News This NAS motherboard has more 2.5G Ethernet ports than USB ports — Topton N9 comes with eight 2.5G Ethernet ports

[Admin]

AliExpress sells the Topton N9, a motherboard that leverages Intel's Kaby Lake G processors and offers NAS users up to eight high-speed 2.5G Ethernet ports.

This NAS motherboard has more 2.5G Ethernet ports than USB ports — Topton N9 comes with eight 2.5G Ethernet ports : Read more

 

[derekullo]

Just curious ... why are 8 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports a thing on a single motherboard?

I can understand having a second NIC as a backup, but I would image having 2 - 10 gigabit ports would be more useful than having 8 - 2.5 gigabit ports.

I recently upgraded my local network to 10G and having 8 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports never crossed my mind lol.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09CYNHL4S

Or am I missing something?

 

[USAFRet]

Just curious ... why are 8 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports a thing on a single motherboard?

I could maybe see some server farm applications needing this.
Maybe.

But if my needs and budget stretched to needing that, I wouldn't be buying from AliE.

 

[jlake3]

Just curious ... why are 8 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports a thing on a single motherboard?

I can understand having a second NIC as a backup, but I would image having 2 - 10 gigabit ports would be more useful than having 8 - 2.5 gigabit ports.

I recently upgraded my local network to 10G and having 8 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports never crossed my mind lol.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09CYNHL4S

Or am I missing something?

This board would be for people who want to build their own router/firewall/network management appliance using pfSense, rather than to put in a workstation itself.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Just curious ... why are 8 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports a thing on a single motherboard?

I can understand having a second NIC as a backup, but I would image having 2 - 10 gigabit ports would be more useful than having 8 - 2.5 gigabit ports.

I recently upgraded my local network to 10G and having 8 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports never crossed my mind lol.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09CYNHL4S

Or am I missing something?

It must be for people who want to build a router box that has enough ports such that they won't need a separate switch.

 

[derekullo]

Ahh that makes much more sense.

The article calling it a NAS motherboard threw me off lol!

Edit: 1 sata port ... stopped making sense

 

[bit_user]

Just curious ... why are 8 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports a thing on a single motherboard?

Yeah, the main reason I can see why you'd want so many distinct controller chips is to use this board for implementing a router.

I don't accept the explanation that it was intended for NAS users, since its storage options are so paltry. 1 SATA port? And that NVMe port is PCIe 3.0 and possibly not even a full x4 width, given the SoC features only x8 PCIe lanes. BTW, that must mean they integrated a PCIe switch to attach those 8x Ethernet controller chips, because they certainly didn't burn all 8 lanes on them.

This is such a weird device, though. Why use Kaby-G, for a router? Did someone imagine using GPU compute, on the Radeon GPU, to do deep packet inspection?

 

[derekullo]

Yeah, the main reason I can see why you'd want so many distinct controller chips is to use this board for implementing a router.

I don't accept the explanation that it was intended for NAS users, since its storage options are so paltry. 1 SATA port? And that NVMe port is PCIe 3.0 and possibly not even a full x4 width, given the SoC features only x8 PCIe lanes. BTW, that must mean they integrated a PCIe switch to attach those 8x Ethernet controller chips, because they certainly didn't burn all 8 lanes on them.

This is such a weird device, though. Why use Kaby-G, for a router? Did someone imagine using GPU compute, on the Radeon GPU, to do deep packet inspection?

Beginning to think Tom's Hammerbot is writing articles now lol.

 

[Foeke]

Chinese companies can be wild. Making things with minimal R&D and/or no market research. It seems so wasteful.
I would love such a board for some general purpose linux gateway. But why the extra GPU. I have Epyc motherboards that probably won't even run the windows 98 mediaplayer hypnotic background smoothly.
And 8 networkcards? Two make sense. Four? Maybe because you don't know how vlan work. I also wonder why the latest generation HP microserver doesn't have iLO as standard but it does have 4 NICs. So I might be missing something.
But 8? Because you don't like switches?

 

[bit_user]

Beginning to think Tom's Hammerbot is writing articles now lol.

Well, the AliExpress listing calls it both a NAS Motherboard and mentions "Firewall Router". So, maybe the article was just written too hastily and without enough thought.

 

[bit_user]

Chinese companies can be wild. Making things with minimal R&D and/or no market research. It seems so wasteful.

To me, this seems like it was probably designed under contract, in order to suit a particular client's requirements. What they're doing now is just liquidating leftover inventory. That explains why they're using a long-ago discontinued Intel CPU, at least.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

If I had to guess it would be part of a custom order for a bank, small office, or other environment where up to 8 PCs could be hardwired to run though as a router or firewall, with the one SATA port able to provide terrabytes of local network attached storage.

Beginning to think Tom's Hammerbot is writing articles now lol.

It really does seem like it, especially given how many articles are related to things which are days old and either already reported by multiple other sites or just posts on social media sites, among other things.

 

[Notton]

I'm kind of worried the GPU? will get cooked unless the heatsink has a huge base plate, kind of like what you see on server/HEDT sockets.
But that heatsink mounting hole layout looks like LGA115x. Most LGA115x heatsinks won't cover all three chips.

 

[fancarolina]

I really hopeful that Zhiye Liu is a bot or an AI. Calling this motherboard a NAS board is very odd. Having only one M.2 and one SATA port for drives makes this a poor choice for that usage. This is clearly a Router targeted motherboard intended to run pfSense with that much networking. No one would choose this motherboard with only two drives for a NAS.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I really hopeful that Zhiye Liu is a bot or an AI. Calling this motherboard a NAS board is very odd. Having only one M.2 and one SATA port for drives makes this a poor choice for that usage. This is clearly a Router targeted motherboard intended to run pfSense with that much networking. No one would choose this motherboard with only two drives for a NAS.

There are plenty of 1 bay NAS units on the market from Synology and others, as well as purpose designed single drive NAS like WD Personal Cloud. If you don't need the performance boost or failure protection of dual drives a 1 drive unit is perfectly acceptable for an NAS.

 

[bit_user]

I'm kind of worried the GPU? will get cooked unless the heatsink has a huge base plate, kind of like what you see on server/HEDT sockets.
But that heatsink mounting hole layout looks like LGA115x. Most LGA115x heatsinks won't cover all three chips.

The AliExpress listing has an option to buy it "With Fan", although they don't show what that looks like. I'm guessing you should either buy it with their heatsink/fan or else be prepared to fabricate something custom.

 

[vanadiel007]

It does not make a lot of sense. If you are building your own router, you just get a board with 2 x 10 Gbit ports and use a 10 Gbit uplink to a switch, so you can always expand your network needs without needing to replace the router.

Using this many 2.5 g ports, without even knowing if they support hardware offloading or even full switching between each port, I would stay clear building a router around this.

 

[newtechldtech]

This is indeed a NAS Motherboard to serve star network.

There are plenty of 1 bay NAS units on the market from Synology and others, as well as purpose designed single drive NAS like WD Personal Cloud. If you don't need the performance boost or failure protection of dual drives a 1 drive unit is perfectly acceptable for an NAS.

Actually it has two SATA ports .. there is an extra M2 SATA port ... and another M2 PCIe slot that can be used for extra drives using M2 PCIE SATA adapters ... you can add 4 SATA drives to this motherboard.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805462100104.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2usa

and it is a cheap motherboard for a router or a switch with 8x2.5Gbp ports.

 

[SDLeary]

AliExpress sells the Topton N9, a motherboard that leverages Intel's Kaby Lake G processors and offers NAS users up to eight high-speed 2.5G Ethernet ports.

This NAS motherboard has more 2.5G Ethernet ports than USB ports — Topton N9 comes with eight 2.5G Ethernet ports : Read more

With only a single SATA connector, and single M.2 slot, this can hardly be considered a NAS board. This is more along the lines of a board to build your own Router or Switch

SDLeary

 

[HideOut]

I think pretty much everyone here agrees this is NOT designed as a NAS board, Its a router board. But I'm sure THG dont care. Just click the link so they get a cut...

But to bad its new but uses a pretty old CPU though

 

[atomicWAR]

Looks like an interesting piece of tech. Not sure as is as I'd want more SATA cause I could see me combining a router and NAS but that only works if you have the IO needed which this board lacks. Now give me a board like this with 8 SATA ports, a 4-8x PCIe slot so I can add more later if the need arises and then I might well be interested in such a solution.

I think pretty much everyone here agrees this is NOT designed as a NAS board, Its a router board. But I'm sure THG dont care. Just click the link so they get a cut...

But to bad its new but uses a pretty old CPU though

Yeah I don't think so in this case being the weekend but I absolutely see where you're coming from. You get a lot of users on toms like me who build their own everything in regards to PC/server/nas/router tech. So of course they'll call out Tom's for not covering it as such when it is clearly geared in that direction. So yeah they could have done a better job on the writing as it is clearly geared more towards the home/business custom router crowd, which is active on Tom's. Weekend pieces like this though, I tend to keep my expectations in check as it IS Saturday and lets be real who wants to work on the weekend. Tom's and other outlets tend to release more pieces like this on the weekend IME.

 

[thestryker]

I'm very confused about this design I think @bit_user is right about it just being old stock, but it'd make more sense for a minipc type design rather than a router box. Especially now that there are plenty of low power Intel CPUs with quicksync on the market.

 

[outsider2k21]

1 M.2 and 1 Sata 3.0, no pci-e slot but 8 2.5G Ethernet ports? How is it NAS MB? In what unversive you run 2 drive for NAS? 288 US dollar without ram and heatsink, you can buy 1 bay or 2 by standalone nas from synology, asutor, TERRAMASTER..etc


You can't use LSI 9211-8i card . While there is m.2 to 5 sata adapter, but JBM585 chipset doesn't always work with Truenas. For exmaple I had to return IO Crest JBM585 5 port pci-e sata card as Truenas keep report check sum error, however Silverston M.2 to 5 sata adapter work with truenas even it also use JMB585 controller.

 

[bit_user]

Actually it has two SATA ports .. there is an extra M2 SATA port ... and another M2 PCIe slot that can be used for extra drives using M2 PCIE SATA adapters ... you can add 4 SATA drives to this motherboard.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805462100104.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2usa

Yes, I'm aware of both M.2 SATA slots and M.2 RAID controllers. Hadn't considered either possibility. Fair points.

Still, I maintain this is a weird setup to use for a NAS. Furthermore, if that's what it was designed for, having to add in a M.2-based RAID controller would seem like an unnecessary cost when they could've just ditched the M.2 slot and put the controller & ports right on the board.

But to bad its new but uses a pretty old CPU though

How do you know it's new, and not just some old inventory being liquidated?

 

[parkerthon]

I think it could be a nas with attached storage. Maybe a network appliance type server. Think something that does network capture, analysis, or wan acceleration. But that many ports is very weird indeed.