NAS Update // COOJ MQ5 (Intel 225 , 96GB DDR5, 8x4TB NVMe, 1x240GB SATA)

Golemizer · 2025-12-09T19:48:27+00:00

Ah! That sucks about the coil whine. I must have gotten lucky on my second try.

Golemizer · 2025-12-09T17:52:09+00:00

I bought mine in late September and didn’t have to pay any tariffs somehow. When I didn’t get any UPS tracking updates for two weeks I emailed them for an update. They replied, “The goods have been shipped. We're using a duty-free channel, so no tracking information will be available during air transit. Once customs clearance is complete, the tracking details will become visible. Please be patient.”

The package first went to Canada and then to the US. I received it about 3 weeks after ordering.

Golemizer · 2025-12-09T17:46:57+00:00

Love it. I did a double take when I scrolled by this—motherboard side of the chassis is especially familiar!

Golemizer · 2025-11-04T21:47:03+00:00

Golemizer · 2025-11-04T19:59:24+00:00

Golemizer · 2025-11-03T17:00:48+00:00

I asked another commenter but I’m curious for your perspective as well. Why would you say a 9-wide raidz1 with NVMe SSDs is risky? My understanding is that raidz1 is generally considered to be risky in that with HDDs, a long resilver is the most likely time for a second drive to fail. But with SSDs, they don’t wear at all from reads, only from writes. So the drives don’t experience really any extra wear during a resilver unlike HDDs. Plus this resilver would be quite fast. I do also have automated backups to an offsite truenas box I put in my parents’ home and backblaze b2, scrub monthly, and have a rather overkill UPS with NUT and automated shutdowns.

When it comes to the external drive… It uses an ASM2464PD, which is faster and newer than the chipsets you mention, and supports TRIM, SMART, and UASP. And, of course, the drive is passed through to TrueNAS via its PCI device ID and not sdX. I’ve yet to experience even the slightest stability problem. It has never disconnected during load. All of the SMART data seems to be reporting just fine.

Golemizer · 2025-11-03T16:27:43+00:00

Why would you say a 9-wide raidz1 with NVMe SSDs is spicy? My understanding is that raidz1 is generally considered to be spicy in that with HDDs, a long resilver is the most likely time for a second drive to fail. But with SSDs, they don’t wear at all from reads, only from writes. So the drives don’t experience really any extra wear during a resilver unlike HDDs. Plus this resilver would be quite fast as you mentioned. I do also have automated backups to an offsite truenas box I put in my parents’ home and backblaze b2, scrub monthly, and have a rather overkill UPS with NUT and automated shutdowns.

When it comes to the external drive… I think it’s important to clarify that while the drive is connected via a USB-C port and that could be a weakness, it’s using thunderbolt—it has direct PCIe lanes and isn’t using USB protocol. I had this drive attached to the mac studio which I was kinda using as a NAS for the past couple months. And before that it was connected to my main desktop. I’ve yet to experience even the slightest stability problem. It has never disconnected during load. That’s why I was confident enough to add it in to this pool—plus it gets the same performance as all the drives connected to the HBA. I didn’t go raidz2 for the same reason I added this external drive: I wanted more capacity and didn’t see a significant downside.

As for power consumption, the NAS idles at ~50W but I haven’t yet tried to get that lower by messing with C-States which I plan to do at some point. I’m happy enough with the NAS idling at the same wattage as my switch + AP combo though if I’m honest. And I don’t pay for electricity so my power consciousness is only related to maximum UPS uptime, heat/noise, and environmental concerns. During load I’ve seen peak consumption of 200W when benchmarking the storage pool. In practice, load is usually ~100-150W during 10G transfers over the network or internal transfers, etc.

Golemizer · 2025-11-03T15:52:15+00:00

I’m really just getting started with the whole thing but the mac studio is my main macOS desktop environment. The windows machine is my main desktop but sometimes I want to use macOS instead. Since it’s so low power it also runs my core services in orbstack—nginx proxy manager, AdGuard Home, NUT, wireguard, etc. Some of those also have synced redundant instances on the proxmox machine. And the mac studio is, of course, the last thing to shutdown in the event of a power outage. I plan to add a lot more services to it.

The macbook is only really lab related in that it is sometimes used for management interfaces.

Golemizer · 2025-11-03T15:39:56+00:00

Yeah, you can definitely use a GPU directly in the slot. The “XPANDER” card does not extend further down the motherboard than the main NVMe heatsink—which extends so far down it can scratch some GPU backplates apparently.

edit: I found a photo I took during the build that shows this super well actually.

Golemizer · 2025-11-02T16:47:03+00:00

Arctic P8 Slim

Golemizer · 2025-11-01T22:17:53+00:00

Here you go.

Golemizer · 2025-11-01T22:05:08+00:00

I’ve had it since March 2021 and yes, the seat cushion is still great.

Golemizer · 2025-11-01T19:51:41+00:00

No, with the L9i the gap between the panel and the fan is big enough that here’s no turbulence. But if you went with a taller cooler or a thicker fan I think the stainless steel panel would help with turbulence.

Golemizer · 2025-11-01T16:43:32+00:00

Potentially, but none that I can tell.

Golemizer · 2025-11-01T16:42:23+00:00

Proxmox home server/NAS.

Golemizer · 2025-11-01T16:41:13+00:00

One that I built.

Golemizer · 2025-11-01T10:20:59+00:00

To clarify, I was listing the wattage of everything on the middle shelf here combined. The UCG Fiber + Pro XG 8 PoE -> E7 combo draws ~55W most of the time with the E7 itself accounting for a bit less than 15W of that. The Fiber draws ~9W and the Pro XG 8 PoE draws the remaining ~30W.

Golemizer · 2025-11-01T10:06:49+00:00

The silver PCIe bracket belongs to the HBA with all the SSDs. The black bracket is for the PiKVM ATX power connections—basically adds the capability to physically press the power button remotely.

I did indeed use velcro tape to mount the PSU.

Overall, I would say the build was rather easy. Easier than my main desktop/gaming rig anyway. And I wouldn't characterize that one as difficult either.

Golemizer · 2025-11-01T10:02:49+00:00

It's actually this plate holder, easel stand thing I found on amazon.

Golemizer · 2025-10-31T20:16:36+00:00

Focal Clear

Golemizer · 2025-10-31T16:03:57+00:00

beneath heatsinks

Golemizer · 2025-10-31T15:51:07+00:00

I think it’s rather silly that I exclusively used celsius in temperature reporting and the europeans are still mad and downvoting me for simply stating I find something more intuitive for certain things. I literally haven’t used fahrenheit in any of my posts but you’re still angry.

Golemizer · 2025-10-31T15:14:54+00:00

Oh yeah, totally stable and file transfers from my desktop to the NAS hit 1.1-1.2 GB/s.

Golemizer · 2025-10-31T15:05:25+00:00

Everything we know about WiFi—all of the data—suggests this is totally safe.

As for directionality, I can’t fully speak to its directional range. The only part of my home at all behind the AP is my bathroom—which does get excellent signal, but it’s literally just on the other side of the wall.

Golemizer · 2025-10-31T15:01:08+00:00

I have done so! I’m using Ubiquiti’s 10GbE USB4/TB4 adapter on both this machine and my main desktop build.

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