This I/O board has been optimised for using a CM4 as a NAS with no moving parts except the bundled fan for cooling the chip.
Packaging was really good and I got complimentary priority shipping (for purchasing this and a CM4) with Bluedart and it got delivered in 2 days which is great.
The board itself taps into the single PCIe-x1 gen2.0 lane offered by the CM4 transforms the same into dual Gigabit LAN, 2x nvme M.2 full size slots and a pair of USB3.0 ports. To be honest the single PCIe-x1 Gen2.0 lane doesn't have enough bandwidth to saturate all that's connected to it but theoretically it has 500MBps converting to at least 100MBps for each M.2 slot and each LAN port and 100MBps for both USB ports combined. This may be dynamically balanced automatically as well as per need theoretically so I guess for a budget NAS device, it's pretty great. If one uses single LAN port, this will improve.
There's a mini PCIe slot as well for a wifi card/4G module but I haven't populated it as my CM4 supports wifi by itself but you don't need it for NAS to be functional over Ethernet.
The aluminium heat sink case makes for a very good heat dissipation for the CM4 and the drives.
My only gripe is 5V/4A supply needed over USB type C port (that doubles as EMMC flash access port as well). It could've been a DC barrel jack or a USB PD port. 20W is easy with PD. However that's for peak load and you can easily get by with the 5V/3A PSU for Pi4 as such.
Overall, a very interesting device as a complete compact package for power efficient NAS device that stays cool.
Happy with my purchase. Thanks ThinkRobotics.
