K100 All-SSD NAS review: A solid and tiny Intel N100/DDR5-powered storage server

The Times They Are A-Changin' yes.. I say it because this is the second all-SSD NAS I have been sent to check out, and I guess we'll be seeing a lot more of them now. It makes sense in a home setup if you can afford the initial investment. Anyway, enough about boring things like cost; let's get down to the nitty-gritty. Aiffro sent me the K100 All-SSD NAS; yes, that is what they call it because, well, it is an all-SSD NAS.

Now for the disclaimer, I have some experience with NAS, having owned a QNAP TS-253Be, a Synology DS720+ and currently rocking a Synology DS923+. Still, I only acquired them to do local and cloud backups and run my home theater solution with a gifted Plex Pass (Thanks, Vishal). I am a fan of SSD storage. I even modified a DS720+'s default setup to install all my apps on an SSD volume. Still, all the hoops Synology makes you jump through, including curveballs like random unmounts of said volume, made it not worth the effort for a system that you don't want to be constantly fiddling with.

All of the aforementioned NAS devices I've owned are media-class, meaning they fully support having something like Plex installed on them to stream over my local network. Aside from a few other things, such as setting up some Docker containers (if there is a clear tutorial), that's about the extent of my expertise in the realm of network-attached storage devices; it's an ongoing learning process.

Here are the most important specifications:

As you can see from the table above, this NAS has pretty decent specs. It comes with an Intel Processor N100, which was introduced in Q1 of 2023; however, it sits on the lower end of the N-series spectrum while still supporting 10-bit HEVC and VP9 encoding/decoding, as well as hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding. In addition, the CPU supports HDMI 2.1, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, LPDDR5, DDR5 and DDR4, with a super-efficient max TDP of 6W.

Oddly, the K100 has an HDMI 1.4 port despite the CPU fully supporting the 2.1 standard. There's also no second network port and no Wi-Fi connectivity.

First impressions

The packaging looked like it had seen some things [above top pic]. However, this thing shipped all the way from China, and comically, the packaging is sort of like a Russian doll, as once the top of that box is removed, an additional K100 packaging is revealed.

In the box

• Another box
• K100 All-SSD NAS
• U.S. Power adapter & Type C cable
• Quick guide [full online guide]

Annoyingly, they sent one with a U.S. power adapter. Luckily, I have a U.S. to EU adapter, so I was able to get started. There was no HDMI or LAN cable in the box, which is a bit of a sad omission to make, guys...

Design

It looks exactly like a Mini PC and the outer shell is made entirely of aluminum alloy aside from the plastic bottom cover. You'd be forgiven for confusing it with a Mac Mini if it weren't for the fact that the AIFFRO logo is stamped onto the top center of the K100.

This thing is small. To give an idea of what I mean, I stood it on its side and placed a 2.5-inch TEAMGROUP QX 4TB 3D NAND QLC SATA III SSD next to it, along with the preinstalled 256GB M.2 SSD lying across the front (top) of the K100. This thing is not taking up any space, anywhere.

On the front, you just have the power button, which lights green when powered on and, according to the manual, can change to red to indicate disk access or "working." Each corner is rounded off, so there are no sharp edges.

Around the back, at the top, is the vent for the CPU fan, and below that, from left to right, there's a single 2.5 GbE Ethernet port, an HDMI 1.4 port, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C and USB 2.0 Type-A ports, and a Type C connector for the power source. There's no Kensington Security Slot present, which I continue to find a bit of a disappointing omission for any data storage device.

On the left and right of the K100, the sides have ample grill vents to expel heat.

On the bottom, the rubber feet are attached with a glue sticker and flaps, It is a familiar sight for anyone that owns a Mini PC, remove the rubber feet and there are four screws that need to be removed in order to access the K100.

Upon removing the bottom plastic cover, another four screws need to be removed in order to remove the metal shield [second image above], which, when turned over, contains thermal pads for when the four M.2 slots are populated. I was surprised to find that a 256GB SSD had already been installed, and upon further inspection of the internals, I noticed that there was no USB flash drive present, which is a common trait of NAS devices that holds the boot loader.

When the screws of the metal shield are removed, this also frees the motherboard, which is not fastened by other means. Upon removal and then flipping it over, it becomes apparent that the memory cannot be replaced or even expanded as there is no second slot, and the memory is part of the motherboard itself. The fan, which is of a similar type you will find in a laptop or Mini PC, was held in place with three screws, when removed it exposes the CPU heatsink and onboard 8GB memory chips.

There is also no WiFi present, so there is no cable to worry about when dismantling it.

Setup

BIOS

The K100 Pro includes an Aptio BIOS from American Megatrends, and you can set up pretty much everything here, including the boot order, which is actually pretty important and I'll come back to later.

Initial Setup

As I said, our K100 was shipped with a 256GB M.2 with a fully activated Windows 11 23H2 on it, which surprised me. I asked my contact if this was intentional and if all buyers receive it that way, and was told no. There is an option to buy with and without 256GB M.2. Normally speaking, there won't be anything installed on it.

This allowed me to do a disk benchmark and confirm the odd internals with CPU-Z.

As you can see above with the CrystalDiskMark image, it aligns with the PCIe 3.0 x2 lane speed of up to a max of 2 GB/s. CPU-Z confirms as much. So, in saying that, you could save yourself a bit of money and only go after the older PCIe 3.0 SSDs, which should work out cheaper than PCIe 4.0 or current gen 5.0 M.2 SSDs.

Actual Setup

TEAMGROUP supplied us with four MP44Q 4TB NVMe SSDs. They are PCIe 4.0 x4 drives and currently cost $216.99 on Amazon or Newegg. They are a bit overkill, considering our NAS only supports PCIe 3.0 x2 (2GB/s) speeds, but these are what I have on hand.

TrueNAS?

At first, I tried to install TrueNAS on a spare WD SN750 500GB I had lying around by following the official tutorial, but I kept running into problems with the setup, exiting with errors. All of the official (and community supported) documentation also said that installing to a USB flash was highly discouraged, to add to this it was also made known that TrueNAS needed to exist on its own disk, and partitioning that disk was also discouraged. That would mean I would be down one of the four bays in the K100.

After searching online for my error "cannot link fstab" which returned little to no results, and after reviewing some community posts on help installing TrueNAS I decided that the community "help" was a bit toxic for noobs, the issues I already encountered actually made me decide to once again look to...

Unraid.

After looking up a tutorial on how to install Unraid, I downloaded the Unraid USB Creator and flashed it to a 64GB Sandisk Ultra that I had lying around. I plugged it into the K100 and set it to boot from it in the BIOS, and I was up and running. Also, Unraid does not discourage booting from a USB flash drive.

The four M.2 disks also stayed pretty cool throughout thanks to the ample vents in the K100.

After logging into Unraid and assigning the four 4TB disks to an Array (which took about 1.5 hours to check and validate), I was pleasantly surprised at how it restored all the shares I had created and even the two apps (Plex and LuckyBackup) and plugins that I had installed on the LincStation N1. That's pretty awesome, Unraid!

I just needed to log in to Plex and claim my server, and I was up and running. Plex worked flawlessly with streaming Dolby Vision content over my network. However, do be aware that if you plan to use the K100 as a directly connected HTPC, the HDMI 1.4 port limits what can be streamed to your TV (4K @30 Hz). In this case, you're better off using the K100 over the network as a Plex Server because the CPU supports all the modern media formats.

I discovered a bit of an annoying trait of the K100: It flashes a light on the right side when data is being copied to it or read. It's quite bright and distracting at night, so you would also have to factor this in when you place it and if you decide to use it as an HTPC.

A CrystalDiskMark test on a mapped network drive from within Windows 11 23H2 PC (image above) connected over a 2.5 GbE hub was well within acceptable ranges.

Conclusion

I want to like this NAS, but it comes with a few strange decisions in production that cannot be ignored.

First of all, this is the first NAS I have tested that did not include an onboard flash drive, usually it's an internal USB thumb drive. This ensures that no other storage ports are taken up by a bootloader. This results in the loss of an M.2 slot if you install something like Windows or TrueNAS on it. You can workaround it by doing what I did: putting the Unraid bootloader on an external USB stick and then stuffing it in one of the USB 2.0 ports.

This brings me to my second grievance: USB 2.0 and HDMI 1.4 in 2024. Why? It seems strange to have the ultramodern N100 processor and DDR5 memory and then nerf it with HDMI 1.4 and USB 2.0 ports. I also don't understand why the four M.2 ports were limited to PCIe 3.0 x2, either. It's like a weird combination of super new and super old tech.

Lastly, you have to remove eight screws to manage the M.2 slots. No thought was given here about the need to quickly swap out a defective drive or expand with additional SSDs. The M.2 slots also include screws which are tiny, so the whole process is a bit of a pain. A system like the one used in the LincStation N1 is definitely the better option.

For only around $350 (see below), this certainly won't break the bank, and for that, it includes the ultra-energy-efficient Intel Processor N100 which only came out last year, 4800MT/s DDR5 memory and four internal M.2 slots.

Although you can get the K100 for $405 (discounted from $449) on the official site, right now, you can score it for just $349 on Amazon (that's after applying a $100 in-page coupon), which certainly makes it more of an enticing offer, possibly offsetting the few negatives this NAS comes with that I mentioned earlier.

This NAS has a special use case, I think. It's perfectly okay as a backup cloud, powerful enough to host your media and VMs, manage your cameras and control your home automation if you don't care about loading it up with tens of terabytes of disk space. Large-capacity SSDs are still very expensive, so you will have to factor that into your purchase decision.

Things that impress me about it are the superb aluminum alloy build quality, the fact it is quiet and uses a modern Intel N100 Processor with DDR5 memory and 2.5GbE connectivity, plus it includes two USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) ports, so you can expand storage even further without losing any performance. Had it included a few more modern internals that truly complement the CPU and DDR5 memory, it could have been truly great, but for now, I'll say that it's just good.

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