CWWK X86-P5 4*M.2 NVMe 12th Generation Intel N100 i3-N305 DDR5 4800MHz Firewall PC 2x i226-V 2.5G Network Card

I was a bit skeptical at first, seeing a mini PC with N305 CPU, 32G of RAM and 512G SSD for 350€, when just the RAM alone would cost around 300€ in today's market.

I was pleasantly surprised when the mini PC arrived within 10 days of ordering, considering it was Christmas time and it had to be delivered from China to Finland. There were nearly daily updates of the package's whereabouts.

The PC was packed tightly inside a cardboard box. The power plug was of correct type, and there was even an extra fan for the PC included in the package.

Immediately upon powering the PC up I installed Proxmox on it. No problems whatsoever, all the hardware works flawlessly. The pre-installed fan seems quiet, but I haven't tested it under heavy load yet.

All in all a wonderful mini PC for hosting OPNsense and Home Assistant virtual machines + a lot more.

All ok

CWWK X86-P5 4*M.2 NVMe 12th Generation Intel N100 i3-N305 DDR5 4800MHz Firewall PC 2x i226-V 2.5G Network Card

The plan was to have 4 nvme’s make it into a nas. However, truenas kept telling me disks failed randomly. This was even happening without load, with cooling of the included fan and paste on top of the nvme’s. Disappointed.

So I really like the price vs performance of this device. It is compact and well built (and will definitely be problematic if you don't blow out the dust every once in a while). The concept of 4x NVMe drives is what drew me to this in the first place. This purchase is for a Proxmox setup using 4x 4TB NVMe drives in a ZFS Raid1 configuration. And to improve on that, a Coral NPU PCIe M Key (I think that's the one - the one that goes into the M.2 WiFi slot) which powers the video analysis on a Frigate LXC install in the Proxmox. Works fabulously...but (and there's always a but). The but part has to do with how they made the 4x NVMe drives. Using a custom hat that connects into a PCIe 3.0 port and divides the lanes amongst the 4x NVMe drives basically giving each one only a single lane. This limits the bandwidth to 1GB/s max even though these drives can easily do 4x to 8x that speed. Maybe having the Raid1 distributed data helps some assuming multiple drives can be accessed simultaneously. This is a potential bottleneck especially if you are maximizing your 2.5G LAN ports.

So far though, for analyzing and recording high resolution video for 6 POE cameras (with the help of the Coral NPU) it hasn't had any problems (or come close to being bandwidth limited). And since that was the primary reason I got this, being able to add any other services on top is just...well, icing on the cake.

So overall this is a well performing, reasonably priced mini pc that as long as you know you are not going to get full speed out of your NVMe drives you are good to go. Oh, note that it does have 2 SATA cables that can be routed externally...keep in mind that you should NOT power an HDD with these cables and should only power SSDs with them. Otherwise you will have problems (like burning stuff up since large HDD will consume 20W each and this power supply is only rated to 60W - you get the point?). If you want to use them with external SATA HDDs, buy a SATA splitter and then only use the SATA data part and ignore the power part (maybe in the future cwwk will provide 2 cable types...one that is combined like the current one and one that is split or just has the SATA data cable coming out instead to simplify this solution). Then power the HDDs with a separate external power supply (works great for external caddies). If you do this then you can add 2 HDDs to your build for some serious bulk storage (albeit quite slow since all HDDs are slow, but you already knew that). Or for some SSDs that you can just plug directly in and will probably be as fast as your NVMe drives due to their one lane limitation (unless somehow they share the same PCIe port on the motherboard in which case everything will just slow down unfortunately). So, you get the point...you are not limited by just the 4x NVMe drives if you are willing to run the two SATA cables out to an external drive of some type. NAS server anyone??