ROUAFWIT N100/N305 NAS Review

ROUAFWIT NAS Drive Review – Super Budget?

I remember when the pre-built NAS market was a pretty sparse and unpopulated one! Most users really only had the choice of expensive turnkey solutions from the likes of Synology and QNAP, or prebuilt, bulky, and inefficient dusty servers that were either horrifically overpowered, or so fragile that a single cough too close to it would cause it to break! The pre-built NAS market is now incredibly oversaturated with numerous brands, a huge diversity in hardware architecture, and a flood of pre-built, OS-free NAS solutions that are really starting to challenge the status quo of modern NAS solutions. However, numerous pop-up and relatively unknown players have entered this space.

Today, I want to talk about a particular budget solution that has started appearing on both Amazon and AliExpress: the Rouafwit Teknas 4 4-bay NAS solution. This system, powered by either an N100 or N305 hardware architecture, with two and four-bay disk configurations, arrives at a price point that even manages to undercut existing budget NAS solutions like Terramaster and Asustor. But, is it actually any good? Today, let’s discuss whether this system deserves your money and, more importantly, your data!

ROUAFWIT 4-Bay NAS Review – Quick Conclusion

Given the affordability of this system, I really wanted to be positive about what you get for your money with the Rouafwit Teknas 4 NAS system. However, this system left me pretty disappointed. The hardware architecture on offer is simply not utilized as effectively as it is in other OS-free NAS solutions from companies like Aoostar, Terramaster, ZimaCube, and more. It would be easy to blame the modest architecture and low LAN allocation for this system being somewhat pared down, but features like the single M.2 slot, the complete lack of PCIe upgradability, the complicated design to access the internal components, and just a general feeling that this system has not been designed as a ‘solution’ but more as just a ‘product’ are hard to ignore. There are better examples out there of this hardware configuration at a similar price point to what the Rouafwit Teknas 4 is being sold for. In itself, it is not strictly a bad system; in fact, it’s not terrible value. The issue is that right now, the market is oversaturated with numerous better examples of similar hardware, and they seem to do it a lot better.

BUILD QUALITY - 6/10

HARDWARE - 7/10

PERFORMANCE - 7/10

PRICE - 8/10

VALUE - 8/10

7.2

PROS

👍🏻Affordable Pricing: Provides an affordable alternative to other NAS solutions while offering solid hardware configurations.
👍🏻Expandable Storage: Supports up to 4 drive bays with 22TB capacity per bay, allowing significant storage potential.
👍🏻Good Performance: Dual 2.5GbE ports allow for aggregated speeds, maximizing network performance for most home and small office users.
👍🏻Hot-Swappable Bays: External hard drives can be easily swapped without powering down the system, improving ease of use.
👍🏻Multiple Operating System Support: Pre-installed with openmediavault (OMV) and supports a variety of OS options like Windows, Linux, Unraid, and more.
👍🏻Power-Efficient: Low power consumption thanks to the N305/N100 processors, making it cost-effective for 24/7 operation.
👍🏻Compact Design: Compact aluminium alloy chassis with solid heat dissipation through both passive and active cooling mechanisms.
👍🏻Dual Display Outputs: Supports dual 4K display output through HDMI and DisplayPort, making it versatile for multimedia applications.

CONS

👎🏻Limited Expandability: No PCIe upgradability, which limits future hardware upgrades like adding a 10GbE network card.
👎🏻Single M.2 Slot: Only one M.2 slot, reducing flexibility for cache drives or storage expansion, especially when using it for the OS.
👎🏻Complicated Internal Access: Accessing the internal components (RAM/SSD) is cumbersome, requiring removal of the base panel and adhesive strips.
👎🏻No ECC Memory Support: Lacks ECC memory support, which could be important for users seeking data integrity in more critical setups.

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ROUAFWIT 4-Bay NAS Review – Design

The Rouafwit Teknas 4 system arrives in a distinctive retail box with a modest accessory kit. The unit was well protected in structured packaging, and I can’t fault the protection it received in transit. That said, it is worth highlighting that it didn’t include any screws for 2.5″ media or an ethernet cable. One could argue that many users may already have network cabling at home and reusing it helps avoid waste, but it does seem a little cheap to omit the necessary screws.

The accessory kit isn’t groundbreaking in terms of quality. Indeed, it doesn’t have any branding on it and feels quite cheap. Again, this system isn’t designed to be a pricey one and is certainly targeting a more cost-effective market. Nevertheless, the accessory kit is not a place where you want to see money being cut.

The instruction manual is quite informal, and the support and warranty document feels a little flat. I know it may seem like I’m being harsh here, but this system is priced similarly to other solutions listed on Amazon and AliExpress from China, and many of them have provided better accessories and presentation—some at an even lower cost than the Rouafwit Teknas 4. So, I think it’s important for users to have higher expectations than what we see here.

The design of the external chassis is quite quirky, and they’ve taken a few unique design and color elements that I haven’t seen on other systems. Everything is where you expect it to be, with drive bays on the front and ports on the back, but a few unique flourishes in the design and material choices do stand out.

For starters, the SATA storage bays are located horizontally, as opposed to the vertical configuration found in most other NAS systems.

The trays themselves are pretty bulky, but they hold a 3.5″ SATA hard drive very well. They are click-and-load trays, so no screwdriver or screws are needed to install drives. That said, as mentioned earlier, the accessory kit does not include screws for 2.5″ media, which you will need to install in this system.

The trays use a double-button pull motion to remove them from the system, as opposed to traditional spring-loaded trays. This is not a bad thing, just different from how other brands approach SATA storage bays.

The four individual SATA bays connect to an internal PCB board that has four individual SATA data and power connectors, so no loose wires here. This board feeds into a larger motherboard PCB, and the SATA storage is managed by a JMB 58x SATA controller.

This controller runs on a PCIe Gen 2*1 line, so you’re looking at around 500 MB/s bandwidth for these drives. That is just about enough to support the dual 2.5 G network connections on this system, but it’s surprisingly tight. Given that the system has four drives in a RAID 0 configuration, it will likely exceed the bandwidth afforded by this SATA controller.

At the base of the system is a ventilation panel with a small laptop cooling fan behind it that draws air through the system’s mainboard PCB.

The sides of the system don’t feature passive ventilation. Instead, it uses a horizontal cooling system that pulls air through via the ventilation and rear active cooling fan. The external chassis is completely metal on all sides, which no doubt helps with light heat dissipation in conjunction with the active and passive cooling systems already in place.

Surprisingly, the system was not too noisy, despite the largely metal design and even with four hard drives in active use.

The base of the system does not feature any accessibility panel to reach the internal SSD or memory slots, which, as you will find out later in the review, was quite frustrating!

Turning the system around, we find the rear-mounted cooling system and ports.

The internal cooling fan is an orange standard PC fan, but it was very low noise, and I’m positive that with the right NAS software, this fan is also controllable via the system hardware.

ROUAFWIT 4-Bay NAS Review – Ports and Connections

The ports and connections on this system are a little underwhelming. There are the obligatory USB 3.2 Gen 2 connections that allow for up to 1000 MB/s bandwidth for locally attached storage and accessories.

There is also a TF/SD card slot for installing smaller SD cards, opening the door for OS updates, BIOS/firmware updates, and even running UnRAID from this.

However, when it comes to network connectivity, the system falls short. It arrives with two 2.5G network connections, which, on the surface, is good, providing 500-600 MB/s external connectivity thanks to load balancing, SMB multi-channel, and link aggregation. However, despite the N305 CPU having only around nine PCIe lanes to distribute across the system, the lack of 10GbE connectivity is a real pain. It significantly reduces the maximum external performance potential of the internal M.2 SSD slot and the four hard drive slots.

I have no doubt that the hard drives or SSDs in this system can easily oversaturate these network connections.

While it’s nice that there’s a port for failover, the inability to scale up network bandwidth with something like 10GbE via a PCIe upgrade slot or a more conveniently placed M.2 slot is disappointing. It feels like the system is limiting my ability to fully utilize the CPU and hardware architecture.

For example, compared to the Terramaster F8 SSD NAS, that system arrives with a lesser N95 CPU but still manages to include eight M.2 SSD slots and a 10GbE connection—and at a similar price point. It’s annoying that the Rouafwit Teknas 4 has a better CPU but severely limits its connectivity options.

Overall, the ports and connectivity on this system are just fine—nothing exciting, nothing groundbreaking, just fine. The lack of an easy way to scale up network connectivity is disheartening. While you could use USB network adapters, there’s definitely enough hardware architecture here that they could have done more with what they had. Let’s discuss the internal hardware.

ROUAFWIT 4-Bay NAS Review – Internal Hardware

The internal hardware of the Rouafwit Teknas 4 is deceptively understated, with the option of an N100 or N305 Intel CPU. Accessing the internal hardware to upgrade memory or change the internal SSD is done in a slightly unconventional way.

Unlike some systems that feature strategically placed rear screws, a click-and-load system, or even an internal panel located in the SATA hard drive cage, the Rouafwit Teknas 4 requires you to peel away the rubber feet strips on either side of the base panel and then remove six individual screws. If I were being charitable, I would say users won’t need to access the system this way very often, so the unconventional means of accessing the internals isn’t a dealbreaker.

However, peeling away these rubber feet strips isn’t easy, and doing so nullifies the adhesive. Additionally, although nothing in this area of the system is hot-swappable, users will need to access this panel to upgrade the internal SODIMM memory or change the M.2 SSD. It’s a really odd design choice and not something I’ve seen on any other NAS server at this scale.

Inside, we found the CPU on one side under a larger heatsink panel, and the rest of the hardware peripherals on the other. I expected a small motherboard given the system’s size, but this one is especially cluttered and not directly in line with the large rear cooling fan. Instead, this small motherboard is connected to a laptop-style fan in the base cavity of the system, and given the clustered nature of the PCB, the airflow seems somewhat optimistic.

The CPU under the larger heatsink is either the N100 quad-core processor or the low-power-consuming 8-core N305 i3 processor. Both CPUs are becoming increasingly common in the NAS world and are great for users wanting integrated graphics and x86 architecture while keeping their electricity bills low.

Given the price point and scale of this system, the choice of the N100 or N305 CPUs makes a lot of sense. Whether you’re running modest container deployments, a mid-range Plex media server, larger file backup operations, or virtual machines, both of these CPUs offer tremendous value. However, the limited resources spread across the system likely contribute to the modest connectivity and expandability. Other brands have utilized the N100 and N305 more effectively with greater connectivity than what’s present here.

The system comes with a single SODIMM DDR5 memory slot, with the default memory choice left to the end user at purchase. For instance, the N100 version of this 4-bay NAS comes with 8GB of DDR5 memory for $350, but you can scale up to the N305 with a 2TB SSD and 32GB of memory on a single module for $750. There are around 12 different configuration options between these two price points. However, the system does not support ECC memory.

Now let’s discuss the internal M.2 SSD slot. There’s good news and bad news here. On the plus side, it comes with a pretty robust, good-quality Samsung SSD, which is surprising for a budget appliance. Most other cheap NAS devices ship with unbranded SSDs as standard. This is a DRAM-less drive, but for a NAS operating system SSD, it’s not too bad.

The downside is that this SSD, regardless of the drive you install, has limited usefulness. With only a single M.2 SSD slot, this drive will almost certainly be used for fast storage or caching.

Unless you plan to run NAS software like Unraid from a connected USB, most other NAS software will require the use of this M.2 slot. This is especially frustrating when practically every other N100 or N305 NAS appliance features two M.2 slots.

This all results in a rather unusual 4-bay NAS system. All the expected building blocks are here, but each one seems slightly off. For example, the internal PCB includes an M.2 Wi-Fi adapter slot, but it’s empty. It would have been a cheap and easy way to add wireless connectivity to the system. You can still add a Wi-Fi adapter if you choose, but it’s a pain to access and is tightly sandwiched against the existing M.2 connection.

Even better, it would have been possible to add an M.2 to 10GbE network adapter in this slot. This would have allowed users to upgrade network connectivity, even if the hardware designers had bifurcated this slot from a single PCIe x2 into two x1 slots. There are so many ways brands have utilized the limited PCIe lane architecture of the N100/N305 in the past year and a half that make this system seem a little limiting by comparison.

The hardware architecture isn’t bad exactly, just not particularly exciting. There are better ways this hardware has been deployed at a similar price point.

ROUAFWIT 4-Bay NAS Review – Power Consumption and Noise

Power consumption on the Rouafwit Teknas 4 was quite reasonable, largely thanks to the efficient CPU. Despite running four SATA drives, two cooling fans, and an M.2 SSD, power consumption during both idle and active use was commendable. In idle mode, with all drives in hibernation, power consumption was an extraordinary 9W. Of course, this would change rapidly with drive access, but clearly, the cooling systems powered down when not needed.

When the system was running the OS from the internal SSD and the CPU was at 40-50% utilization, power consumption ranged from 31 to 36W. This is much higher, of course, but still impressive for a 4-bay SATA hard drive system.

Similarly, the noise levels were quite low. During idle use, the fans spun down significantly, and we recorded impressively low noise levels.

When all four hard drives and both fans were active, the system only produced 36 to 41 dBA of noise. Had I used higher-capacity or enterprise hard drives, the noise level would have been higher, but the slightly bulky trays did a great job of reducing ambient noise.

ROUAFWIT 4-Bay NAS Review – Performance

Measuring the performance of the Teknas 4 Rouafwit NAS is a little more complicated than it should be. With hard drives, there is potential for aggregated read performance to reach 500-600 MB/s (in a RAID 0 configuration). However, since the system only features dual 2.5GbE network ports, there’s a cap on the overall external performance. Aggregating the two 2.5G ports should give you performance above 550 MB/s at full saturation, but there’s not much room to maneuver between what a SATA hard drive can output and what the network interface can handle before full saturation.

Using Unraid, we performed some internal performance tests on the M.2 SSD. Since the slot is Gen 3 x2, the drive has around 1800-2000 MB/s of internal bandwidth to work with. Running repeated 1GB test files showed performance between 1.1GB and 1.5GB per second, which is respectable. However, it’s unfortunate that there’s no way to fully realize this external performance on this box.

Theoretically, you could use 2.5G or 5G network adapters to fully saturate those connections, but the only high-speed SSD slot is already occupied by the OS. Even if you fully populate this device with SATA SSDs in a RAID configuration, you’d likely only hit 700-800 MB/s at most. So, while sustained performance is possible and heavily dependent on the storage media you use, these performance numbers come with the caveat that the system lacks most traditional methods for scaling up external bandwidth to enjoy this performance across your broader network.

ROUAFWIT 4-Bay NAS Review – Conclusion

Given the affordability of the Rouafwit Teknas 4 NAS system, I had high hopes that it would offer great value for budget-conscious users, but ultimately, it left me disappointed. While it uses low-power processors like the N100 and N305, which are suitable for NAS applications, the hardware is not utilized as efficiently as it could be compared to other OS-free NAS solutions from brands like Aoostar, Terramaster, and ZimaCube. The single M.2 slot, lack of PCIe upgradability, and overly complicated design for accessing internal components are difficult to overlook. These shortcomings reduce the flexibility and future-proofing potential of the system, which is especially unfortunate in a market where users expect more scalability, like the ability to upgrade network speeds to 10GbE or add additional SSDs for caching. The need to peel away rubber strips to access the internal components adds to the frustration, as it feels like an unnecessary hassle when other systems offer easier, tool-less solutions.

While the Rouafwit Teknas 4 NAS isn’t strictly a bad system, it’s hard to recommend when the market is full of better alternatives that offer more for a similar price. Competitors like Terramaster and ZimaCube manage to provide more user-friendly designs, better expandability, and faster network options, all within the same budget range. In contrast, the Rouafwit Teknas 4 feels more like a “product” to fill a gap rather than a well-thought-out “solution” for long-term use. For users seeking a high-performance, cost-effective NAS with room to grow, there are simply better options available that deliver more value, making this system feel underwhelming in comparison.

PROS of the Rouafwit Teknas 4	CONs of the Rouafwit Teknas 4
Affordable Pricing: Provides an affordable alternative to other NAS solutions while offering solid hardware configurations. Expandable Storage: Supports up to 4 drive bays with 22TB capacity per bay, allowing significant storage potential. Good Performance: Dual 2.5GbE ports allow for aggregated speeds, maximizing network performance for most home and small office users. Hot-Swappable Bays: External hard drives can be easily swapped without powering down the system, improving ease of use. Multiple Operating System Support: Pre-installed with openmediavault (OMV) and supports a variety of OS options like Windows, Linux, Unraid, and more. Power-Efficient: Low power consumption thanks to the N305/N100 processors, making it cost-effective for 24/7 operation. Compact Design: Compact aluminium alloy chassis with solid heat dissipation through both passive and active cooling mechanisms. Dual Display Outputs: Supports dual 4K display output through HDMI and DisplayPort, making it versatile for multimedia applications.	Limited Expandability: No PCIe upgradability, which limits future hardware upgrades like adding a 10GbE network card. Single M.2 Slot: Only one M.2 slot, reducing flexibility for cache drives or storage expansion, especially when using it for the OS. Complicated Internal Access: Accessing the internal components (RAM/SSD) is cumbersome, requiring removal of the base panel and adhesive strips. No ECC Memory Support: Lacks ECC memory support, which could be important for users seeking data integrity in more critical setups.

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