I understand this could be posted in a hardware forum or I could use a stats comparison tool (and I’ve poked around a fair bit as is), but I’m curious, specifically from the self-hosted, roll-your-own NAS perspective, does the Minisforum n5 Pro seem like a decent machine for self-hosting? Any impressions? What percebtage of this is the marketing hype-train and what percentage would still be good if it shipped unbranded in a cardboard box. What would you expect this to cost?
https://www.minisforum.com/pages/n5_pro
Currently I’m running one of the DS-Series Synology NAS but I want to remove the Synology dependency because I don’t fully trust them to deliver and not remove features. I would rather give the TrueNaAS thing a try (or something in that direction) now so I’m prepared to jump ship when I need to. I’m lucky enough to be able to buy a decent NAS and hang onto it for a while, but I want to come in below the point where an extra $100 doesn’t really get me much anymore.
I am specifically interested in the hardware because I don’t plan to use the default OS.
Tbh, as someone who just built their own system I am a little bit angry that they didn’t announce it a few months earlier - I would have waited a bit longer then to see their pricing.
The specs are solid for a “Proxmox NAS with ZFS and containers”. For a regular NAS it’s oversized,but we all know that. The trend towards integrated devices is there and I went down that way as well.(And if you can actually install a different OS of course)
Anyway: If they can deliver what they promise it might be one of the most interesting systems - it doesn’t have many of the issues the Ugreens have (lack of ECC,etc.) and if they manage to deliver… it’s pushing into a space a lot of prosumers and small companies are that is currently only covered by self builds or spending much more money than necessary.
I read their webpage. They advertised having ECC and using AI 9 HX 370. Are they fake advertising about ECC? AMD explicitly listed ECC unsupported on the page of AI 9 HX 370.
They list the AI 9 Hx Pro 370 which does support ECC.
Looks like the Ryzen Pro line supports it… but the Ryzen line does not.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen/ai-300-series/amd-ryzen-ai-9-hx-370.html
Not sure what it would cost, but it would likely cost double just buying a ODROID H4+ and making your own NAS
https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-h4-plus/Depends on your personal use case of course but for comparison I have a (relatively) piddly Intel N305 processor mini PC with 16GB of memory and currently run a 25-30 container load, including Plex and a torrent server. My setup currently idles at around 20% CPU and 25% memory utilisation, so I can quite confidently say the linked N5 ought to give more than enough headroom to handle a typical homelab/self hosted load.
I have one of those minisforum amd hx 370 (the x1 ai pro). Those are very powerful awesome hardware. I use the mini pc as a work computer for 3D and dev on OpenSuse and lightweight low power gaming machine (like long haul Xplane12 flight during the night).
Everything is well made and beautifully built.
As for this NAS version, if money is not an issue I wouldn’t hesitate. 10Gbs, tons of ram, Amd hx 370. It sure is overkill for a NAS, it’s more tailored for a very beefy docker server and/or virtualization station while being a multimedia NAS at the same time.
I built my own synology replacement with second hand itx parts in a jonsbo n3 case, but if I hadn’t or just had plenty of cash to spare, I would definitely go for a server like this one (my use case is NAS + docker + virtualization + eventual game server all in one).
As a side note, the “AI” part is just communication for now, those chips are not yet supported for local LLM on Linux (Windows only atm), they need ROCm support for iGPU RDNA 3.5 and the new AMD NPU integration into those local frameworks (llama.ccp etc).
It will come for sure, it’s just not ready yet.
I hate to say this but it’s gonna be expensive obviously compared to what you can get from China. Just look at the CPU - for a NAS, it’s a huge overkill. Aoostar WTR Pro looks identical for NAS storage needs and costs around 300 euros on AliExpress. I don’t see this thing being priced any lower than that
This seems more like a server with a built-in NAS, but i agree it’s probably way overkill for most, though it seems like an awesome product at first glance. It’s like they took every component and cranked it up to 11. I wish we saw more of this in the consumer electronics segment and less “let’s strip or nerf everything we possibly can before sales tank. Our margins are so great this quarter!”
It is complete overkill for most home server tasks but I would look to run something like this for next 10 years at least so I can see it making sense if you cost it out like that.
