Intel N150 is the first consumer Atom [1] CPU (in 15 years!) to include TXT/DRTM for measured system launch with owner-managed keys. At every system boot, this can confirm that immutable components (anything from BIOS+config to the kernel to immutable partitions) have the expected binary hash/tree.
TXT/DRTM can enable AEM (Anti Evil Maid) with Qubes, SystemGuard with Windows IoT and hopefully future support from other operating systems. It would be a valuable feature addition to Proxmox, FreeNAS and OPNsense.
Some (many?) N150 devices from Topton (China) ship without Bootguard fused, which _may_ enable coreboot to be ported to those platforms. Hopefully ODROID (Korea) will ship N150 devices. Then we could have fanless N150 devices with coreboot and DRTM for less-insecure [2] routers and storage.
As a Schrödinger-like property, it may vary by observer and not be publicly documented.. One could start with a commercial product that ships with coreboot, then try to find identical hardware from an upstream ODM. A search for "bootguard" or "coreboot" on servethehome forums, odroid/hardkernel forums, phoronix or even HN, may be helpful.
With some currently still a bit of hands-on approach you can set up measured boot that can measure everything from the BIOS (settings) through the kernel, the initrd, and also kernel command line parameters.
I currently do not have time for a clear how to, but some relevant references would be:
While it may be tempting to go "mini" and NVMe, for a normal use case I think this is hardly cost effective.
You give up so much by using an all in mini device...
No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O.
I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use and has 10 docker containers and 1 windows VM running.
So I would prefer a mATX board with ECC, IPMI 4xNVMe and 2.5GB over these toy boxes...
Another thing is that unless you have a very specific need for SSDs (such as heavily random access focused workloads, very tight space constraints, or working in a bumpy environment), mechanical hard drives are still way more cost effective for storing lots of data than NVMe. You can get a manufacturer refurbished 12TB hard drive with a multi-year warranty for ~$120, while even an 8TB NVMe drive goes for at least $500. Of course for general-purpose internal drives, NVMe is a far better experience than a mechanical HDD, but my NAS with 6 hard drives in RAIDz2 still gets bottlenecked by my 2.5GBit LAN, not the speeds of the drives.
It depends on what you consider "lots" of data. For >20tb yes absolutely obviously by a landslide. But if you just want self-hosted Google Drive or Dropbox you're in the 1-4TB range where mechanical drives are a very bad value as they have a pretty significant price floor. WD Blue 1tb hdd is $40 while WD Blue 1tb nvme is $60. The HDD still has a strict price advantage, but the nvme drive uses way less power, is more reliable, doesn't have spinup time (consumer usage is very infrequently accessed, keeping the mechanical drives spinning continuously gets into that awkward zone of worthwhile)
And these prices are getting low enough, especially with this NUC-based solutions, to actually be price competitive with the low tiers of drive & dropbox while also being something you actually own and control. Dropbox still charges $120/yr for the entry level plan of just 2TB after all. 3x WD Blue NVMEs + an N150 and you're at break-even in 3 years or less
Don’t forget about power. If you’re trying to build a low power NAS, those hdds idle around 5w each, while the ssd is closer to 5mw. Once you’ve got a few disks, the HDDs can account for half the power or more. The cost penalty for 2TB or 4TB ssds is still big, but not as bad as at the 8TB level.
Low power, low noise, low profile system, LOW ENTRY COST. I can easily get a beelink me mini or two and build a NAS + offsite storage.
Two 1TB SSDs for a mirror are around 100€, two new 1TB HDDs are around 80€.
You are thinking in dimensions normal people have no need for. Just the numbers alone speaks volumes, 12TB, 6 hdds, 8TB NVMes, 2.5GB LAN.
The selling point for the people in the Plex community is the N100/N150 include Intel’s Quicksync which gives you video hardware transcoding without a dedicated video card. It’ll handle 3 to 4 4K transcoded streams.
There are several sub $150 units that allow you to upgrade the ram, limited to one 32gb stick max. You can use an nvme to sata adapter to add plenty of spinning rust or connect it to a das.
While I wouldn’t throw any vms on these, you have enough headroom for non-ai home sever apps.
Intel also means it has QuickSync, so you won't need to buy a N150. However, I tend to be sceptic about these aliexpress-boxes, too. Reliable server manufacturers, like Dell, HP, Lenovo or Fujitsu (RIP) are way more reliable.
We’ve been able to buy used OptiPlex 3060 or 3070’s for about $100 for years now and they tick all the boxes for Plex and QuickSync. Only two NVME and one SATA slot though, so maybe not ideal for a NAS but definitely fits the power and thermal profile, and it’s nice to reuse perfectly good hardware.
I think you're right generally, but I wanna call out the ODROID H4 models as an exception to a lot of what you said. They are mostly upgradable (SODIMM RAM, SATA ports, M.2 2280 slots), and it does support in-band ECC which kinda checks the ECC box. They've got a Mini-ITX adapter for $15 so it can fit into existing cases too.
No IPMI and not very many NVME slots. So I think you're right that a good mATX board could be better.
Not sure about the odroid but I got myself the nas kit from friendly elec. With the largest ram it was about 150 bucks and comes with 2,5g ethernet and 4 NVME slots. No fan and keeps fairly cool even under load.
Running it with encrypted zfs volumes and even with a 5bay 3.5 Inch HDD dock attached via USB
Not totally upgradable, but at least pretty low cost and modern with an optional SATA + NVMe combination for Proxmox. Shovel in an enterprise SATA and a consumer 8TB WD SN850x and this should work pretty good. Even Optane is supported.
You can get a 1 -> 4 M.2 adapter for these as well which would give each one a 1x PCIe lane (same as all these other boards). If you still want spinning rust, these also have built-in power for those and SATA ports so you only need a 12-19v power supply. No idea why these aren't more popular as a basis for a NAS.
No ECC is the biggest trade off for me, but the C236 express chipset has very little choice for CPUs, they are all 4 core 8 thread. Ive got multiple x99 platform systems and for a long time they were the king of cost efficiency, but lately the ryzen laptop chips are becoming too good to pass up, even without ECC. Eg Ryzen 5825u minis
I've had a synology since 2015. Why, besides the drives themselves, would most home labs need to upgrade?
I don't really understand the general public, or even most usages, requiring upgrade paths beyond get a new device.
By the time the need to upgrade comes, the tech stack is likely faster and you're basically just talking about gutting the PC and doing everything over again, except maybe power supply.
Understandable... Well, the bottleneck for a Proxmox Server often is RAM - sometimes CPU cores (to share between VMs). This might not be the case for a NAS-only device.
Another upgrade path is to keep the case, fans, cooling solution and only switch Mainboard, CPU and RAM.
I'm also not a huge fan of non x64 devices, because they still often require jumping through some hoops regarding boot order, external device boot or power loss struggle.
While I get your point about size, I'd not use RAID-5 for my personal homelab. I'd also say that 6x2TB drives are not the optimal solution for low power consumption. You're also missing out server quality BIOS, Design/Stability/x64 and remote management. However, not bad.
While my Server is quite big compared to a "mini" device, it's silent. No CPU Fan only 120mm case fans spinning around 500rpm, maybe 900rpm on load - hardly noticable. I've also a completely passive backup solution with a Streacom FC5, but I don't really trust it for the chipsets, so I also installed a low rpm 120mm fan.
How did you fit 6 drives in a "mini" case? Using Asus Flashstor or beelink?
HPE have announced 12th Gen servers for their other lines recently, so maybe the Microservers will get a 12th Gen update this year too. Hopefully with AMD cpus rather than the Intel crap.
Where are you measuring the power consumption? I've recently started measuring the wattage of all the various electronics in my collection, and I haven't found any computer that's not underpowered and draws under 25W from the wall when idle, and that's with no HDDs and minimal RAM.
Turns out I actually have power supplies that alone draw over 30W with zero load; when trying for the lowest idle power consumption I've found that the choice of power supply matters a lot,
I use a cheap power meter for initial testing and a tasmota plug for having a monitoring solution as well as a second measure and a possibility ro remote hard reset in case of a freeze or something.
Turns out that power supply and motherboard are the most important to save power - besides low C-states (powertop). I had best results with Fujitsu D3x17 / d3644 and Gigabyte C246 wu2.
Today these are unicorns not worth hunting for. Like I said: No modern server grade board is that good while being cheap. You could take a look at
Kontron K3851-R ATX
If i remember correctly. Kontron bought Fujitsus Mainboard segment a while ago.
Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new design goal? He seems to be describing about a desktop worth of storage (6TB), but always available on the network and less power consuming than a desktop.
This seems useful. But it seems quite different from his previous (80TB) NAS.
What is the idle power draw of an SSD anyway? I guess they usually have a volatile ram cache of some sort built in (is that right?) so it must not be zero…
> Should a mini-NAS be considered a new type of thing with a new design goal?
Small/portable low-power SSD-based NASs have been commercialized since 2016 or so. Some people call them "NASbooks", although I don't think that term ever gained critical MAS (little joke there).
Not really seeing that in these minis. Either the devices under test haven't been optimized for low power, or their Linux installs have non-optimal configs for low power. My NUC 12 draws less than 4W, measured at the wall, when operating without an attached display and with Wi-Fi but no wired network link. All three of the boxes in the review use at least twice as much power at idle.
HDD-based NASes are used for all kinds of storage amounts, from as low as 4TB to hundreds of TB. The SSD NASes aren’t really much different in use case, just limited in storage amount by available (and affordable) drive capacities, while needing less space, being quieter, but having a higher cost per TB.
Looks like it only draws 45w which could allow this to be powered over POE++ with a splitter, but it has an integrated AC input and PSU - that's impressive regardless considering how small it is but not set up for PD or POE
I've been running one of these quad nvme mini-NAS for a while. They're a good compromise if you can live with no ECC. With some DIY shenanigans they can even run fanless
If you're running on consumer nvmes then mirrored is probably a better idea than raidz though. Write amplification can easily shred consumer drives.
I’m a TrueNAS/FreeNAS user, currently running an ECC system. The traditional wisdom is that ECC is a must-have for ZFS. What do you think? Is this outdated?
Been running without for 15+ on my NAS boxes, built using my previous desktop hardware fitted with NAS disks.
They're on 24/ and run monthly scrubs, as well as monthly checksum verification of my backup images, and not noticed any issues so far.
I had some correctable errors which got fixed when changing SATA cable a few times, and some from a disk that after 7 years of 24/7 developed a small run of bad sectors.
That said, you got ECC so you should be able to monitor corrected memory errors.
Matt Ahrens himself (one of the creators of ZFS) had said there's nothing particular about ZFS:
There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.
I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS.
That traditional wisdom is wrong. ECC is a must-have for any computer. The only reason people think ECC is mandatory for ZFS is because it exposes errors due to inherent checksumming and most other filesystems don't, even if they suffer from the same problems.
ECC is a must-have if you want to minimize the risk of corruption, but that is true for any filesystem.
Sun (and now Oracle) officially recommended using ECC ever since it was intended to be an enterprise product running on 24/7 servers, where it makes sense that anything that is going to be cached in RAM for long periods is protected by ECC.
In that sense it was a "must-have", as business-critical functions require that guarantee.
Now that you can use ZFS on a number of operating systems, on many different architectures, even a Raspberry Pi, the business-critical-only use-case is not as prevalent.
ZFS doesn't intrinsically require ECC but it does trust that the memory functions correctly which you have the best chance of achieving by using ECC.
One way to look at it is ECC has recently become more affordable due to In-Band ECC (IBECC) providing ECC-like functionality for a lot of newer power efficient Intel CPUs.
Not every new CPU has it, for example, the Intel N95, N97, N100, N200, i3-N300, and i3-N305 all have it, but the N150 doesn't!
It's kind of disappointing that the low power NAS devices reviewed here, the only one with support for IBECC had a limited BIOS that most likely was missing this option. The ODROID H4 series, CWWK NAS products, AOOSTAR, and various N100 ITX motherboards all support it.
Is this "full" ECC, or just the baseline improved ECC that all DDR5 has?
Either way, on my most recent NAS build, I didn't bother with a server-grade motherboard, figuring that the standard consumer DDR5 ECC was probably good enough.
The Aoostar WTR max is pretty beefy, supports 5 nvme and 6 hard drives, and up to 128GB of ECC ram. But it’s $700 bare bones, much more than these devices in the article.
Aoostar WTR series is one change away from being the PERFECT home server/nas. Passing the storage controller IOMMU to a VM is finicky at best. Still better than the vast majority of devices that don't allow it at all. But if they do that, I'm in homelab heaven. Unfortunately, the current iteration cannot due to a hardware limitation in the AMD chipset they're using.
One of the arm ones is yes. Can't for the life of me remember which though - sorry - either something in bananapi or lattepanda part of universe I think
Related question: does anyone know of an usb-c powerbank that can be effectively used as UPS? That is to say is able to be charged while maintaining power to load (obviously with rate of charge greater by a few watts than load).
Most models I find reuse the most powerful usb-c port as ... recharging port so unusable as DC UPS.
Context: my home server is my old https://frame.work motherboard running proxmox VE with 64GB RAM and 4 TB NVME, powered by usb-c and drawing ... 2 Watt at idle.
This isn't a power bank, but the EcoFlow River makes for a great mobile battery pack for many uses (like camping, road trips, etc) but also qualifies for a UPS (which means it has to be able to switch over to battery power with certain milliseconds.. that part i'm not sure, but the professional UPSs switch over in < 10ms. I think EcoFlow is < 30ms but I'm not 100% sure).
I've had the River Pro for a few months and it's worked perfectly for that use case. And UnRaid supports it as of a couple months ago.
Powerbank is a wrong keyword here, what you want to look for is something like “USB-C power supply with battery”, “USB-C uninterruptible power supply”, etc.
Lots of results on Ali for a query “usb-c ups battery”.
The battery will eventually degrade, so how about using a portable power station with replaceable 18650 cells? Essentially a powerbank with replaceable 18650 cells. They're a bit bulky but you can replace the degraded cells as needed.
These are cute, I'd really like to see the "serious" version.
Something like a Ryzen 7745, 128gb ecc ddr5-5200, no less than two 10gbe ports (though unrealistic given the size, if they were sfp+ that'd be incredible), drives split across two different nvme raid controllers. I don't care how expensive or loud it is or how much power it uses, I just want a coffee-cup sized cube that can handle the kind of shit you'd typically bring a rack along for. It's 2025.
Not the "cube" sized, but surprisingly small still. I've got one under the desk, so I don't even register it is there. Stuffed it with 4x 4TB drives for now.
Readit News
TXT/DRTM can enable AEM (Anti Evil Maid) with Qubes, SystemGuard with Windows IoT and hopefully future support from other operating systems. It would be a valuable feature addition to Proxmox, FreeNAS and OPNsense.
Some (many?) N150 devices from Topton (China) ship without Bootguard fused, which _may_ enable coreboot to be ported to those platforms. Hopefully ODROID (Korea) will ship N150 devices. Then we could have fanless N150 devices with coreboot and DRTM for less-insecure [2] routers and storage.
[1] Gracemont (E-core): https://chipsandcheese.com/p/gracemont-revenge-of-the-atom-c... | https://youtu.be/agUwkj1qTCs (Intel Austin architect, 2021)
[2] "Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion", 400 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44427986
I currently do not have time for a clear how to, but some relevant references would be:
https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...
https://www.krose.org/~krose/measured_boot
Integrating this better into Proxmox projects is definitively something I'd like to see sooner or later.
You give up so much by using an all in mini device...
No Upgrades, no ECC, harder cooling, less I/O.
I have had a Proxmox Server with a used Fujitsu D3417 and 64gb ecc for roughly 5 years now, paid 350 bucks for the whole thing and upgraded the storage once from 1tb to 2tb. It draws 12-14W in normal day use and has 10 docker containers and 1 windows VM running.
So I would prefer a mATX board with ECC, IPMI 4xNVMe and 2.5GB over these toy boxes...
However, Jeff's content is awesome like always
And these prices are getting low enough, especially with this NUC-based solutions, to actually be price competitive with the low tiers of drive & dropbox while also being something you actually own and control. Dropbox still charges $120/yr for the entry level plan of just 2TB after all. 3x WD Blue NVMEs + an N150 and you're at break-even in 3 years or less
You are thinking in dimensions normal people have no need for. Just the numbers alone speaks volumes, 12TB, 6 hdds, 8TB NVMes, 2.5GB LAN.
Linux ISOs?
There are several sub $150 units that allow you to upgrade the ram, limited to one 32gb stick max. You can use an nvme to sata adapter to add plenty of spinning rust or connect it to a das.
While I wouldn’t throw any vms on these, you have enough headroom for non-ai home sever apps.
Intel also means it has QuickSync, so you won't need to buy a N150. However, I tend to be sceptic about these aliexpress-boxes, too. Reliable server manufacturers, like Dell, HP, Lenovo or Fujitsu (RIP) are way more reliable.
No IPMI and not very many NVME slots. So I think you're right that a good mATX board could be better.
Running it with encrypted zfs volumes and even with a 5bay 3.5 Inch HDD dock attached via USB
https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/CM3588_NAS_Kit
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006369887180.html
Not totally upgradable, but at least pretty low cost and modern with an optional SATA + NVMe combination for Proxmox. Shovel in an enterprise SATA and a consumer 8TB WD SN850x and this should work pretty good. Even Optane is supported.
IPMI could be replaced with NanoKVM or JetKVM...
I don't really understand the general public, or even most usages, requiring upgrade paths beyond get a new device.
By the time the need to upgrade comes, the tech stack is likely faster and you're basically just talking about gutting the PC and doing everything over again, except maybe power supply.
Modern Power MOSFETs are cheaper and more efficient. 10 Years ago 80Gold efficiency was a bit expensive and 80Bronze was common.
Today, 80Gold is cheap and common and only 80Platinum reaches into the exotic level.
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Another upgrade path is to keep the case, fans, cooling solution and only switch Mainboard, CPU and RAM.
I'm also not a huge fan of non x64 devices, because they still often require jumping through some hoops regarding boot order, external device boot or power loss struggle.
My use case is a backup server for my macs and cold storage for movies.
6x2Tb drives will give me a 9Tb raid-5 for $809 ($100 each for the drives, $209 for the nas).
Very quiet so I can have it in my living room plugged into my TV. < 10W power.
I have no room for a big noisy server.
While my Server is quite big compared to a "mini" device, it's silent. No CPU Fan only 120mm case fans spinning around 500rpm, maybe 900rpm on load - hardly noticable. I've also a completely passive backup solution with a Streacom FC5, but I don't really trust it for the chipsets, so I also installed a low rpm 120mm fan.
How did you fit 6 drives in a "mini" case? Using Asus Flashstor or beelink?
https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/compute/tower-servers/proliant-mic...
Pity they're Intel cpu's though. :(
HPE have announced 12th Gen servers for their other lines recently, so maybe the Microservers will get a 12th Gen update this year too. Hopefully with AMD cpus rather than the Intel crap.
The Hardware is great but >1000 bucks is pretty hard even for enthusiasts
Turns out I actually have power supplies that alone draw over 30W with zero load; when trying for the lowest idle power consumption I've found that the choice of power supply matters a lot,
Turns out that power supply and motherboard are the most important to save power - besides low C-states (powertop). I had best results with Fujitsu D3x17 / d3644 and Gigabyte C246 wu2.
Today these are unicorns not worth hunting for. Like I said: No modern server grade board is that good while being cheap. You could take a look at
If i remember correctly. Kontron bought Fujitsus Mainboard segment a while ago.Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
This seems useful. But it seems quite different from his previous (80TB) NAS.
What is the idle power draw of an SSD anyway? I guess they usually have a volatile ram cache of some sort built in (is that right?) so it must not be zero…
Small/portable low-power SSD-based NASs have been commercialized since 2016 or so. Some people call them "NASbooks", although I don't think that term ever gained critical MAS (little joke there).
Examples: https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tbs-464, https://www.qnap.com/en/product/tbs-h574tx, https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=80
Not really seeing that in these minis. Either the devices under test haven't been optimized for low power, or their Linux installs have non-optimal configs for low power. My NUC 12 draws less than 4W, measured at the wall, when operating without an attached display and with Wi-Fi but no wired network link. All three of the boxes in the review use at least twice as much power at idle.
One curiosity for @geerlingguy, does the Beelink work over USB-C PD? I doubt it, but would like to know for sure.
If you're running on consumer nvmes then mirrored is probably a better idea than raidz though. Write amplification can easily shred consumer drives.
They're on 24/ and run monthly scrubs, as well as monthly checksum verification of my backup images, and not noticed any issues so far.
I had some correctable errors which got fixed when changing SATA cable a few times, and some from a disk that after 7 years of 24/7 developed a small run of bad sectors.
That said, you got ECC so you should be able to monitor corrected memory errors.
Matt Ahrens himself (one of the creators of ZFS) had said there's nothing particular about ZFS:
There's nothing special about ZFS that requires/encourages the use of ECC RAM more so than any other filesystem. If you use UFS, EXT, NTFS, btrfs, etc without ECC RAM, you are just as much at risk as if you used ZFS without ECC RAM. Actually, ZFS can mitigate this risk to some degree if you enable the unsupported ZFS_DEBUG_MODIFY flag (zfs_flags=0x10). This will checksum the data while at rest in memory, and verify it before writing to disk, thus reducing the window of vulnerability from a memory error.
I would simply say: if you love your data, use ECC RAM. Additionally, use a filesystem that checksums your data, such as ZFS.
https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1235679&p=...
Sun (and now Oracle) officially recommended using ECC ever since it was intended to be an enterprise product running on 24/7 servers, where it makes sense that anything that is going to be cached in RAM for long periods is protected by ECC.
In that sense it was a "must-have", as business-critical functions require that guarantee.
Now that you can use ZFS on a number of operating systems, on many different architectures, even a Raspberry Pi, the business-critical-only use-case is not as prevalent.
ZFS doesn't intrinsically require ECC but it does trust that the memory functions correctly which you have the best chance of achieving by using ECC.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IGEN6-IBECC-Driver
Not every new CPU has it, for example, the Intel N95, N97, N100, N200, i3-N300, and i3-N305 all have it, but the N150 doesn't!
It's kind of disappointing that the low power NAS devices reviewed here, the only one with support for IBECC had a limited BIOS that most likely was missing this option. The ODROID H4 series, CWWK NAS products, AOOSTAR, and various N100 ITX motherboards all support it.
https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro
https://store.minisforum.com/en-de/products/minisforum-n5-n5...
96GB DDR5 SO-DIMM costs around 200€ to 280€ in Germany.https://geizhals.de/?cat=ramddr3&xf=15903_DDR5~15903_SO-DIMM...
I wonder if that 128GB kit would work, as the CPU supports up to 256GB
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen-pro/...
I can't force the page to show USD prices.
Either way, on my most recent NAS build, I didn't bother with a server-grade motherboard, figuring that the standard consumer DDR5 ECC was probably good enough.
FLASHSTOR 6 Gen2 (FS6806X) $1000 - https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=90
LOCKERSTOR 4 Gen3 (AS6804T) $1300 - https://www.asustor.com/en/product?p_id=86
At some point though, SSDs will beat hard drives on total price (including electricity). I’d like a small and efficient ECC option for then.
Most models I find reuse the most powerful usb-c port as ... recharging port so unusable as DC UPS.
Context: my home server is my old https://frame.work motherboard running proxmox VE with 64GB RAM and 4 TB NVME, powered by usb-c and drawing ... 2 Watt at idle.
I've had the River Pro for a few months and it's worked perfectly for that use case. And UnRaid supports it as of a couple months ago.
Lots of results on Ali for a query “usb-c ups battery”.
Check some models from cuktech and anker
Something like a Ryzen 7745, 128gb ecc ddr5-5200, no less than two 10gbe ports (though unrealistic given the size, if they were sfp+ that'd be incredible), drives split across two different nvme raid controllers. I don't care how expensive or loud it is or how much power it uses, I just want a coffee-cup sized cube that can handle the kind of shit you'd typically bring a rack along for. It's 2025.
Not the "cube" sized, but surprisingly small still. I've got one under the desk, so I don't even register it is there. Stuffed it with 4x 4TB drives for now.
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unfortunately most people still consider ECC unnecessary, so options are slim