The Jonsbo N1: The start of a new home lab
I have been looking for a case that will fit in my network enclosure and hold a handful of drives for a while. The idea: to build a home server that was a bit more powerful than a handful of Raspberry Pi. So I began the hunt. I saw Linus Tech Tips‘ build review of the Jonsbo N1 and was immediately sold on the idea. It was small, held a handful of drives, and looked reasonably well-built.
Let’s Unbox and take a look
The Jonsbo N1, as far as I can tell, is only available on AliExpress. For the price of $120 USD, I was jazzed to put in my order. Shipping the Jonsbo N1, however, was another ~$140 or there-about. Honestly, the shipping is brutal. If they could find a US supplier I could see this case being a ‘go-to’ for many.
The Jonsbo N1 comes really well packed with excellent firm and forgiving packaging foam. It is exceptionally well-secured and exceptionally well-built. Again, though – shipping is a bear and took nearly a month to arrive.
The Jonsbo N1 is rugged!
The shell is built out of 3mm thick aluminum with a 1mm steel frame, making for superb quality. You could probably stand on it (but please don’t). The brushed-aluminum outer shell comes in what was supposed to be grey but looks more frost blue. Color expectations aside, it looks really good. It uses a ‘slide’ style build, much like the Louqe Raw S1, which if stood upright has an obelisk aesthetic.
Jonsbo N1: A Server Build
The calling for this case is a home NAS; it supports an ITX motherboard and five 3.5″ drives as well as one 2.5″ SSD.
Motherboard | MSI B550i Gaming Edge |
CPU | Ryzen 5 5600g |
Ram | 32GB Team Group (2666Mhz) |
HDD | 5x 4TB Ironwolf (5900rpm) |
SSD | 120GB Random Kingston Cheapo |
SSD | 16GB Intel Optane Memory Accelerator |
PSU | Corsair 450w SFX |
GPU | TBD |
Building in the Jonsbo N1 was a breeze. The biggest callout is cable management. With this many drives, there are a lot of cables to keep track of, and you will want right-angle SATA cables. The warranty doesn’t cover the backplate, so take extra care when wiring up the hard drives. It’s also worth noting that the hard drives don’t use a typical drive caddy, but rather a rubber grommet and rubber handle mechanism to mount them into the case. The 140mm fan is girthy, and built for static pressure, so it can force plenty of air past the drives to cool all the internal components.
This is an incredibly tight build area and, as mentioned, cable management is key. For example – I did not secure my CPU 8-pin power connector well enough. It shifted after I got the case altogether, so I couldn’t open the case back up. The cable would bind as soon as the case was pulled even slightly open. I was able to get a small set of tweezers in to push the cable down, but I was moments from cutting the cable and ordering a new one. I 3-D printed a clip to hold my M.2-to-SATA board in place, but that isn’t a fault of the Jonsbo N1.
I had to 3d print a clip, no fault of the jonsbo n1 though
Final Thoughts
If you REALLY want this case, it is well worth the ~$260 you pay between the case and shipping. If they had a US supplier, and we could buy it domestically for around the $120 price it’s listed for on AliExpress, I would tell you to buy it immediately. It has a very small build area and cable management is paramount. If you can handle that, then this is a breeze and has put me on my path to my dream home server. I am currently running TrueNas Scale, so keep an eye out for more on that.
I purchased this case and I am about to build my NAS system. I am new at this and would like to know if there’s a step by step video of how you built yours? I’m trying to follow Linus tech tips vid but he skips some steps.
Zee, thanks for commenting! Hardware wise, it is very much like Linus’ build. Software wise, I don’t have a step by step guide. It was a little trial and error. I highly recommend Techno Tim, Raid Owl and Leve1Techs on YouTube.
Wonderful, thank you so much for responding. I had questions build wise, cables and such. I will check the other channels you suggested
Thanks again!!
The one cable I will say to watch for is the CPU power cable that in my build loops over the top of the motherboard mounting panel if it is not completely flat it will catch when you try to pull the inner frame back out for any maintenance.
Wonderful, thanks!!
What about temperatures mate?
Hdd should be cool enough, but CPU, vrm RAM and mb in general? Do they need another fan ziptided in front of cpu?
In my experience, no. they pull enough fresh air from the perforated sides. I can imagine a build where you could push beyond that though. It really depends on your use case
How are you powering the hard drives? It’s hard to see from the images, the molex is unplugged so is there a hidden sata power cable somwehere?
Thanks!
yes, there is a molex that is hard to see there on the backplane