CHEAP ALL SSD NAS! AIFFRO K100 Review

This tiny little thing is actually an all-SSD NAS! And even more amazingly, it isn’t any more expensive than a hard drive based NAS – at least for the system itself anyway… This is the AIFFRO K100, a quad-bay flash NAS, and it’s so close to being amazing. Let me walk you through this tiny little thing, then we’ll get it set up and test it out. First off, a tour. It’s pretty small so this’ll be a short tour. The front has just the power button, the top has their logo, the sides have vent holes, and the back has the IO and another vent. IO is a 2.5Gb Ethernet port, two USB C ports, two Type A’s, HDMI, and USB C PD in. The base is pretty plain, although this is where we find the first poor design choice. This is a ‘barebones’ machine, as in it doesn’t come with the drives you’ll actually be storing your data on, so you need to get in here. You’d think that this might be a toolless slide-off panel, or at least if it is screwed in the screws might be obvious and in the open – you know for easy access to do the thing you absolutely must do to use this thing? Yeah, no. The four screws are hidden under the four double-sided-taped rubber feet. Come on guys.

Inside, and under the heat spreader plate, you’ll find four M.2 2280 drive slots, a 256GB M.2 SSD, and the board itself. If I pop the board out the case you’ll see the fan and heatsink hiding the CPU and RAM. Specs wise what we’ve got here is a quad core Intel N100 – which yes is just 4 first gen E cores on their own – which has a 6W TDP and a total of 9 PCIe Gen 3 lanes. You might be doing the maths in your head there, thinking, huh, 4 M.2 slots (which normally carry 4 lanes each) adds up to 16, which is quite a few more than the CPU has available, and yep, you’d be right. These M.2 slots actually only have two lanes each, at PCIe Gen 3 speeds, so a max of 1.5GB/s per drive is all you’ll get here. Also, while this CPU supports up to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, this bad boy comes with a paltry 8GB. You might also be wondering why this comes with one of the M.2 slots populated with a pretty naff 256GB SSD, and the answer to that is that they forgot to put any storage on the board itself, so if you want to install an operating system (at least one that doesn’t run from a USB stick like UNRAID), you need to lose one of your M.2 slots to put a boot drive in. Again, guys, come on. If I’m buying a 4 bay NAS, I don’t expect to have to use one of the bays as a boot drive! Also if you look on the under side of the drive heatspreader you’ll notice a nice big thermal pad where the 256GB drive is mounted, but not where the other three slots are. Annoyingly, they don’t include any spare pads in the box, you’ll want to pick up some thermal pads to cut to size for this thing if you do pick it up. Again, come on guys. 

One thing that is actually pretty cool is the power brick. This is a USB PD power supply with only a US flip plug on the input and a Type C port on the output, but it’s cool in part because it’s a 65 watt unit that’s freaking tiny, and in part because it also supports not only USB power delivery, but PPS, or programmable power supply, meaning if you get the right breakout board you can actually use this as a variable power supply all on its own. That’s cool. Not relevant to the board, but cool. Genuinely though, all you get in the box is this power brick, a C to C cable, and the system. Nothing else.

For the sake of testing this out I stuck two 2TB drives in here. They aren’t the same make or model which isn’t exactly recommended, but they’re close enough so I’ll give it a go. Despite the product page making it clear this is a no-OS preinstalled system, this had an operating system installed. Weirdly it wasn’t able to connect to my network, I think because the OS doesn’t have a built in driver for the Realtek 2.5G NIC, making it entirely useless. I also don’t exactly know what OS it was – it had links to kodcloud.com, but called itself “TeamOS”, which isn’t a product kodcloud offer. Anyway, since it was entirely unreachable over the network, and the system wasn’t meant to have anything on it anyway, I wiped it and installed TrueNAS Scale. I set up an array, created an SMB share and copied some files. I don’t have 2.5G equipment here – only 1G or 10G – so the max I can get is 100MB/s on transfers, but I can say it did handle them fine enough. I kept an eye on drive temperatures but remarkably they didn’t change much, likely thanks to the system being wholly unable to write to them with any amount of heat-inducing performance. They stayed at very reasonable temperatures, so at least there’s that. I can also say that the CPU fan is beautifully quiet, and the fact there aren’t four hard drives whirring away is pretty nice too. It’s also considerably lower power – i mean the max it can draw is 65 watts, and with the CPU capped at 6W and at most a couple watts per drive when reading or writing, there isn’t much to be sucking on power. Compare that to hard drives which are more like 10 to 20 watts each, that’s a decent difference. I left this hooked up to a smart plug and it idles at I think 2-3 watts. That’s incredible.

The big problem with this thing really is the RAM. Only having 8GB of RAM, especially if you pick TrueNAS and use ZFS (which is what I recommend for a NAS), means you have very little available for any services. For a 2TB mirrored array like I’ve got here, sure, this is liveable, but if you opted for more like 4 4TB drives instead? That’d be a bit of a pain point for sure, and you’d struggle to run something like Plex or Jellyfin too. You can also forget running Ollama, or really anything memory intensive. With the max supported 16GB it’d definitely be better, much more usable, and considering this is currently selling for just £227, I think it costing a few quid more for double the RAM is well worth it. There’s lots of small design choices that take this from a really promising and cool idea to something pretty underwhelming and unsuitable for the task. No toolless access to the drive bays, no onboard storage so you need to take up one bay with a boot drive, and too little RAM. If they solve those problems, this could be an absolutely incredible little bit of kit. 2.5G ethernet is more than enough for home use, and considering 2TB M.2 drives can be had for about the same as 4TB HDDs, you’d be looking at a considerably faster, smaller, quieter, more efficient solution – sure, with half the capacity, but for home gamers 6TB of usable space is likely plenty – all for a pretty reasonable price tag. This could be so cool, and I really wish it lived up to the hype.