Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

sour.coffee

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 101 posts

Re: An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

#31

Post by zamadatix »

neelc wrote: post #3
metadat wrote: post #2

Why is the power supply 2x larger than a Macbool Pro PS unit? Cheap? What about GaN?

Mac Mini/Studio has an integrated power supply, but other Mini PCs do not have the same luxury. It doesn't matter if you're Minisforum or HP. Minisforum probably reused the x86 power supply for ARM. The x86 MS-01 and MS-A2 supports GPUs after all. I'm not a hardware engineer, I've failed miserably in software engineering and now run a VPS host.

I think that's why they were comparing to the MacBook Pro rather than the Mac Mini/Studio.

Re: An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

#32

Post by inventor7777 »

esseph wrote: post #25
inventor7777 wrote: post #21

$599 seems like a lot to me. You can get numerous older, much more powerful Mini PCs (e.g older ThinkCentre Tiny series) or even a base brand new M4 Mac Mini for that kind of money. Admittedly, the 10G interfaces and fast RAM make up for some of it, but at least for a normal homelab setup, I can't think of an application needing RAM faster than even DDR3, especially at this power level.

You can't get an ARM one though, only X86, which is mostly the point.

True. However, I've always noticed that ARM has less Linux support than x86, and the main benefits ARM is known for are typically performance/watt, running cooler, and less legacy support.

Since this server seems to have pretty average performance/watt and cooling, I can't really see much advantage to ARM here, at least for typical server use cases.

Unless you're doing ARM development, but I feel like a Pi 4/5 is better for basic development.

Re: An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

#33

Post by zamadatix »

plagiarist wrote: post #11
metadat wrote: post #2

Why is the power supply 2x larger than a Macbool Pro PS unit? Cheap? What about GaN?

I have a personal ban on any hardware that isn't powered by USB-C. (Or if it's large I'll accept a C17 socket.) Either give me a GaN or I will get it myself. Otherwise I'd probably have a few machines from this company.

This model accepts 100W USB PD input as well.

Re: An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

#34

Post by CharlesW »

g947o wrote: post #29
esseph wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't get an ARM one though, only X86, which is mostly the point.

Most people don't care about nominal difference in x86 vs arm. They care about cost, performance, efficiency, noise etc. Which applications run on the machine does matter. The article never explained why the author wanted an ARM setup. I can only consider this a spiritual thing, just like how the author avoids Debian without providing any concrete explanations.

The usual reason to prefer ARM is efficiency, and the author's mention of replacing "power-hungry HPE towers" seeems to support that as a primary motivating factor.

Re: An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

#35

Post by unsnap_biceps »

tiew9Vii wrote: post #19
hi_hi wrote: post #17

Not sure I understand this distinction. > I’ve always wanted an ARM server in my homelab. But earlier, I either had to use an underpowered ARM system, or use Asahi... What is stopping you using Mac with MacOS?

It’s not great as a headless server. With full disk encryption enabled you need a keyboard and display attached at boot to unlock it. You then need to sign in to your account to start services. You can use an IP based KVM but that’s another thing to manage. If you use Docker, it runs in a vm instead of native. With a Linux based ARM box you can use full disk encryption, use drop bear to ssh in on boot to unlock disks…

    The root of trust for Private Cloud Compute is our compute node: custom-built server hardware that brings the power and security of Apple silicon to the data center, with the same hardware security technologies used in iPhone, including the Secure Enclave and Secure Boot.
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

Granted, I don't know if it's really server oriented or if they're a bunch of iPhones on cards plugged into existing servers.

Re: An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

#36

Post by p_ing »

zuntaruk wrote: post #16
neelc wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cutting-edge distro with 6-month release and 13-month support cycles. Whereas Debian/Ubuntu have 5 years and RHEL/Alma/Rocky have 10 years.

I don't feel like this really answers the question thought, right? At least not at face value. I could see the side of maintenance burden being a potential point, meaning that one would be "pushed" to update the system between releases more often than something else.

Typically you want stability and predictability in a server. A platform that has a long support lifecycle is often more attractive than one with a short lifecycle.

If you can stay on v12.x for 10 years versus having to upgrade yearly yo maintain support, that’s ideal. 12.x should always behave the same way with your app where-as every major version upgrade may have breaking changes.

Servers don’t need to change, typically. They’re not chasing those quick updates that we expect on desktops.

Re: An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

#37

Post by inventor7777 »

CharlesW wrote: post #34
g947o wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't care about nominal difference in x86 vs arm. They care about cost, performance, efficiency, noise etc. Which applications run on the machine does matter. The article never explained why the author wanted an ARM setup. I can only consider this a spiritual thing, just like how the author avoids Debian without providing any concrete explanations.

The usual reason to prefer ARM is efficiency, and the author's mention of replacing "power-hungry HPE towers" seeems to support that as a primary motivating factor.

True. But as detailed in the Jeff Geerling article that was shared here in the comments, it has (at least at the moment) a rather high idle power draw, which seems to negate that, especially over time.

Re: An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

#39

Post by ggm »

Nice device but the experience write up is more about distro choices than anything. It's quieter than the older units and it's harder to run 2 disk ssd raid because of some design choices. Is it faster? How many virtuals? What's the throughput if you use it for complex network related roles not offloaded to the microtik switching/routing kit?

Does FreeBSD work better?

Re: An ARM Homelab Server, or a Minisforum MS-R1 Review

#40

Post by JustFinishedBSG »

ninth_ant wrote: post #28
orion7 wrote: post #27

For those who don't need quite that much power I recently added an Orange Pi 5 to my own homelab, the RK3588 SoC packs an impressive punch for what it is

And despite their broadly similar performance, the RK3588s have significantly better power draw. However I’m not sure of any of the rk3588 vendors that support both UEFI and have a full-size PCIe slot like the MS-R1 has.

https://github.com/edk2-porting/edk2-rk3588
Post reply on HN