the 50 mark But hey, we're hitting 2.8 gigs here 2.7 gigs So it's definitely faster than one gig, but no, it's not fully saturating with this particular configuration Of just having four drives in a raid z1 that are ssd drives able to fully saturate this 10 gig on this particular setup There are still some limitations to it, but for the most part in like the example here I am Editing in 4k and that's not a problem in a system setup like this And that's all I really have for the true nas many are because all the other features such as virtualization SMB nfs ice because he all the zfs features and all the integrity that comes with Using zfs are all just true nas features and it runs standard true nas. It's not a special version It's not a proprietary version of true nas The only thing extra you get when you get these minis and the difference you're going to get is the ix system Hardware and the enclosure management because the hardware is talking to the software in a way So they know where all the drives are that also means you're not locked in if you buy this as a solution So if you start with this as a solution or you're coming from a diy solution You can swap different drives in there's not a vendor lock in where you can only use a particular drive or a narrow list of drives This is something I like about true nas and it is a big consideration when you're considering what nas to buy because if a Vendor says these are the drives that are going to be used in there Does take that into consideration whether or not that nas becomes well more expensive because of that So it's not just the chassis. It's the ecosystem around it and true nas being the largest by far open source storage solution out there Um, I don't think you can go wrong with using true nas It's one of the reasons I'm such a big fan of it and why I use it to edit this video and all of my other videos I'll trusting it and trusting zfs to keep the integrity of all of my files So this is a great addition to the true nas lineup with the mini leave your thoughts and comments down below However, my forums for more in-depth discussion or head over to iExistence forums to you know Talk about the new features and new things that are coming out with true nas scale It's a pretty rapidly developed product right now And i'll be doing some more videos on scale soon including like a whole getting started with scale as they kind of Mature the operating system and waiting for it to get where there are a lot more feature complete and feature stable Including some of the new features that came out in the new version that was released today. All right, and thanks