I’m looking to replace a 2013 Mac Mini running Proxmox. Just curious if anyone has one of these or anyone heard of any negatives about them? Watched a bunch of videos and outside of a lack of 10G Ethernet, it seems to be well received!
I’m looking to replace a 2013 Mac Mini running Proxmox. Just curious if anyone has one of these or anyone heard of any negatives about them? Watched a bunch of videos and outside of a lack of 10G Ethernet, it seems to be well received!
Depends on what you need it for. If it’s just a NAS with a few containers, more than enough. I’ve not heard anything bad about the brand, and I know more than a few people with them.
Good call and good to hear you’ve not heard anything bad about the brand. Going to use it as a NAS, few VMs (Debian with Docker and NixOS dev env) and a Plex LXC (might move to Docker), but I aim to move my PiHole to it and want to try more distros in test environments. Biggest reason for an upgrade is the potential to transcode more content, the Mini struggles (fine on Direct Play) and also the NIC is flakey so it’s using a USB adapter right now. I probably borked it replacing the HDD with a SSD, it was a nightmare to open. Not sure if I’m ready to pull the trigger, but if my hardware died, I’d maybe go this route!
Looking through some of the notes there, some things to consider:
The biggest question mark there is kernel driver compatibility if you’re running a Linux distro. I’d check around. There are also other vendors with similar form factors and price that DO have hot swappable drives. Maybe something to consider.
It’s a laptop chip, and a 15w one at that so I wouldn’t exactly say that’s high-power.
Eh, at it’s minimum configuration. I run two 5500u in similar setups that are almost always at 30W+ with pstate in its epp setup. In the scheme of things, not that much I suppose, but I run a couple little n100’s as well that almost max out at 15W, and my Synology units have these crappy Marvell chips that use less than 5W. The 5500’s are vastly more capable, but y’know…it’s all subjective to the user.
You know, I think I did the thing I always do and forget how bad the idle power for Ryzen cpus are due to how they’re architected.
Like, my home server is a 10850k, which is a CPU known for using 200+w… except that, of course, at idle/normal background loads it’s sitting at more like 8-15w. I did some tweaking to tell it to both respect it’s TDP and also adjusting turbo boost to uh, don’t, but still: it’s shockingly efficient after fiddling.
I wouldn’t have expected a 5500u to sit at 30w under normal loads, but I suppose that depends on the load?
Well it’s an APU, so it’s running pretty much everything. Running any normal network services pretty much means it’s in use.
In the context of having a normal light bulb back in the day on 24/7, it’s still more efficient, but there are other options out there than use much less power is all I was saying. If you’re heavily transcoding, I don’t think it matters at all.
Right, but you’re pulling way more power than the homeserver I’m running is, and at 10-15w it’s doing frigate + openvino based (on the igpu) identification on 4 cameras, usually 2 jellyfin streams at any given time, 4 VMs, home assistant, and ~80 other containers plus a couple of on-host services for NAS duties (smb, nfs, ftp, afp, nginx, etc.)
I was just surprised that a Ryzen U-series chip would be worse re. power usage.
Thanks for the heads up…
Most of the videos I’ve seen online are using Proxmox which is my goal. Just trying to decide if $400 before tax without any memory or storage is a good deal or if I should just build a box.
Critical…technically no. Shutting down your NAS, putting in a replacement, and waiting for the disk array to come back online is trade-off.
Nothing wrong with building a box. You probably won’t be able to build something in this form factor and features though.