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There’s a thin line between a mini PC and a network-attached storage (NAS) device. Effectively a NAS is just a small computer that’s purpose-built to let you connect a decent amount of storage to a network so that it can be accessed by other devices on that network. But up until recently most of the NAS systems available for purchase were made by a handful of companies that offer specialized hardware and software.
That’s started to change in recent years, with a number of companies that are best known for offering general-purpose mini PCs starting to add NAS-like features. And that brings us to the GMKtec NucBox G9. Like most of the company’s other products, the G9 is a small computer that can be used for a variety of different purposes. But with onboard eMMC storage for an operating system and four M.2 2280 slots that can be used to add PCIe NVMe storage, this little computer is clearly designed to be used for network-attached storage applications.
GMKtec’s NucBox G9 also has two 2.5 Gb Ethernet ports, support for WiFi and Bluetooth, and other features that make it a versatile little computer.
At time of publication, the NucBox G9 is also relatively inexpensive. Prices start at $200 for a model with 12GB of LPDDR5 memory, a 64GB eMMC and Ubuntu Linux if you order from the GMKtec website, or $230 for a model that also has a 512GB SSD if you order from Amazon.
Not only is this good value for money but I’ve found the NucBox G9 lives up to its promises and delivers very good performance. It is a great little device.
GMKtec sent me a NucBox G9 to test, and in this review I’ll look at how well the G9 actually performs as a NAS, by testing the computer’s networking and storage capabilities. The NucBox G9 was provided to Liliputing for free, with no requirement that the device be returned upon completion of the review. This review is not sponsored by GMKtec, and the company did not modify or approve the content of this article in any way.
Hardware Design
The NucBox G9 measures 147 mm x 100 mm x 39 mm (5.8″ x 3.9″ x 1.5″) and consists of a lightweight plastic case wrapped around the middle with a thin metal band. Without any storage drives installed it is remarkably light, weighing only 339 grams (12 ounces).
Being substantially made of plastic makes the NucBox G9 feel rather cheap though. It’s not that it doesn’t look stylish with its black vented top, black base and matt silver metal sides, it’s just that it doesn’t give you that same impression as an all-aluminium case would do.
But that is the cover, let’s look at the book inside. If you peer through the top vents you can just make out the fan used for cooling the CPU.
Turning it over and the base reveals a cover which when removed, provides access to the M.2 2280 slots.
There are four of them, each with support for PCIe 3.0 x2, allowing for data transfer speeds up to 1969 MB/s after encoding overheads. This is going to be fast enough for any network connection you are likely to make to the NucBox G9.
All the slots support NVMe drives, and the fourth slot also supports SATA drives.
The computer also has 64GB of eMMC soldered to the motherboard. It’s a SCY (E64GCM7T1ABE00) module that can be used for an operating system.
The GMKtec logo is molded into the top of the case in a way that would indicate that the side with most of the ports is the front of the computer. But unlike some companies, I’m going to follow tradition and say that an easily accessible on/off button goes on the front of a computer.
GMKtec’s power button also glows when the computer is on, so the company probably meant for you to position the NucBox G9 so that the button is on the front … even if it means that the company’s logo is upside down.
On the side that I’m calling the rear of the computer, you’ll find most of the NucBox G9’s ports. From left to right these are:
- 1 x USB Type-C port for power only
- 1 x 3.5 mm audio jack
- 2 x 2.5 Gb Ethernet ports (Intel I226-V controllers)
- 2 x HDMI 2.0a ports
- 1 x USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2×1 port supporting 10 Gbps data, Power Delivery and Alternate Mode (DP 1.4)
On the left are just some ventilation holes for the CPU fan.
Finally on the right side are three USB Type-A 3.2 Gen 2×1 (10 Gbps) ports.
Inside the box besides the device, is a 64.99 W (19.0V/3.42A) power adapter with a power cable suitable for your location, an HDMI cable, VESA mount with screws and a user manual.
The NucBox G9 processor uses Intel’s latest Twin Lake architecture mobile N150 quad core processor. As a low powered processor with a base power of 6 watts, it’s capable of reaching 3.6 GHz.
As the Intel N150 only has nine PCIe lanes, the NucBox G9 is limited in what speeds it can offer for storage and networking.
Worse still is the maximum number of PCIe root ports, or devices, that can be enabled. If the four NVMe drives get two lanes each to allow a throughput of 16 GT/s (PCIe 3.0 x2), this only leaves one root port and one lane left for networking. GMKtec has chosen to connect an ASM1182e PCI express packet switch to this last root port.
This switches a single 5 GT/s PCIe 2.0 lane to two downstream ports each at 5 GT/s PCIe 2.0 x1. GMKtec uses these for two 2.5 GbE Network Interface Cards (NICs). If you’re wondering why the system doesn’t have any 10 GbE LAN ports, one reason is that there’s not enough PCIe lanes left to include one even if GMKtec had wanted to.
The NucBox G9 also comes with 12 GB of memory running at 4800 MT/s. However this is soldered on and there are no memory slots on the motherboard to allow additional memory.
The NucBox G9 also has an Intel AX101 wireless card connected to an M.2 2230 slot. This user-replaceable card provides Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Bluetooth 5.2.
When I say replaceable, I mean that you can replace it, but you’ll need to disassemble part of the computer to access the M.2 2230 slot because it’s covered by the portion of the computer that holds the SSDs.
In order to do that, you’ll need to first remove the computer’s bottom panel, and then remove any drives that are currently installed. Only then should you remove the four corner screws and gently take out the drive tray, folding it over to the side where it is connected by two sets of wires.
This exposes the WiFi card on the motherboard as well as two fans that are attached to the underside of the drive tray.
This pair of fans pull cooler outside air across the drives from vents on the opposite side of the case.
The fans then expel the warmed air externally through the bottom of the case.
There is actually quite a lot of clearance from the top of the drives and the cover. So I recommend installing NVMe drives with heatsinks to take advantage of this air flow, as this would further improve the system’s thermal performance.
The motherboard can be removed from the case by unscrewing a further four corner screws.
However, from a user perspective, do not try this at home! There is absolutely no need to do this, and it can be tricky to both remove and put back without causing damage.
The top side of the motherboard has a blower-style laptop cooling fan over the CPU.
This fan pulls air in through the top of the device and expels it out the side through fine fins which cool the copper pipe running to the CPU heatsink.
The top of the device, which again is made of plastic, has vents to allow the airflow to the fan and is where the aerials from the WiFi card are mounted.
It can also be removed as it is only clipped on and then secured by strong adhesive tape.
I appreciate how few screws are involved in the complete disassembly of the NucBox G9 and that the screws are easily distinguishable by getting larger the deeper into the device you venture. This may be a small thing that most people won’t notice, but it’s something that made disassembly and reassembly of the NAS a little easier.
Software Options
GMKtec sells the NucBox G9 in several configurations which essentially boil down to buying the G9 either with an NVMe drive or having to supply your own. I’m not using the term “barebones’ to describe any of those configurations because it isn’t really accurate for this computer since all models have LPDDR5 memory and eMMC storage soldered to the motherboard, and all versions come with a wireless card.
So the only real hardware choices you have to make are whether you want to purchase a model that comes with an SSD or not, and if so, how large of an SSD do you want?
Unlike most off-the-shelf NAS devices from companies like Synology, QNAP, Asustor, Terramaster and Ugreen, the NucBox G9 doesn’t come with an operating system designed specifically for use in NAS hardware. This is increasingly common for NAS-like PCs from smaller Chinese companies.
If you buy a NucBox G9 with only eMMC storage, it will come with Ubuntu 24.10 (Oracular Oriole) pre-installed on the internal eMMC storage. However if you purchase the G9 with either of the NVMe drives offered by GMKtec (512 GB or 1 TB), you will also get a licensed copy of Windows 11 Pro installed on the drive.
But you are not restricted to using just these two OS. The NucBox G9 will also run your typical NAS orientated OS, like TrueNAS Scale, Unraid etc.. However, for this review, I’ll just look at some performance observations when using Windows or Ubuntu.
Performance Observations Using Ubuntu
The Ubuntu release preinstalled on the eMMC is 24.10. This is termed an interim release and it is worth noting that it is only maintained for nine months which expires in July. The next release, Ubuntu 25.04 (Plucky Puffin), will soon arrive and the Beta version is already available for download.
If you’re looking to run something with more support, it’s worth noting that GMKTec says that the NucBox G9 does not officially support Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (which is supported for five years), because of some sort of a driver issue. So there may be some hardware (most likely the sensors on the NVMe SSD fans) that’s not fully supported when running earlier versions of Ubuntu or some other GNU/Linux distributions.
Prior to starting with a basic configuration for Ubuntu as a NAS, I installed four 4 TB Lexar NM790 M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4×4 NVMe SSD drives.
After installing ZFS, I first created a storage pool with a single-parity RAID configuration known as RAIDZ (or RAIDZ1) which is similar to RAID5. I then created a couple of ZFS file systems, one of which I shared through Samba to act as the NAS storage.
If we look at how the NucBox G9 uses the five available PCIe root ports, we can see that four are allocated to the NVMe drives and the fifth uses an ASM1182e PCIe express packet switch to split this final port with a PCIe Gen 3 lane into two lanes of PCIe Gen 2.
These are then used by two Intel I226-V 2.5 Gb Ethernet ports with each one connected to a single lane of PCIe Gen 2.
With two lanes of PCIe Gen 3, the throughput speed of each NVMe drive is limited to 1969 MB/s.
Testing one of the newly created ZFS file systems using my ‘fio’ wrapper ldiskmark (which is my Ubuntu version of CrystalDiskMark) gave a sequential read speed of 2626.8 MB/s and a sequential write of 2133.8 MB/s.
However, for any NAS, the typical storage access bottleneck is the network speed. So really the minimum speed of the MVMe drives only needs to be faster than the network connection available.
The NucBox G9 has two Ethernet ports but they are only 2.5 Gb rather than 10 Gb found on some other recent consumer NAS devices. This difference becomes apparent when accessing the G9 from network connected devices. For example, the speed of the G9 NAS configured as described above, saw a sequential read speed of only 309.31 MB/s and a sequential write of only 309.23 MB/s when connected to a Windows PC.
This can be confirmed by testing the performance of the 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports using ‘iperf3’. The observed upload speed was 2.48 Gb/s and the download speed was 2.47 Gb/s.
However, the USB ports are all 10 Gbps which means you have an option of using a 5 Gbps USB Ethernet adapter. I connected a Wavlink WL-NWU340G USB C to 5 Gbps Ethernet Adapter which uses the Realtek RTL8157 controller using drivers that are available from Realtek for both Windows and Linux.
Testing the performance of the 5 Gbps USB Ethernet adapter gave an upload speed of 4.77 Gb/s and a download speed of 4.90 Gb/s.
With this adapter on the NucBox G9 NAS, I got double my earlier sequential read and write speeds at 619.07 MN/s and 617.13 respectively. It is also a low cost solution as these USB Ethernet adapters cost less than USD 25 in Australia and are available in the US for around $30.
Another point to note is the settings for the power limits and ‘tau’ on Linux. Running the command ‘powercap-info intel-rapl -z0:’ shows:
Zone 0
name: package-0
enabled: 1
max_energy_range_uj: 262143328850
energy_uj: 13665879749
Constraint 0
name: long_term
power_limit_uw: 10000000
time_window_us: 7995392
max_power_uw: 6000000
Constraint 1
name: short_term
power_limit_uw: 15000000
time_window_us: 2440
max_power_uw: 0
Constraint 2
name: peak_power
power_limit_uw: 78000000
max_power_uw: 0
This indicates that the value for PL/1 is set to 10 watts and for PL/2 it is 15 watts with ‘tau’ set to 8 seconds. These are quite conservative settings for a mini PC, but are perfectly adequate for running the NucBox G9 as a NAS.
There is a “Power mode” setting in the UEFI/BIOS and these are the settings when the default value of “Balanced” is used. There are also options for “Performance” or “Quiet” and the individual settings can also be manually adjusted.
I spent quite a bit of time testing, including dual-booting between Ubuntu and Windows. On each OS I built different NAS configurations including a very simple one based on a NAS consisting of striped drives (RAID0) for storage, containers implemented through Docker and managed through Portainer. I also added a Jellyfin container to look at the system load whilst playing music remotely.
Monitoring the CPU usage on Ubuntu using the system monitor showed around 20% usage. As the Intel N150 is not a very powerful CPU, this usage shows that care should be taken not to overload the system by running too many containers concurrently.
On Ubuntu I found I had to use Docker Engine rather than Docker Desktop on Linux, as the latter gave me errors.But It is worth noting that it is only officially supported on Ubuntu 24.04 and earlier. Overall I found the hardware performance was as expected and perfectly acceptable.
Performance Observations Using Windows
The review unit came with the optional 1 TB M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe drive which is made by OEM Shenzhen Techwinsemi Technology Co., Ltd. or TWSC. Slated to have a top read speed of up to 3500 MB/s and a write speed of up to 3100 MB/s, it came preloaded with Windows 11 Pro Version 24H2 Build 26100.2314.
Obviously, as the NVMe drives in the NucBox G9 are only allocated two lanes of PCIe Gen 3, the theoretical maximum speed is 1969 MB/s, which falls short of what the drive itself should be capable of.
When speeds were actually checked using CrystalDiskMark, the sequential read speed was measured at 1783.62 MB/s and the sequential write was 1692.00 MB/s.
The included Intel AX101 card is rated with a maximum speed of 600 Mbps. Unfortunately WiFi almost never gets close to its theoretical speed regardless of the card so this is probably best used for emergency management access.
The wireless card also supports Bluetooth 5.2, as shown by the firmware version being LMP11.
The soldered-on LPDDR5 memory is from Samsung and capable of running at 6400 MT/s although it is configured to only run at 4800 MT/s as this is the maximum supported by the processor.
The memory is also arranged in four banks each of 3 GB to make up the total of 12 GB.
All the power related settings are identical to those in Ubuntu: PL/1 is set to 10 watts, PL/2 is set to 15 watts and ‘tau’ is set to 8 seconds.
With the Windows drive taking up one NVMe slot, I striped the three 4TB drives I’d installed in the remaining slots into one single “12 TB” drive which actually has 11.1 TB capacity.
Striping (RAID0) splits the data across the three drives and improves performance due to working in parallel across the drives. But it is risky as if a single drive fails, all the data will be lost. Using CrystalDiskMark to check the speeds of this single large drive shows a sequential read speed of 3630.12 MB/s and a sequential write of 3594.59 MB/s.
Once the drive is set up with sharing it can obviously be accessed from Windows PCs. Earlier, I showed the sequential read and write speeds when the NucBox G9 was connected to a 10 GbE network using the 5 GbE USB adapter. The sequential speeds were 619.07 MN/s and 617.13 respectively.
The Windows NAS can be accessed from Linux PCs using CIFS after mounting the remote drive locally. When I ran ldiskmark I saw a sequential read speed of 596.0 MB/s and a sequential write speed of 579.2 MB/s. This speed difference is due to the additional burden of processing the CIFS protocol.
Overall on Windows I didn’t experience any issues installing Docker Desktop and Portainer and the hardware performed as expected and was perfectly acceptable.
Power and Thermals
Running a stress test shows the fan keeps the processor temperature under control although there is slight thermal throttling.
During the stress test the average CPU frequency dropped from the idling frequency of just over 2935 MHz to 2785 MHz. The CPU’s temperature did rise quickly but settled to averaging 86.6 °C. The temperature of the NVMe drives were not affected by the higher CPU temperature with the unused Windows OS drive (NVMe1) averaging 48.9 °C, and the other drives averaging 55.9 °C , 55.8 °C and 51.8 °C.
As I mentioned above, I’d recommend using heatsinks on the NVMe drives to ensure adequate cooling provided by the bottom two fans.
At idle, the power usage was around 14.4 watts and the noise from the fans was minimal and couldn’t be measured by my meter next to the device. During the stress test the power usage initially peaked at 27.5 W at the start during the ‘tau’ period running at PL/2, before averaging at around 26.3 W for PL/1 and the duration of the test. The fan was audible during the stress test but it was a constant noise that was acceptable being like a quiet whir averaging only 37.4 dBA.
The case did warm up as a result of the higher CPU temperature with the metallic sides reaching around 46 °C.
When the Docker Jellyfin was running playing music remotely, the power usage ranged around 20 W. The fans were active but too quiet to register on my sound meter. The sides of the device felt warm at around 43 °C but certainly not too hot to touch.
It was quite a warm day when these measurements were taken with a room temperature at 28.6 °C but there was no air movement in the room from fans or air conditioning to help with heat dissipation from the device.
When powered off, the NucBox G9 still consumes power measuring 2.7 watts.
Conclusion
The GMKtec NucBox G9 provides impressive value for money. It’s a small, reliable solution that makes a great network-attached storage device, and is perfect for a NAS beginner offering various paths to learn more about NAS technology and don’t want or need a larger device with support for 3.5 inch hard drives.
There are some negatives with the NucBox G9, but these are to be expected for the price you are paying. And they’re not necessarily deal breakers.
For example there’s no support for 10 GbE networking. But you can always use a cheap USB Ethernet adapter to upgrade to 5 GbE speeds.
And the computer’s memory is soldered onto the motherboard and is not user upgradeable. But 12GB of RAM is more than you’d get from most other NAS devices in this price range. This may be an issue with heavy TrueNAS or ZFS usage though.
And unfortunately the plastic top and bottom really do make this computer feel cheap – but this is a case where being cheap doesn’t mean it’s not good.
There are plenty of positives. You’ve got four NVMe slots in a computer that’s almost small enough to fit in your pocket. It supports a wide range of operating systems and comes with a choice of Ubuntu 24.10 or Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. It also allows you to install a NAS OS of your choice. Since it has an Intel x86 processor, most operating systems should be compatible.
Despite having three fans inside the case, it’s not a noisy mini PC. And it’s so small that it’s easier to mount behind a monitor. And with a $200 starting price, it’s as cheap as chips.
The NucBox G9 is a really good and fun device. It certainly works as a network storage device, and you can run apps like Jellyfin to handle your general media needs. It is well worth considering for anyone looking to get into NAS systems.