Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Checking Out The Seeed Studio ReServer: Great For IoT + Home Server”.
Everybody is always really excited about building a home server, but I have something unique and interesting from Seed Studio. I mean sure it’s a tiny computer, small form factor computer big deal, that’s nothing new 11th gen tiger Lake. It’S got Thunderbolts mother, Nifty options like two and a half gig ethernet, but what if I told you, it also has a Raspberry, Pi, coprocessor co-processor. What’S a Raspberry Pi code? Well, they just shoved a Raspberry Pi in here, which can also Run fun, interesting things. In addition to the Intel tiger Lake system – and this thing doesn’t use – hardly any power, let’s unbox and take a look, so this is the reserver x86a1135. This is an 11th gen tiger Lake I5, 1135, G7, dual Channel ddr4 3200 up to 64 gigabytes it’ll do SATA gen 3 for two mechanical hard drive storage. So I’ve got two 20 terabyte hard drives we’re going to put in here pcie Gen 4 by 4×1. So you get a pcie slot and then you’ve got two and a half gig ethernet and the i-225v Lan port and there’s two of those as well as as well as an integrated, Arduino, co-processor atsamd21 arm cortex m0 plus it’s got HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4. In addition to that, it’s also got 3m.2 b key e key and m key. So that means you can add your m.2 Wi-Fi adapter, which I just so happen to have here: Intel Wi-Fi 802.11 ax, adapter plus all the other stuff in the accessory box. You guys your Wi-Fi paddle antennas.
These are at least a little better than the smaller rubber duck antennas. A screwdriver looks like a miniature fan. Extension, cable, and here is our server. It’S scarcely bigger than two three and a half inch mechanical hard drives.
There is no one’s desk that this would look out of place on. This is so cool looking metal. Also like the cooling design, it’s got one big fan in the bottom: that’s going to pull air in from the bottom and chimney it out the top. That’S a pretty good design now inside.
I know they’ve made a few really interesting design choices. One, the SATA ports are color coded, so you can see the SATA connections on the front of the motherboard, there’s a red one and a black one. And then, of course, we have red and black connectors built right in okay. Cool makes sense. Our PCI Express 4 slot is here, but it seems to be blocked by the top of the three and a half inch. You know, mechanical hard drive trays could probably use it somehow with a breakout, ribbon, cable or something like that.
I can get creative and get something in there. We’Ve got our dual Channel ddr4 2m.2 slots at the bottom and one at the top. There is also an embedded DisplayPort connection at the top edge of the motherboard for future fun projects. Now, as you start digging into this and looking at the interesting stuff, that’s available here, you’ll notice on seed Studio’s website, they actually document everything and so there’s different motherboards, there’s different internal modules that you can get for this. This is why our ports on the side over here, don’t necessarily align perfectly. You could get Thunderbolt option, for example, and that’s why our if you’re going to use both of your mechanical hard drives you’ll have to do something creative with this physical PCI Express by four expansion slot, because it’s not exactly a normal expansion slot.
There’S not really a way that you can connect this. Of course I can use a ribbon cable and get it connected, but there’s something sort of special going on C Studio, publishes and documents, the connectors and the specifications and the sizes and everything else. It’S like this. Top you could 3D print an alternative top to connect to the embedded, DisplayPort connector and turn this into a physical display. C Studio would be more than happy to work with you to put your logo on this or do a custom case or custom, something else which is you know again. It’S the whole maker thing.
If you want to put this in something you can, if you just want the motherboard – and you don’t want the case because you’re going to build your own case, you can that’s an option with this. This would actually be pretty good for an RV or something like that. You could put multiple 5G modems in here and turn this into a TCP multi-path router, for example. Maybe you could combine it USB 5G Modem with a m.2, 5G modem or two deploy that on this, and this could be a nice low power under 60 watt solution for that.
But with all the horsepower of the tiger Lake I5, I mean the my imagination is running wild with all the stuff that you could possibly do with this. For me, 220 Tower button mechanical hard drives for storage, I’ll, probably throw in two m.2 just for a mirrored setup, so I’ll mirror the m.2 for storage and I’ll mirror the mechanical hard drives. So it’ll be 20 terabytes of available space with two 20 terabyte mechanical hard drives. You want to run open media Vault, no problem.
You want to run true, Nas, no problem. All of those have been tested on this. It’S basically an x86 PC. You’Ve got DisplayPort and HDMI out over here.
You don’t have to use the embedded DisplayPort connection, and so it gives you a lot of options in terms of what you want to do with the system power button and the reset button. The bottom here and it’s so tiny, it’s so it’s barely bigger than a stack of two hard drives. It’S important to keep in mind that m.2 configuration you got four PCI Express Lanes for your m.2 at the bottom, but at the top really it says it’s only.
The one one PCI Express 3.0 Lane and one USB 3.0 Lane – that’s probably okay. I picked up a bunch of Intel optane on sale, there’s some links below so we’ve got 258 gig optane. Now these are only two PCI Express Lanes and these aren’t the fastest. But I’m going to use these for caching in our true Nest setup. I definitely wouldn’t want to use. You know too high performance nvme, because it’s not going to run that fast or if I was.
I want to figure out some sort of adapter for this PCI Express by four slot so that it wouldn’t bottleneck now remember if you’re going to install a wireless card, you want to do that first, because it’s actually going to be under the normal m.2. It’S going to be in this slot right here: nice short low profile and you’ll also need to connect up your antennas before installing the rest of your storage. You also want to install your memory, that’s pretty easy to install, and then we just Mount our hard drives.
I plan to use smaller hard drives, but hey 20 terabytes, I’m not going to say no now, if you did want to use two and a half inch hard drives, you could there’s holes on the bottom for mounting that as well, and that’s it both of our Mechanical hard drives are connected at this point and we got plenty of storage, let’s plug it in and see what happens at this point. You’Ve got a more or less normal pc pc installation. Now it’s a little bit not normal when it comes to the Raspberry Pi component of the the show, and that’s one of the premium things you get for the price point I mean if it comes down to comparison, shopping and pricing and pricing for features. It is a little on the premium side, I mean we are talking about tiger Lake and I have featured some videos that are based around Alder Lake and some of the really inexpensive Alder Lake CPUs. I mean you get that six core or the 6p core Alder Lake CPU pretty inexpensively, but by the time you build the entire rest of the system. It’S not going to be as small and quiet as this arguably possibly rivaling this in terms of power efficiency. But this whole package tops out at 60 watts and the bulk of that power is going to to your mechanical hard drives. This does have a vapor chamber cooling system, so this CPU is going to Turbo all the time if you configure it that way in the Bios and the BIOS is fully unlocked.
Everything is there that you could possibly want to configure on this tiger Lake platform. So if you wanted to use this as a starting point to build something really custom, this would be a pretty good place to start. You could really go nuts building a routing platform or storage platform. This is pretty much the perfect Home Server in its configuration. I think you could run a sort of a redundant quasi-redundant home assistant setup with this, because you’ve got the the Raspberry Pi interface as well as the the local interface. You can move things between Docker and just save and back up your configuration so for an ultimate Home Server in the smallest possible space. 20 terabytes usable in this with mirroring and redundancy is pretty good. Oh, no there’s only four storage devices and I’m gon na have mirrored m.2 and mirrored mechanical storage.
Where do I install true Nas, you could make creative use of your PCI Express by four expansion slots, so this is one of the smallest adapters that you can get. This will turn your pcie slot into an m.2 slot and then you’ll have three m.2 slots that you can use for storage. That would work with an extension, cable or if you got creative about your mechanical hard drive mounting and you could go down to one mechanical hard drive and then you got all that room for activities. You could also just run with a single m.2 that you use for your true Nas operating system and use your redundant storage, your SATA storage for your actual important data.
If something bad happens in your m.2 drive dies, you’ll still be able to recover your information, because the ZFS pool will have only existed on your mechanical hard drive. You can just re-import it on a fresh installation. Of course, you’ll you’ll lose your true Nest configuration unless it’s also backed up to the ZFS pool which, through an S, can do automatically uh me. I I like getting creative, so I’m going to use the PCI Express 4 expansion slot. To add, add a third m.2, which is very small, 16 gigabytes, we’ll use that for internal storage. Now you could also use the USB 2 header there’s a USB disk on module options. It’S a USB 2 header. You can add that at least a 16 gigabyte. I recommend 32, if you’re going to do that. But again you know USB wire, leveling tree. Nice actually does chew up those discs. Pretty good. Don’T know that 100 recommend that, but it is an option with a true Nas installation tackled. What’S the next fun thing that we can do with this setup? Well, we’ve got that onboard processor now, depending on which model of reserver you get the higher end. Models have support for ECC and they also have the onboard Raspberry Pi, but you could get the lower end models like the I3 that have the arm cortex processor, that you can use with Arduino Studio sketch pad whatever you want to call it and build your own Custom functionality into that module to get some options either way.
Now, if you do opt to use the 5G module, you got to be wondering: where do you insert your sim? Well, you insert your Sim on the side on the side. Motherboard, it’s not a Micro SD slot now my particular model does not actually have the onboard Raspberry Pi. This is the 1135 I5.
So that means that it’s got the onboard, Arduino sketch pad interface thing shows up as a USB device. So obviously, this makes a pretty interesting platform for Home Server storage, but because of the extras like the Raspberry Pi on board or Arduino, depending on which model you pick, it opens up a world of possibilities. You got any ideas: let’s build something more interesting than a storage server with this, although, as a storage server does seem to work pretty well in case you’re wondering about the finer points of the true Nas configuration, there really wasn’t much to it, both the nvme storage, As well as the mechanical storage show up now, the printed circuit board on mine – I thought it said – is PCI Express by one. But when I look at the electrical interface, it’s actually PCI Express by two.
So our top m.2 slot – that’s a you know, meant for your cellular. Modem has a PCI Express 3.0 by 2 connection, which is the same as our 58 gig optane module. The bottom slot is PCI Express it’s for PC Express 3.0 Lanes, but our 58 gig optane module is only using two of those and we still have four lanes in the slot for the other interface, for, in this case, permanent storage. I’Ve got two onboard rs-232 headers that I could break out into other connectors and everything is modular like I can take these plastic sides off and have other modules in here other than mechanical storage. If mechanical storage is not your cup of tea, you could put other stuff in here. If you put SATA hard drives in here, there’s all kinds of room for activities and custom boards and that sort of thing and I’m sure the seed would love to talk to you.
If you want to build something really custom around this product, that’s sort of part of their business model, it’s like di wires and it’s like okay, you want to build your own internet of things lab it’s totally fine. We can research that, but also this thing is super modular, so maybe we can just make little modules for this that’ll be able to do this that in the other, which is I like that I, like that, approach, that reusability and everything else. It’S pretty awesome.
I want to listen to level one there’s been a look at the reserver and you can find me in a level one forums. Let’S talk ideas. What do you want to see with this? I bet you can come up with something really awesome.
I’D love to do a video on it all right, I’m signing out if I’m in the level, one forums, oh and actually Seed Studio, has a little contest going or a little coupon rebate thing saying: hey what what do you want in a sort of a DIY? Like what would you like to see in terms of a paint by numbers thing, what’s your ideal, what do you? What are you building? What’S? What’S awesome, I love how quiet this thing is the loudest thing about. It is definitely the hard drives, but what do you want to see all right check out on the Forum? I’M signing out I’ll, see you there, foreign .