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

sour.coffee

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

#51

Post by INTPenis »

some-guy wrote: post #7

> Yes, while I use Fedora on my laptop, I also know Fedora is generally not a good option for a server. Why is Fedora not considered good for a server?

It's more maintenance due to its frequent release cycles, but it's perfectly good as a server OS. I've used it many times, friends use it.

You can't mess up the release cycle because their package repos drop old releases very quickly, so you're left stranded.

A friend recently converted his Fedora servers to RHEL10 because he has kids now and just doesn't have the time for the release cycle. So RHEL, or Debian, Alma, Rocky, offer a lot more stability and less maintenance requirement for people who have a life.

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

#52

Post by sgt »

jeroenhd wrote: post #47
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.

> even a base brand new M4 Mac Mini A base Mac Mini (256GB/16GB) would cost me €720 while a Minisforum MS-R1 (1TB/32GB) would cost me €559 (minus a 25 euro discount for signing up to their newsletter if you accept that practice). Price to performance the Apple solution may be better, but the prices aren't similar at all. Upgrading the Mac to also feature 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM, the price rises by a whopping €…

559 vs 720? That's literally like a few coffees. I went to Amsterdam (assuming you're dutch) and I paid 5 euro for a coffee.

Go for the Mac Mini, the hardware incl thermal is also built exceptionally well. That's why you still have 20 year old Mac Minis still running as home servers etc.

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

#53

Post by hmry »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #20

> There is also one other perk: while the MSRP is $599, I got it for $559 despite a RAM shortage. At that price, why not a mac mini running linux? I think (skimming Asahi docs) the only things that would give you trouble don't matter to the headless usecase here?

I don't think you can get an M1 or M2 mac mini with 64GB of RAM for $559

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

#54

Post by justincormack »

hi_hi wrote: post #41
tiew9Vii wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the reply. I'm looking to replace my aging mini pc with a mac mini, so I'm quite interested in any limitations here. The full disk encryption I can live without. I'm assuming these limitations don't apply if it's disabled. [Ah, I just saw the other reply that this has now been fixed] I was aware of the Docker in a VM issue. I haven't tested this out yet, but my expectation is this can be mitigated via http…

Apple containers run in one vm per container

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

#55

Post by esseph »

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.

> Most people don't care about nominal difference in x86 vs arm.

"Most people" aren't on HN, either.

The # of ARM servers at cloud providers are growing, but the ARM server options are severely lacking for most.

I, personally, would like to see more ARM growth (and I think we're heading that direction anyway... look at NVIDIA right now). Buying ARM servers that help push ARM software development forward is probably a good thing, IMO, from that POV.

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

#56

Post by trvz »

sgt wrote: post #52
jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even a base brand new M4 Mac Mini A base Mac Mini (256GB/16GB) would cost me €720 while a Minisforum MS-R1 (1TB/32GB) would cost me €559 (minus a 25 euro discount for signing up to their newsletter if you accept that practice). Price to performance the Apple solution may be better, but the prices aren't similar at all. Upgrading the Mac to also feature 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM, the price rises by a whopping €…

559 vs 720? That's literally like a few coffees. I went to Amsterdam (assuming you're dutch) and I paid 5 euro for a coffee. Go for the Mac Mini, the hardware incl thermal is also built exceptionally well. That's why you still have 20 year old Mac Minis still running as home servers etc.

And ironically, a special part failing and there being no replacement parts is more likely to happen on one of these NUCloids than a Mac mini.

So over the span of 20 years they’ll pay a multitude on these crappy computers than what the Mac mini costs once. May as well get a specced out Mac.

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

#57

Post by Mashimo »

sgt wrote: post #52
jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even a base brand new M4 Mac Mini A base Mac Mini (256GB/16GB) would cost me €720 while a Minisforum MS-R1 (1TB/32GB) would cost me €559 (minus a 25 euro discount for signing up to their newsletter if you accept that practice). Price to performance the Apple solution may be better, but the prices aren't similar at all. Upgrading the Mac to also feature 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM, the price rises by a whopping €…

559 vs 720? That's literally like a few coffees. I went to Amsterdam (assuming you're dutch) and I paid 5 euro for a coffee. Go for the Mac Mini, the hardware incl thermal is also built exceptionally well. That's why you still have 20 year old Mac Minis still running as home servers etc.

> 559 vs 720? That's literally like a few coffees. I went to Amsterdam (assuming you're dutch) and I paid 5 euro for a coffee.

When someone says he drank a few coffees, I would never have guessed it was 32.

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

#58

Post by jeroenhd »

sgt wrote: post #52
jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even a base brand new M4 Mac Mini A base Mac Mini (256GB/16GB) would cost me €720 while a Minisforum MS-R1 (1TB/32GB) would cost me €559 (minus a 25 euro discount for signing up to their newsletter if you accept that practice). Price to performance the Apple solution may be better, but the prices aren't similar at all. Upgrading the Mac to also feature 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM, the price rises by a whopping €…

559 vs 720? That's literally like a few coffees. I went to Amsterdam (assuming you're dutch) and I paid 5 euro for a coffee. Go for the Mac Mini, the hardware incl thermal is also built exceptionally well. That's why you still have 20 year old Mac Minis still running as home servers etc.

If you're spending 170 euros on coffee then you're either abnormally rich or abnormally bad with money for a Dutchman.

Without the ability to upgrade either storage or RAM, a 256GB SSD with 16GB RAM is quite useless for a home server. Minisforum doesn't offer any options with that little RAM and storage it seems (you can pick between barebones and 1TB models).

The bare minimum spec for the Mac Mini sits at an interesting price point, but if you use it for any more than the bare minimum it'll be pretty restrictive with how memory-hungry macOS has become. No Linux support to speak of also makes for a rather mediocre home server experience.

One interesting part I found out of Apple's European pricing is that after currency conversion and subtracting VAT, the European price is still equivalent to $700, which is $100 more than they charge within the US. Looks like a 1/6th price increase is all you need for consumer rights!

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

#59

Post by daymanstep »

sgt wrote: post #52
jeroenhd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even a base brand new M4 Mac Mini A base Mac Mini (256GB/16GB) would cost me €720 while a Minisforum MS-R1 (1TB/32GB) would cost me €559 (minus a 25 euro discount for signing up to their newsletter if you accept that practice). Price to performance the Apple solution may be better, but the prices aren't similar at all. Upgrading the Mac to also feature 1TB of storage and 32GB of RAM, the price rises by a whopping €…

559 vs 720? That's literally like a few coffees. I went to Amsterdam (assuming you're dutch) and I paid 5 euro for a coffee. Go for the Mac Mini, the hardware incl thermal is also built exceptionally well. That's why you still have 20 year old Mac Minis still running as home servers etc.

But you can't run most Linux distros on Mac hardware without doing hacks

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

#60

Post by merpkz »

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.

Not sure about the CPU performance being much more powerful for some shit-stained NUCs found on ebay, but one selling point for these minisforum machines are hassle-free dual 10G interfaces which are required for decent cluster performance - see ceph or proxmox ( with ceph ) or even kubernetes with, you guessed it - rook-ceph. Getting 10Gbit interface to work on ThinkCentre is possible, but not guaranteed to be reliable. This machine is perfect for such application and price point is not that terrible all things considered.
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