HKUXZR N100 NAS Mini-ITX Board

The JMB585 shares roughly 2GB/s of PCIe bandwidth across its five ports. For hard drives that is ample:

• Five 3.5-inch HDDs each reading about 200–280MB/s, depending on model and position on the platter, stay within the link even during a full parity check.
• Mixed arrays of hard drives plus one SATA SSD cache on the native SATA1 port work well.
• Five SATA SSDs at around 550MB/s each would outrun the link during a simultaneous scrub, so all-flash builds belong on the NVMe slots instead.

Either way, the network is the tighter pipe. A 2.5GbE port moves about 280–295MB/s of real traffic, depending on protocol and client, which a single modern hard drive nearly fills on its own.

Six ports also leave room to grow. A four-drive RAIDZ1 or Unraid array with one parity disk can expand to six drives on the same board, the most common upgrade path in a home NAS. Operating system choices and whole-system builds are covered in the N100 home server guide.

That adds up to six lanes before the PCIe 3.0 x4 slot gets any. Unless lanes are switched or shared, the slot can have at most three live lanes, and possibly fewer. Treat it as physically x4 and confirm the electrical width before buying a card that needs all four.

An x1 NVMe link sounds slow next to a desktop's x4, but it still beats a 2.5GbE network by more than three times. For a NAS, the M.2 slots are the right place for a mirrored boot pool, a ZFS special vdev, or an app and VM pool for Docker containers.

Both i226-V ports are Intel parts with mature drivers in Linux, FreeBSD-based TrueNAS and OPNsense, and in Proxmox. One can serve the LAN while the second links a backup target or a router VM.

Good uses for the PCIe slot, in order of how well they fit a limited lane count:

1. A 10GbE network card, where even two or three PCIe 3.0 lanes carry near line rate.
2. An HBA for more SATA drives, if the case has the bays.
3. A Wi-Fi card or a Coral-style accelerator for camera recording software.

The power supply has to cover hard drive spin-up, not idle draw. A 3.5-inch drive can pull around 2A from the 12V rail for a few seconds as it spins up, depending on the model. Six drives starting together briefly ask far more than the whole system uses once running:

• Idle: the board and CPU sit in low double-digit watts, with each spinning 3.5-inch drive adding roughly 4–8W depending on model.
• Spin-up: size the 12V rail for every drive starting at once, or enable staggered spin-up if the OS and drives allow it.
• picoPSU builds: fine for two to four drives with a good external brick; six drives favour a proper SFX unit.

Memory is one DDR5 SO-DIMM slot rated for 4800, 5200 and 5600MHz non-ECC modules up to 32GB. The N100's controller runs DDR5 at 4800MT/s, so a faster stick simply runs at 4800. 32GB is a comfortable size for ZFS caching plus a handful of containers.

The two internal USB headers suit Unraid, which boots from a USB flash drive, keeping the stick inside the case where nobody knocks it out.

For a NAS, only the HKUXZR is built for the job. The others suit kiosks, machine control and legacy peripherals. The full comparison of N100 boards sits in the N100 motherboard guide.

The HKUXZR is also the only one of the three that doubles as a capable desktop. An HDMI 2.1 port and a DisplayPort 1.4b output drive two 4K@60Hz screens, and the TF slot takes a microSD card for logs or a rescue image. A headless NAS needs neither, but both make first setup and BIOS work easier.

A working NAS build around it needs:

• Chip option: the board is made with an N100 or an N150; choose the N100 version for this build.
• Case: a Mini-ITX NAS case with enough 3.5-inch bays and an SFX or ATX supply bay.
• Memory: one DDR5 SO-DIMM, non-ECC, up to 32GB, bought separately.
• Cooling: the CPU heatsink needs some airflow in a closed NAS case; a slow case fan over the board is enough.

The rest of the UDPTCP board and the ECS ADLN-I are covered on their own pages.