N5105/N6005 NAS Demon Board/Six SATA3.0/ Dual M.2/ITX/Four I226-V Nics. (NAS N5105)

Status: Just received, haven't built system yet.First impressions: Holy cow does this look great on paper. 4x2.5GbaseT and a ballin' efficient CPU that support hardware codecs for a home media server, AES-NI for streamlined security, dual M.2 slots, 6xSATA3, virtualization support... I mean come on... it's hundreds of dollars less than the competition. (if you just thought 'but I can get hardware that competes for not much more', consider the power bill difference over 3-5 years and get back to me.) The drawbacks: 0 documentation. There is no manual. There is no firmware support. We'll be lucky if this thing doesn't get backdoored in a year. I checked the MFG website and nothing was available. (e.g. buttons at https://changwang.com/down/67.html => "Unavailable"). I have high hopes for this board, though.

Really like this board. The 5105 has sufficient performance to use it as a NAS. Unfortunately when I dropped in my six-drive RAID only five of the drives showed up. After swapping drives, SATA cables, and power cables I finally realized one of the ports itself is bad. This doesn't speak well for QC. To compound things this board doesn't have a PCIe port. It might be possible to use an M.2 to SATA board, which I'll try out soon, to make up for any defective SATA ports. Overall this is a nice board, if only they were QC'd a bit better...

Had ordered via another website directly, received the N5105 board, when I paid $40 extra for the N6005 model. Beyond this, the motherboard will not boot with any SATA devices connected, meaning it's all but useless for the purpose it was purchased for. Unfit for use.