Radxa Launches NAS Friendly ROCK 5 ITX Motherboard with Arm SoC

[TheLostSwede]

Radxa is a Chinese manufacturer of various Arm based devices and something of a minor competitor to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The company has just launched its latest product which is called the ROCK 5 ITX. As the name implies, it's a Mini-ITX form factor motherboard, which in itself is rather unusual for Arm based hardware to start with. However, Radxa has designed the ROCK 5 ITX to be a NAS motherboard and this is the first time we've come across such a product, as most Arm based boards are either intended for hobby projects, software development or routers. This makes the ROCK 5 ITX quite unique, at least based on its form factor, as it'll be compatible with standard Mini-ITX chassis.

The SoC on the board is a Rockchip RK3588 which sports four Cortex-A76 cores at up to 2.4 GHz and four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz. This is not exactly cutting edge, but should be plenty fast enough for a SATA drive based NAS. The board offers four SATA 6 Gbps connectors via an ASMedia ASM1164 controller, each with an individual power connector next to it. However, Radxa seems to have chosen to use fan-header type power connectors, which means it'll be hard to get replacement power cables. The board also has a PCIe 3.0 x2 M.2 slot for an NVMe drive. The OS boots from eMMC and Radxa supports its own Roobi OS which is Debian Linux based.




Other features include a PCIe 2.0 M.2 slot for WiFi modules, a microSD card slot, a PoE module header, an eDP interface and MIPI DSI and CSI interfaces for displays and cameras. More NAS focused features include a pair of 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports and four USB 3.0 ports, as well as a pair of USB 2.0 ports. There's also a USB Type-C port that supports USB 3.0 data speeds, but also DP Alt Mode display output, alongside two HDMI ports, of which one supports 8K60p output. There's even a 4K60p HDMI input, but it's unclear how this will function. Finally there's a pair of 3.5 mm audio jacks and an optical S/PDIF output and a 12 V DC power jack. The board can be powered by a standard ATX power supply or an external power brick.

The RK3588 SoC also houses an Arm Mali G610MC4 GPU and a 6 TOPs NPU for machine learning acceleration. Radxa offers the ROCK 5 ITX in four different configurations with 4 to 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Pricing for the 4 GB SKU wasn't available, but the 8 GB SKU starts at US$120, with the 16 GB SKU coming in at US$160 and finally the 32 GB SKU at US$240. All SKUs appear to come with 8 GB of eMMC for the OS.

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[Firedrops]

Radxa makes some interesting stuff, but they are very uncharacteristically low-stocked and overpriced. Combining with the compute module, this is priced quite far above embedded N100 boards, and is within spitting distance of regular desktop i3+ITX combos. Except with about 10% the speed and no GPU support, no Windows support.

Also, in this case, not sure what the custom fan header SATA power is for - the board requires "standard" (including FLEX) PSUs, unlike all their previous products which relied on a tiny external brick to 12v power barrel. In this case, users would just use a normal SATA/molex power cable from their PSUs.

There's a lot of irony in that. In all their previous products where breakout 12v power were required for hard drives, they were never present, and a huge deal breaker for those thinking of NAS-ing. Now that they're unnecessary, suddenly there's 4 of them.

I really want to know what they're thinking.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Combining with the compute module, this is priced quite far above embedded N100 boards, and is within spitting distance of regular desktop i3+ITX combos. Except with about 10% the speed and no GPU support, no Windows support.

Huh? You don't get an x86 system with a CPU and 8 GB or RAM for $120. Why would you run Windows on a NAS? Do you even understand who this is for?

Also, in this case, not sure what the custom fan header SATA power is for - the board requires "standard" (including FLEX) PSUs, unlike all their previous products which relied on a tiny external brick to 12v power barrel. In this case, users would just use a normal SATA/molex power cable from their PSUs.

The board can use an external power brick. The fan headers are so you can power the SATA drives from the board when used with a power brick.

 

[Packabowl09]

Huh? You don't get an x86 system with a CPU and 8 GB or RAM for $120. Why would you run Windows on a NAS? Do you even understand who this is for?

The board can use an external power brick. The fan headers are so you can power the SATA drives from the board when used with a power brick.

To play devil's advocate, yes you can. And it includes a Windows 11 Pro license:

Amazon.com

And to further play devil's advocate, in my limited 8 years of being a sysadmin at an MSP, I'd argue 75%+ of small-midsize businesses use Windows Servers as their file servers. These ARM computers have much more limited use cases compared to an x86 system.

 

[TheLostSwede]

To play devil's advocate, yes you can. And it includes a Windows 11 Pro license:

Amazon.com

And you can turn that overheating matchbox into a NAS?

And to further play devil's advocate, in my limited 8 years of being a sysadmin at an MSP, I'd argue 75%+ of small-midsize businesses use Windows Servers as their file servers. These ARM computers have much more limited use cases compared to an x86 system.

Of course they have a "more limited" use case, but they also draw less power, produce less heat and noise.
It all comes down to what your needs are.

 

[Ferrum Master]

Video surveillance recorder?

 

[psydroid]

It's a shame that this board doesn't have a PCI-Express x16 slot for a graphics adapter, as it could be great for a low-end ARM-based development box.

I don't think anyone is interested in this for a Windows NAS, as there are plenty of other boards with x86 chips out there for that purpose, such as the Asrock N100M mini-ITX board.

 

[Scrizz]

should just call it an ITX ARM sbc