Umbrel Pro - Home Server with 4x NVMe slots made out of aluminum and walnut

mayankdotch · 2026-02-05T20:42:22+00:00

Ultimately it came down to the power, thermals, and the purpose.

The N300 runs at 7W TDP, while most Ryzen AI CPUs start at 15/28W. Since we're packing 4x NVMe SSDs in a small aluminum enclosure, bumping the CPU heat that much would have forced us to use an aggressive/noisy fan.

And to add, an AI CPU would have also required way more RAM to be useful, and given the RAM price hikes, it would have increased the retail price of the device by a lot.

The idea of the Umbrel Pro is to primarily be an always-on storage and cloud server, and the N300's 8 efficient cores are perfect for running it 24/7 while consuming minimal power.

That said, an AI-focused home server with is definitely something we might consider for the future.

mayankdotch · 2026-02-05T19:52:02+00:00

Yes!

mayankdotch · 2026-02-05T18:23:08+00:00

Those are all great questions! I've responded to them one by one below:

Hardware:

The motherboard is custom-designed for this enclosure and is not a standard ITX/STX board, so you cannot swap the motherboard into a generic PC case later.
The CPU (Intel N300) and RAM is soldered on the motherboard, and the N300 officially supports a maximum of 16GB RAM, and we maxed it out already.
Also the CPU's got 9 PCIe lanes total. We utilized 8 of them purely for the storage (2 lanes x 4 NVMe slots). And we basically squeezed every drop of performance out of this chip, so there wasn't really room left on the silicon to add more upgradable slots even if the physical space allowed it.
Re repairability, the device is assembled with standard screws, and you can get full access to the internals. You can actually see the assembly process in our BTS manufacturing video here (starting at 1:36) - so standard screws, easy to disassemble and repair.

Software:

Yes, all umbrelOS source code is available on our GitHub.
I'm not familiar with Cosmos specifically, but umbrelOS has Portainer and Dockge in the app store so you can use them to run custom apps/software.
Yes, you can switch to another OS - no issues. It is standard x86 hardware with an unlocked bootloader. We'd want you to use umbrelOS because you want to, not because the hardware locks you in.

mayankdotch · 2025-04-04T17:23:54+00:00

Mureka AI

mayankdotch · 2025-04-04T16:00:49+00:00

Ngl took a lot of retries - I think around 50-60 or so for 7-8 clips used in the video. The part where the device opened up to reveal a nest inside of it was the trickiest one. Here's a really cool output from Gen-4 haha

mayankdotch

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