 I've actually had this for a little while because I wanted to test it out, not just unbox it and talk about it. But I mean, I'm not gonna dive deep into the FreeNAS software on this because well, it runs the same FreeNAS software that you're familiar with. So there's no real big breakthrough there. It's wonderful. I like it. The XL, I did a video on running the beta version. This is still running the production release version of it. But this is a nice compact newer version I have that's low wattage that's been at my house. And I brought it back here, but it's going back home. And I needed a lot of storage at home. Matter of fact, what we have in here, and we'll start there is a 40, pop them all out, 40 terabytes of WD purples inside of here. And someone's gonna mash the keyboard and ask why purple and why not red, et cetera, et cetera. Purple and red are very similar. The big difference, the huge difference this was, I had these. These were for another project that's not being done and they're laying around, literally doing nothing. I know it's someone's jealous because they're going, you have 40 terabytes. No, you'd be worse to know that I have 60 terabytes laying around, but this only have slots for four. So these are all hot swappable bays. There's 40 terabytes in here. And I probably, if it were me purchasing it, yes, I probably wouldn't with the reds and I can't see what I'm doing. So let me pull the last one out. If we're gonna tip this thing around I don't want the drives just kind of sliding around. But the rails, easy to install, comes with the screws and everything. They're nice recessed in, no problems putting this in. Obviously that's easy. It's not a toolless rail kitten for those wondering, but I like those, I mean, don't get me wrong. Toolless rail kits are cool, but I feel the confidence of when you have a screw in here like nothing's going to bend and flex to put it in. But you know, hey, whatever, they're pretty cool. And I know other people are talking about, well, no, you're asking about the toolless rails like the ones back here. I've reviewed those two, I do like those as well. Those are toolless rails. And what I mean by that is you just pop the drive in with no screws at all. Those are pretty cool too. Would have been nice if they went with these, but these feel really solid and they got a really good connection. And I've had people break them, those ones that are where they slide and make as they slide the drive in it doesn't have guides along it. I mean, you just have to be careful. I've watched people does jam rail drives and go, I won't fit. Don't do that, please. Anyways, back to the box here. So this is ideal for low power. And that's one of the things is kind of the bragging point here and that's where we're going to start. So breaking down the FreeNAS Mini E. This is a blog post I'll link to that is right on their site. And this is as configured in matches. This is Intel. Yes, that does say dual core, Adam. So we have an Adam dual core, eight gigs of RAM, four hotspot base, two inside base. We'll get to those in a second. Four, one gig ethernet ports. That's actually a really nice feature. Two USB two, one USB three and a 16 gig SATA DOM for boot. And you can see the back here and we'll show it as well here. Quiet fans and it's really like they said when it's sitting here with the hard drives in it idling I think we're looking at like 40 Watts. So it's ultra quiet. We're gonna turn it on a second so you guys can hear it turned on or not hear it while it's turned on and get a better idea of that. And if you're wondering why, if this is like some type of coloring it's actually the way the studio lights catch it. So now it kind of inverted. They kind of have a nice little, kind of the way the gloss is on that. But it's well made, well designed like it feels nice, compact and cute and fitting four 40 terabytes in there was no problem. It's almost gonna go, but it's eight gigs of RAM. Shouldn't you not have 40 terabytes with eight gigs of RAM? This has a very specific use case and that's gonna be for storage. Just a lot of data that I need replicated. You know, for those of you who know I'm popular on YouTube apparently, but it also is because I created 900 something videos. I kind of need a place to drop all 900 videos that's outside of this building. So while my videos are replicated on my primary and secondary free NASA's here that are for that purpose, I want them replicated offsite. So I bring it here and replicate the videos and then I can synchronize as I create new videos. So it's one of the things and hey, why not videos and free NASA storage go hand in hand with purple. So hey, that seems like a good use case. Now actually we'll spin it around here and we'll use the overhead camera to get some ideas. But you get the idea of the way this box looks. It's solid, not rattling. They do a great job of cabling and wiring. You can see it's nice and pretty inside and no LED still. You know, I mentioned that when I reviewed the Mini XL which is the more workhorse one, but you know, no without LEDs, maybe I can add a few in there and make it look cool but it does fit the bill for being really quiet and really low wattage. Now you also notice on this side here, this is another PCIe slot. So if you wanted to pop in a 10 gig network card with a low profile, there's plenty of room for that in there if that's something you want. And it's like I said, not going to be the speed demon but for raw storage and jumping files here, it does have that as an option. Looking at it from the overhead, I like that they don't just leave a spot to put the drive, you can mount the drive here for a smaller SATA or laptop, two and a half inch hard drive that you may want to put here for caching but they give you the connector already done and turn it on its side. Same thing here, we have another one, we have a connector, no problem so you're not chasing around going okay, I need to get it to the motherboard. Now the motherboard itself actually has still two more SATA slots on there, a low profile fan and it's like I said, this whole thing's really quiet we'll turn it on in a second but no issues there as far as it's nice and compact and air flow is good with the one fan at the back then the one processor fan but as I stated before, this is only a dual core therefore you're not exactly pushing a lot of heat, it's not a really hot processor. There's our USB three, the IPMI lights out management, we'll show that in a second, this is not another network adapter, it only has four and then this one is for your lights out management so you can control the system while it's not turned on or turned on and off remotely so this is actually kind of a nice little box if you had it somewhere that you have remotely backing it up to and you wanted to be able to get like console access remotely if there's some type of problem. Now having the four ports allows you to bond them together as an option as well so if you just need one gig, plug one in but they give you four if you wanted to bond them together either as redundant connections or as like I said to aggregate speed, well that's an option on this if you wanted more speed so I like the fact that they put four on there, gives you options or if you just have to split this into different networks. Back all the way to the front, we got the FreeNAS logo right here and a little locking in the front and of course the way the drives just drop in and a note on the drives just dropping in is we'll go ahead and slide this one in real quick if I can do it while I'm gonna stand up to, there we go, can't see what I'm doing watching the camera and they just snap in and they have a little twist that you can put on there to keep people from just popping out once they're in. So let's put the drives in and turn this thing on. So it's up and running, nice and quiet and the microphone is a fuzzy on it. The microphone is right here it's maybe 14, 15 inches away from the device so really close, close enough to hear me and hopefully you're not even noticing this because it's really, really quiet. Now, right now we're sitting at like 46 watts on the device right now and we're gonna open up a couple things and show you how that handles when you actually are doing something with it specifically Plex. I figured I'd start there. There's a lot of people that's a popular question. So I throw a couple of my own videos in here and I don't wanna face any copyright issues and I'll resume playback right here. And you can see no problem. By the way, now we're up to 48 watts, 49 watts, that's it. I know it's hard to see right there. But you can get the idea. It's not stressing the box here to play Plex at 1080. This is the important aspect here is that this is just doing 1080. We'll just jump to another video real quick just to show you. And hey, why not do a video on IAC systems in their new beta release? It's no problem. It seeks back and forth perfectly fine. Now this once again, 1080 content. The moment you move to 4K content, it dies. It just doesn't have the real ability to handle all that. I've tried a couple different ways of testing it. It just really struggles hard with 4K but it doesn't seem to be using more when you dive into the process uses even though it's only a dual core. It's probably using 20% of the processor to run a single 1080 stream. So for its use case and what I'm using it for that's perfectly adequate. This is gonna be a lot of my videos on there. Now a couple other things I do have loaded on here. So we'll talk about that. Cause you gotta talk about how you're really gonna use it and this is how I've been using it at my house. So I have my Plex Pass. I have Sync thing on here because that's one of my favorite ways to sync all my documents and things like that. I've got a couple of videos on it. Still using it, it's a really great tool so this allows offsite syncing really easy to my house. As a matter of fact, when I'm using my laptop this is what it connects to when it's at home. That way if I make file changes it never has to go all the way back to get those file changes especially if they're big synced between my laptop and my office. It'll sync between the two servers and then my laptop will locally access that local server. So that's how that's set up. Then I have transmission on here because if you want a way to, you know torrent all your latest ISOs and then give back to the community and seed them that's what I have running to make sure that works. So let's jump back over to Dashboard real quick though and with all these things running I wanted to show what was being used and how we have these configured. So here's my four 10 terabyte drives configured with 25.3 terabytes available and the pool is just a RAID Z1 pool because well this is replicating something offsite. So it's not like, the data starts here at the office and replicates to my house so I'm not worried about having even more redundancy. Like I said, this is going to be, my intention is more of a backup server offsite that can handle a lot of data. But when it comes to like memory usage and things like that, let's just go to the memory report and yeah, it's not out of memory with only eight gigs of RAM. It's running those services like I said and it's not having any problems. And you've seen it jump through Plex it didn't struggle and grind and go crazy trying to do things so it works quite well with it. Other than that, the software itself is your standard FreeNAS software that I've talked about and I don't know if I'm gonna load the beta on this one, I have the beta on the FreeNAS Mini XL for testing but I'll probably for now leave this one because I kind of need it to be very stable because while it's backing up a bunch of stuff offsite with all my videos I don't want to have to re-sync all that data. So I had to bring in here for the first syncing just because the amount of data that's going to be on there. It's not on there yet. It's still got to go through and do a little bit more syncing for trying to decide how I want to handle all that. I'd mentioned the lights out management and that's what this is here. This is really cool. So this is that extra port and the default on this is admin-admin. I'll change it back to here and then I'll change it back to what I want it to be after the video is done. That's why it wants to save it. But this gives you all the information including when you can power cycle this, turn it on and off, look at sensor data on it. I really like having the more advanced server motherboard. This is an advantage you get versus over a consumer motherboard is having this detailed reporting. Now, the gaming motherboards have actually gotten a lot better. They do have a lot more in them than they used to but that's not always remote accessible on the ones versus this is designed to be accessed over network connection, especially this right here, the remote connection. So you can launch it as a Java client. That's always a pain or we can launch KVM. I believe this is all an HTML5. And this is pretty cool because now I can get directly into it. Matter of fact, what it's doing is plugging in USB ports. That's why you're seeing this is gonna take a second as it just plugged all of these in to give me keyboard access. So now I can go through and have shell access remotely to it, not like any type of remote access software tool setup but I can get to the command line I can configure something if I make a poor choice of how I configure something I can get to here, I can get to the bio settings I can get to the boot menu in case you're loading an update and you have to undo something big. And this is nice, like I said I didn't have to load any special plugins it all works in browser. Speaking of that, there are functions to set up remote media on here so you can even load this remotely granted your connection speed may be an issue but so you don't have to physically plug into it though if you wanted to have to do a reload or anything like that, this is an option of course, like I said to power record power control so you can do a hard reset power cycle at power on power off. But overall I really like the box right now it's listed on Amazon for 749 without any hard drives in it. So I mean it's not gonna be the bare bones how cheap can I build something but you have a really solid design really quiet good choice of hardware here that out of the box if you're not wanting to tinker and I always encourage people people think the builder to buy it argument comes up a lot I'm very much an enthusiast who builds many things but occasionally I just need something to work and I just buy something because I wanted to I just need this work right now because I'm gonna tinker with another project so it's a balance really of time of whether or not you want to go around hunting down the parts and picking out and building something yourself which I take great joy in when I have time to do or you go you know what I just need a box at home that has 40 terabytes in it and backs it up so I'll leave a link below where you can get this and I'll leave a link to the purple drives if you wanted to use them they're supposed to be like I said ideal for surveillance but they are the WD red NAS might be a better choice I think they're a few dollars less but there's some articles you can read about the there's some nuance differences they're both raid drives they're both very reliable drives made by Western Digital and actually one thing I'll leave you with this this is a great explainer link over at Pujet Systems and it's understanding the WD rainbow and they break down it's the article is a little bit older but the concept really hasn't changed dramatically but it's a good article about the difference between the drives and what they're doing and why raid drives versus versus consumer drives and versus the enterprise drives et cetera and talks about error correction and some of the details like I said I thought it was kind of a cool read even though it's a couple of years old it's still reasonably relevant and then you can do some further reading on it I'm always encouraging people to dive deeper I spend a lot of time reading more and things like that so but like I said leave a link to this I'm happy with it it's been running for a while and doing all the things I wanna do and I'm surprised that it works as well as it does with only eight gigs of RAM and a dual core it really has some problem of course file copies and all that usual stuff doesn't seem to be any problem and you get the full blown free NAS software so all right and thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you wanna carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video, other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos they're accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you'd like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time