 Tom here from Lawrence Systems and IAAC Systems has sent me for review a Free NAS, I'm sorry true NAS. I'm gonna keep mixing that up for a little while You know bear with me while I say true NAS and say it all together true NAS core System now this is actually still running the beta so the test will be done all on the beta but they sent me this for review and I started with this being on and IAAC Systems has done a great job on this Free NAS mini line true NAS mini line of making them really really quiet because I'm louder than this by a lot I think my laptop when it spins up is louder than this and I have the lid off on it So I'm gonna first say hats off to making a really nice quiet system And that's really important because the target audience for this are people who you know want something that maybe sits in their Office with them. I've done a demo before on the Free NAS mini e a really tiny one How you can use it as a steam library even you know for me? Yeah, because you got 40 terabytes of games and you need to place a store at all I'll leave a link to that video if you're interested in this might be anything more fun box to do that with But the quiet nature of it is really impressive. It's low wattage Recently priced and low-powered So it's checking a lot of boxes that make people happy that quietness is really neat I've actually been reviewing it for a couple weeks. It's been just out of camera while I did videos while it was on and So far I had no problems with it at all went through a couple updates already Before we dive into some of the details and talk about this box and all the fun stuff with it Let's first click that like button and feel like to learn more about me and my company head over to Lawrence systems calm If you like to hire short project, there's a hires button right at the top If you like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has There is a join button here for YouTube and a patreon page. Your support is greatly appreciated If you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel Check out the affiliate links down below. They're in the description of all of our videos Including a link to our shirt store We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out. Well randomly so check back frequently and Finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics You've seen on this channel now back to our content We'll start here with the IX systems announcement. So on August 20th They had made the announcement that the compact office storage system provides up to 85 terabytes of whisper quiet HED and flash via 10 gig networking and we'll cover all the specs of this but yes, it does have 10 gig networking included This is a really nice upgrade. I'll leave a link to the press release and let's jump over to right here and This is we'll run down through all the marketing stuff I'll leave that for you to read and we'll just talk about it from the standpoint of this is the one I reviewed before the true Nassimini E with only four hot swap old base dual core C 3 3 8 Intel CPU Yes, that says dual core and this was something I brought it before that even though it was a dual core It was able to do quite a bit and still continues to run all of my son's steam games Along with being a Plex server along with a lot of other features that I do with it So I'm really impressed with the amount of efficiency you get out of this small dual core system that like I said I've still been using this one of course is an octa core So we've bumped up the speed a bit the three C three seven five eight Intel CPU And now we have five plus two hot swap bays and from eight gigs of RAM to 32 gig Actually the one that we have here, which I've already unplugged it And I just yanked the power cord out has specifically 64 gigs of ram in it So as outfitted it's also has all SSDs in here So we're not gonna have any spinning drives like I said I'm gonna say the benchmarks for another time goes on a scope of this particular video The default config comes with dual 10 gig on there and our system has dual 10 gig RJ45s and dual SFP plus 10 gig so technically we get four 10 gig ports on this that's pretty impressive and Great performance like they said here We'll dive into the performance of a later They have all the very detailed specs right here But let's take a closer look at the hardware and I'm on among the other links I'm gonna leave here serve the home has also done a write-up on the IA system tune as many x plus and Like I said, they think positively of it as I do Patrick does a great job over there on your write-ups The one thing I'll comment on that I will not be able to demo I'm running a beta version of well a slightly different one than they probably reviewed Beta version it seems to have broke the enclosure display So that is a feature that's going to be when this comes out of beta that it's going to be able to do this and you'll Have full enclosure now really like this. This is the builder to buy it argument you occasionally get this is a big advantage When you buy one of these IA system knows exactly where all the drives are because they designed and engineered this Therefore if you have a problem, they're all listed in order very clearly and you can get You know these little Diagnostics that come up when you get a true IA systems and I just want to bring it up. So thought it was really cool But unfortunately it decided in the beta to have a problem. I'm not sure where that problem lies I've notified them. They know that it's not doing it But please note that's because we're running a beta version of software because I'm really trying to test out the latest version Now let's look at the hardware itself and dive a little bit closer into this Actually, I pulled the power cord up and out the other cords We'll start at the front that five drives that we have here. We have five That are the three and a half now even though we have two and a half inch SSDs in there They're easily removed. They're easy to lock and keep fingers out of them And I'll bring that up because if you're using this in a home and you have kids or someone I mean, who doesn't want to press that button? I mean that spring action is pretty cool And yeah, if this is where kids I know kids shouldn't be in reach of a nest but people saying that probably don't have kids kids are very clever at finding Things with buttons on them and pressing them and these little buttons have the ability to be locked So you spin the little Knob in them and they will go into a lock mode. You can't easily open them up the same thing with down here We have a couple mini versions These are a little snug would come right out and these don't have the lock Unfortunately, but the same little spring action when they pop up These are little two and a half inch bays down at the bottom and like I said everything in here is all SSDs So we'll get this pop back in now spinning around to this side right here This is a nice feature. This is a full height SFP plus card in there So this is a Chelsea. Oh, I think I said it right and it's dual SFP plus on here and full height For the adding card. So there's our two 10 gig ports on the back at the IPMI to USBs and That full height So if you want to switch out for a different card that you thought maybe was more compatible Or you will swap put your own card and not order it for my X systems for an add-in one easy enough Take side cover off to full height which is you know opens you up to more cards than does the half height one There's plenty of room in here to fit that now kind of obscured behind here We'll try to see it though is the way the back plane is connected to these drives so the back plane is Has a kind of like a sass expander is what it reminds you of but it's all SATA and that SATA is Connected and expanded off the motherboard off a connector and then goes out to a series of SATAs that go into the back plane And the integration for the case now the operating system itself is loaded on a SATA DOM That's just kind of hard to see but it's back there Behind the card now flip around to the other way This is how the cable management came to us one IX system ship me this device for a review and It's clean enough. It's for all the little extra cables that they have they tucked them up nice I didn't have to do anything nothing feels in the way and for a compact case design I think they did a very adequate job on the cable management now the fans are of course a important part one They're accessible replaceable, but they chose some really quiet fans We have the larger fan in the back right here and it seems to have no problem pulling enough air through There is a CPU fan on here as well to keep the CPU cool and everything seems really well made So it shouldn't have any problems and you know provided you don't have a super dusty environment should have a really really long life Dust kills more PCs than age We were talking about this the other day how most of time if a computer doesn't get dusty It's traded in or removed out of service for obsolescence But yeah, if you have a really dirty environment, yeah, keep that keep them clean They last a really long time usually age out before they die out But there's only those fans in there That's really it you have one in the back and then one CPU fans That's part of what contributes to keeping it so quiet. So let's get this plugged in I'm gonna put the lid back on which makes it of course even quieter than it was You could probably hear a little bit in the microphone But we'll put the lid back on run down the software real quick and talk about some of the other details We're gonna start right here with the lights out management I really like this feature being on these devices because well now I don't have to have a monitor sitting next to them And of course it makes it that much easier when you're doing an update remotely and you're nervously waiting for that screen and login page But you want to see what's on the display and the console output and of course the system is modern so comes with the HTML5 version being able to log in I really just just makes my life easier. I can see what IP address I see what's on the screen. I see what it's up to has the power controls capture if I need to reboot it Virtual keyboard and another thing that's really nice and we'll close this is the virtual media options And if you need to remotely reload this you can set up a virtual media path in here as well So get the you know new ISO that you need attach it Virtually to this and it does require some local storage if you're trying to do that It does have the ability to mount I believe from your computer as well But that's not if you're remote that may not be as effective, but this concept being in there is a nice feature Besides remote control we have a handful of alert options fan alerts syslog alerts Which is great so you can have hardware alerts going to wherever you need them to go So you can keep an eye on the hardware of what's going on We have server health sensor readings and event logs so we can check the temperature and see how it's doing So it's been running for a little while at the on from the time I turned it on I actually ran a few tests did a few things. It's been about an hour of on time I wanted it to ramp up to see where it sat temperature wise and you know still not overheating not too hot It still seems pretty reasonable Now on to the true nas itself. So this is running very specifically true nas 12 beta 2.1. So this is a you know as new as we have available to us I didn't switch to the nightlies as of September 5th 2020 and as I mentioned it's you know still in a beta the true nas core is but it's coming along quite well and this system Outfitted with 64 gigs of RAM to SFP plus's for 10 gig connectivity and to RJ 45 standard You know network interface for 10 gig connectivity. I want to do some further testing that will be after I do this video I just want to get the hardware video and kind of talk about the device itself But so far with that kind of connectivity Plenty of options on there now. I have over in the background here just something. I'm gonna run just to load this up I've got an ice cuz he connection on here I'm just loading up this to see some CPU usage on here and Pushed this to its limit now while I'm doing that I'll just jump over here and see what kind of I ops we're getting and refresh this page Well, it ramps up refresh And I've run this test a couple times once again to help put some load on this and build a bit of heat But we're seeing, you know about 18,000 IOPS from this base configuration that I have and just one VM running one Little script here, which will actually cancel so you with the script. It's just the FIO script Then I'm running on here just to generate some noise essentially This is not going to be any type of benchmark that we're gonna chest performance I'll do that a later date where I'll do some benchmarking on this device with these SSDs to see what kind of performance It's on there, but you know overall it's been really reliable and solid But that's kind of the nature of ZFS and true nas it's warning me that doing this is pushing some high usage on there But you can still get some pretty good performance even out of this lower and essentially Intel atom processor But other than that, I'm not gonna spend too much time dwelling on this I've got some other videos on true nas and true nas core and reviews and I have more videos coming and getting started with it But I've been really happy with the performance and of course just randomly unplugging the system ZFS as always has proved resilient against well oops is and Fault tolerant, which is really important Now one thing I will note is having these upgraded with the 64 gigs of RAM There's always a common misconception that you have to have a lot of memory It's beneficial to have a lot of memory the other one as I pointed out in my other videos Unlike the free nas mini with only eight gigs of RAM Still performs really really well as the things that we wanted to do with it such as the steam library and the plexon things I was running when you bump up to more memory that gives opportunity to cash things So we only have this one thing running on this so we've only got a little sliver most of this is free But we have this little sliver being used, but this starts getting exponentially used the more Things that can be put in memory. Well memories faster than the SSDs So it's beneficial but not required to have all that memory But it is a nice feature that they have the four slots in there So you can put this much memory in there because for a lot of IO intensive especially, you know Video editing you're repeating you're pulling the same assets all the time You're constantly queuing up the same things having that memory available to cash all those is really nice So that's it for as far as I'll talk about the software on this like I said more reviews coming of it I'll do a separate video on benchmarks, but overall even me pushing it with some ice-guzzy here Still nice and quiet even with the CPU getting loaded up even with it warming it up a little bit I haven't had any issues for the couple a couple weeks. I've been testing this box now Like I said targeted to small businesses targeted to a lot of people who say, you know I just want not to tinker with a bunch of hardware. I want a turnkey system that just works This is great for that. It's from my X systems. They spec'd out the hardware So you know what you're getting you know that it will just work out of the box And I think that's a great target for this. I mean, I know there's always someone going but you know I'm gonna mash out Adding it up and building myself. Absolutely. Those are people who want to tinker and want to spend their time doing that And it's great that that is still the same software You can run churnass on stuff you churnass core on stuff you built Or you can get it directly from IX systems as a turnkey device because you go Maybe you just want to get right to video editing and you want a great storage device for that Or whatever you want to store on here and other services. So my overall thoughts in this I really like the device. I like this whole lineup from IX systems Computing on the edge is kind of some of their target for this because we do need to have you know stuff That's not always in the cloud. It is very convenient to have these locals Especially as someone who edits videos that are currently being recorded and streamed to another churnass core system that I'm testing in the back Yeah, it's great to have all this locally. It's not as easy to stream it all online and then pull it back down to edit it I think these devices kind of fit that bill really good I'll leave links to all the things I discussed like to serve the home article and the announcements from IX systems But um, 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 LawrenceSystems.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 want to 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 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