[inventor7777]

$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.

[jeroenhd]

> 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.

[inventor7777]

Yes, I was basing my estimate more on the US price of $600, which is basically the same, if you buy both at MSRP. (However, that means the Mac does not have 10G)

I did not realize the EU versions were that much more expensive.

I do agree about the RAM/storage prices though. It's only worth it if you want the raw power, where the Mac handily beats this.

[madduci]

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

[nonamenoslogan]

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.

[sgt]

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.

[thebruce87m]

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.

[vladvasiliu]

Does it take ECC RAM?

[merpkz]

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.

[TacticalCoder]

> 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)

[ekropotin]

2x10G is the biggest selling point of this device. This can be very useful in certain use-cases, when you need a high speed interconnect with SSD-backed NAS, for example. Or between a Ceph-cluster nodes for the faster replication.

[esseph]

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

[inventor7777]

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.

[adrian_b]

This is the only thing at a reasonable price with an Armv9.2-A CPU that is not a smartphone, but this Chinese CPU has various quirks.

An older but better ARM CPU with quadruple Cortex-A78 cores (Armv8.2-A ISA) is available for use in embedded computers from Qualcomm, rebranded from Snapdragon to Dragonwing. There are a few single-board computers of credit-card size with it, which are much faster than Raspberry Pi and the like.

Such SBCs are cheaper than the one from TFA and they are better for the purpose of software development.

The computer described in this article has the advantage of better I/O interfaces, the SoC has much more PCIe lanes, which allows the computer to have more and faster network interfaces.

If you want for an ARM computer to be a true high-throughput network server, then this one is the best choice. Nevertheless, for a true network server, a mini-PC with an Intel or AMD CPU will have a much, much better performance, at the same price or even at a lower price.

Using ARM is justifiable only for the purpose of software development, or if you want a smaller volume and a lower power consumption than achievable by a NUC-sized computer. For these purposes, one of the SBCs with Qualcomm QCM6490 is a better choice.

While a credit-card-sized SBC has only one Ethernet port, you can connect as many Ethernet interfaces as you desire to it (by using an USB hub and USB Ethernet interfaces), as long as the network throughput is not important and you just want to test some server software.

The Minisforum computer from the parent article has only 2 advantages for software development, the Armv9 ISA and being available with more memory, i.e. 32 GB or 64 GB, while the smaller ARM SBCs are available with 8, 12 or 16 GB.

[g947o]

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.

[Bluescreenbuddy]

Good luck finding a Mac mini in stock