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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

#81

Post by inventor7777 »

irusensei wrote: post #66
sgt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on what you need it for. Love Mac minis but feature by feature the MS-R1 has more memory, ECC support and dual 10Gbe.

Agreed. I can definitely see the Minisforum being far more cost efficient if you're mostly doing high speed networking transfers, while the Mac is more cost efficient if you need more raw power.

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

#82

Post by lostmsu »

protimewaster wrote: post #78
sgt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That's why you still have 20 year old Mac Minis still running as home servers etc. I often see statements like this made as if it's an exceptional characteristic of Macs. I've found that almost all computer hardware I buy has made it 20 years, though. Sure, a hard drive or something dies every once in a while, but most stuff gets retired because I just don't care to use it anymore, not because it doesn't work.

Exactly. Of all my hardware since 2003, which includes 5+ different GPUs that were mining and later training AI models almost non-stop the only things that stopped working and not just discarded for being too old/slow are 2 OCZ 2 SSDs which my guess would be had a bug in their firmware that caused a lockup.

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

#83

Post by tills13 »

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

Similarly, a Beelink mini runs one of my Proxmox nodes and it's excellent. Literally sips power, too. I think I measured under 30w while under load. I mainly use it for my Plex instance given the N100 with QuickSync.

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

#84

Post by vladvasiliu »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #77
merpkz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 relia…

> Not sure about the CPU performance being much more powerful for some shit-stained NUCs found on ebay The 10 GBit/s NUCs you find on eBay are enterprise-grade stuff: 10 Gbit/s hasn't really been a consumer thing. A used Fujitsu, Intel or Mellanox dual 10 Gbit/s bought on eBay isn't a "stained shit" that's "not guaranteed to be reliable". It's enterprise grade hardware. (that said the machine in TFA looks nice)

I'd argue they're actually much better than some bargain-bin realtek cards, especially if you want raw performance.

They'll also probably work out of the box on whatever "server" distro you throw at them, which seems to be an issue with the machine in question.

However, GP was most likely talking about actual NUCs, not NICs. I mean, there wasn't a typo. The point probably being that the CPUs in some of those mini boxen are likely to be woefully undercooled, so performance may not be what you expect by just looking at the CPU model.

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

#86

Post by vladvasiliu »

thebruce87m wrote: post #61
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.

I just picked up a NAS - a ugreen dxp2800 - for £300. It has 2x nvme slots and 2x 3.5 bays. It’s x86 so if you don’t like the ugreen os you can change it. It runs docker (supports docker compose) and vms and has the usual raid stuff. They also do an arm version for half the price but I wanted the intel gpu for transcoding.

Does it take ECC RAM?

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

#87

Post by nonamenoslogan »

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 €…

The MacMini will still be running in 5-7 years, reliably, and still have updates from Apple on the macOS side. It will still be running in 10+ years too should you keep it that long.

MinisForum makes disposable hardware. We used to use them for TV computers at work, and while they are cheap, they are fidgity with hardware and drivers, come with hacked-Windows Enterprise installed by default, and generally last for about 2 years before they hit the recycle pile.

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

#88

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

hmry wrote: post #53
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

Oh, that's what I missed; you can get a Mac for that, but I missed memory. Yep, that's my mistake thank you for correcting me

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

#89

Post by madduci »

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 €…

Mac M4 have also the problem that you can't install whatever distro you want too, even if it is cheap. When they'll get out of support, there's no upgrade available anymore
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