HKUXZR 1 * 10G 2*i226-V 2.5G 3LAN Intel N305 NAS Motherboard 6-Bay 6*SATA3.0 2*M.2 NVMe 1*DDR5 Soft Router ITX Mainboard

I purchased this to use in a DIY NAS as opposed to buying a prebuilt enclosure with no upgrade solution. Initial setup was super easy to do even for a noob like me (only built one PC before). I used TrueNAS Scale as my OS. The board has the standard ITX bolt pattern and is able to fit M4 sized hardware to mount. It has 1 header for the CPU fan, and 1 header for system/case fans. Additionally has a header for power button, HDD LEDs, and reset (and a few other headers). Running Crucial 8GB DDR5 5600MHz (haven't even configured it in BIOS yet), a 400w SFX power supply (overkill tbh but needed SFX size), two TEAMGROUP MP33 Gen3x4 m.2, one 256gb for OS and 1TB for apps/temp storage. With the N150 and heat sink, temps hover right around 40c when idling, and rarely spike over 60c when under load. Noise is about 40dB even during load.

Really happy with this little board. The n305 and 10gbe is really killer for my truenas setup. It came relatively well packaged with the board in anti static bags and io cover. Shockingly it even came with the bios battery, something that's becoming rare. I had no issues getting it running, and everything worked as expected. I've read other places that for whatever reason that this particular board requires a 300w power supply, but it works fine for me with a 240w brick and DC atx converter plug. The board had no issues with the 32gb sodimm I'm using, and I'm really curious if it would run with a 64gb, but I don't have one for testing. If I manage to get my hands on one I'll definitely update. Something to keep in mind: although there are 2 nvme slots, they are both only 1x, so you're going to top out around 550MB/s. The 10gbe worked as advertised and is a huge boost over 2.5 for large file transfers, but that 550MBs disk speed limit is going to prevent link saturation. This is an upgrade from a n150 for me, and imo it's 100% worth the added cost. The extra cores are really great for my now numerous containers, and really help with video transcoding and VMs. The only two real downsides of this board are going to be the 1x nvme slots, and lack of pcie slots, but you could probably find a work around with various different nvme add on boards. So if you can live with those two drawbacks, the board is a 5/5.

UPDATE 10/23/25: This thing definitely has a fatal disk controller problem. After I wrote the review below, it dropped sdb (sata2) overnight, similar to the first board's problem. Rebooting brought it back, but it dropped again several hours later, and this has been the pattern ever since. It isn't the disk, I went so far as to swap in a pair of new Seagate drives, on the theory that I got a bad batch of WD Reds. No change. It isn't the cables, have now tried three new cables in each. No change. It isn't TrueNAS, ls /dev showed sdb/sdb1 had vanished. I give up. Returning and will try again with a different brand. Now one star; the board has good specs for the price, but it simply isn't reliable enough for 24/7 operation. (original review) Config: The beefier N305 motherboard, 16GB RAM, two 256GB NVMe drives, two 4TB WD Red Pro, which will eventually be six, latest TrueNAS. Good: It's fast. Booted into the TrueNAS installation flash drive in under 5 seconds, after install boots to console menu in under 30 seconds. Installation is straightforward (but see below). Enough SATA3 ports (six) for my NAS needs. CPU fan is a plus, all boards in this class need at least a small fan but many do not have one. Does not appear to be a power hog as so many similar boards are. Docs are adequate for installation (but, again, see below.) Good price considering that it's hard to find a similar SuperMicro board for under $1K now. Built-in 10Gb Ethernet port is a big plus. Bad: The I/O backplate cutouts are offset a bit to the left and up, requiring you to loosen the board mounting screws a little and jockey the board around to unblock all of the jacks. It has HDMI and DisplayPort video but no VGA, which can be a problem in a server rack. No IPMI, ditto. Only one RAM slot, but it's DDR5 so the performance hit isn't severe. The bios setup only shows the first three SATA ports, has a 2025 date so even assuming an update is available it probably won't help. Documentation is good for little more than installation; good luck trying to troubleshoot if you don't know your way around an AMI BIOS. Technical support appears to be nonexistent. Sum of topic: this is not a motherboard for beginners. Bottom line: As you may have guessed, I bought this to replace a failed NAS motherboard whose replacement cost has tripled over the past several years. The first one I bought was bad; it would only recognize the spinner on SATA1 and the 10Gb port was dead. Amazon offered a rapid exchange, and two days later the replacement showed up and is installed and working. One quirk I noticed was that the big hard drives were reluctant to start the first time after installation. Once the motherboard recognized them after several minutes they were fine, and have been so ever since. I don't know whether this is a quirk of the motherboard, or the drives, or if something got confused during the multiple, rapid power cycling while troubleshooting the first board. When it's time for the next pair of Reds to go in, I think I'm going to plug them into my laptop via USB adapter first, wake them up, format them and exercise them a little before installing them in the server. At any rate, it's working now and working well. Hopefully it'll stay that way for a few years with the full eight-drive configuration. I wouldn't use this in a business installation, but for a hobbyist it's fine. Five stars, barely - the lack of support resources almost cost it that fifth.

Great product

Using this to run Truenas storage that is hosting media to my local network as an SMB share that I have mapped to several machines, and it's been rock solid running 24x7 for the last 8 months or so. I picked it because of the network port flexibility. The 10GB port has been hard to fully validate the functionality with so far, but I am suspecting that my cheaper network hardware is to blame so far. That said, I have definitely been able to saturate 2.5G links with this during heavy transfers. The only issue I struggled with for a bit was the USB ports... I googled it pretty thoroughly, and it seems like the 2 internal ports aren't both meant to be utilized? I boot my system from two USB to SATA connectors that are hooked up to 120gb SATA SSDs. If I plug both into the internal header (a tight fit), it won't recognize both- but it will always recoginize one in either port. I just ended up running the second cable out of the case and into a port in the back, and it's been happy since then. I run both NVME slots as read/write cache, and have a 16GB RAM stick in the single SODIMM slot... which I suspect would actually let you run 32GB, but I cannot confirm as I read the listing and stuck with what it said at the time was a maximum supported 16GB stick. Absolutley solid for a DIY storage build. Will possibly add a second one in the future when I start to run out of storage.