$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.

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merpkz 4 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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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jeroenhd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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 €1000 to €1719.

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sgt an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	jeroenhd 28 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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!
	▲	Mashimo 32 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> 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.
	▲	trvz an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	daymanstep 27 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		But you can't run most Linux distros on Mac hardware without doing hacks

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esseph 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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g947o 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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CharlesW 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	inventor7777 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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esseph an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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inventor7777 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	cromka 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Linux support for ARM is inferior for end users of desktop 3rd party software. Everything else is provided by the repos. I doubt this person runs Signal or Spotify on those servers.