this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024

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Minisforum MS-01 announced. 2x10g sfp+, 2x2.5gbe, pci slot, 3xm2 slots. 2xUSB4 40g. What do we think? (store.minisforum.com)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by MonkCanatella to c/[email protected]

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This looks like an amazing little box that can do almost anything. I'm wondering how people feel about the pricepoint

$679 early bird

$839 msrp

I'd love to grab one to use as a router/firewall, plus run any homelabbing containers I have on my NAS.

How's the value proposition stack up? Price looks great to me considering the cpu and connectivity it offers.

Edit: Additional info

serve the home sponsored video sponsored but still really really informative. There's a section near the end going through a tons of ideas of how to utilize the pci slot, including epanding nvme storage, external sas, extra networking etc. seems you can get over 40gb extra throughput from that port.

Forum thread for pci slot compatibility

all 34 comments

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

I think $700-800 for a server with SFP ports sounds like good value in terms of price relative to capability, but the absolute price and capability are probably overkill for a residential use-case (even a homelab one). It's a no-brainer if you're the Other Linus (the Tech Tips one) and have unlimited budget for all the latest electro-bling in your house, but if you're any sort of normal person you don't need 10 gig networking yet.

Does Minisforum make anything with 4 ethernet ports and a <100W TDP in the <$300 range? If so, get that instead.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

If this can handle routing 10g this is a great choice to use as a router. It's actually quite difficult to find a gateway that's around this price and ISPs (at least here in Canada, or my part of Canada) are offering internet over 1Gbps at the same price as gigabit, but their routers are awful.

[–] MonkCanatella 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I use 10g between my main pc and my nas. It's amazing. I use nvmes for triple a, intensive type games, and almost everything else gets installed on the nas. There's great use cases for 10g.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I have a similar setup. Even for hard drives and slower SSDs on a NAS, 10g has been beneficial. 2.5 gig would probably be sufficient for most of what I do, but even a few years ago when I bought my used mellanox sfp+ cards on eBay it was basically just as cheap to go full 10g (although 2.5 gig Ethernet ports are a bit more common to find built-in these days, so depending on your hardware, that might be a cheaper place to start). But even from a network congestion standpoint, having my own private link to my NAS is really nice.

[–] MonkCanatella 2 points 7 months ago

Also for media creation, using my main pc and nvme as a staging area and moving finished work and archived projects to my NAS is really helped along by the 10g connection I have. Easily saturates it with 6x7200rpm exos drives.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 7 months ago (3 children)

It says 2tb limit for SSDs which is odd? Maybe I am misunderstanding that.

I'm interested in hearing what folks who are interested had planned for this. It seems like it would be an overkill pfsense box. Could be a proxmox host for high IO vms but at rh same time kinda limited in terms of storage.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

I would guess that's not a hard limit. Maybe they decided to undersell it because many 4TB+ nvme drives are physically larger and/or require heat sinks, so they might not fit. I don't see any details on their web site though.

Given two drives with the same size, same heat output, and same interface, it shouldn't make a difference.

It's pretty common to see fake limits like that on spec sheets. I can definitely put more RAM in my motherboard than is officially supported since higher-capacity DIMMs are out in the same form factor now compared to when the mobo was released.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That is strange that they would have size limit for the SSD. Maybe it only supports single sided M.2 drives, but if that's the case, they should have just said it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Single-sided drives can be up to 4TB though, no?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

The Samsung pro I got is 4TB and single sided.

[–] MonkCanatella 1 points 7 months ago

the pci slot would be able to be used for external storage, like connecting to a nas or das. serve the home found you can add one of these though I don't think they tested that it can hit the max theoretical throughput of 96gbps.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

I want one. The only thing stopping me is current server has ecc

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Looks like it would eat power in a 24/7 setup but might be useful as an alternative to multiple systems.

[–] MonkCanatella 1 points 7 months ago

Hmm that's a good point. Though I think it shouldn't be too bad unless under heavy load all the time. I think the CPU is made for laptops. That said it'd definitely have to be doing more than just working as an opnsense box

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Note that the 2x10G is SFP+ not SFP. I was briefly confused. I have tons of SFP+ stuff but no SFP gear whatsoever

[–] MonkCanatella 3 points 7 months ago

I updated it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Got optic to SFP bridge from my ISP (only because I insisted on using my own router) , that was fed into SFP to RJ45 adapter that I have bought (via Amazon - apparantly the ISP's have lobbied to not import it here) and then connected my router.
That went somehow ok untill I switched ISPs , now the optic cable is fed into an ISP provided decryption module , paired specifically to the mac address of my router.

It's like the ISPs went onboard with upgrading to optic because they could excert more control over their customers.

[–] IronSage 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Looks amazing, but I really wanted amd so I could make a chimeraOS gaming console

[–] MonkCanatella 1 points 7 months ago

Someone installed chimera os already! Should be in YouTube search results

I do think they’ll release an amd version

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I'm wondering what all the Ethernet ports are good for in a home server setting? I have my box hooked up to the router but that's it. Seems like overkill to me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

"Being a router" is what they are good for! Even needed.

Edit to be more specific: two switches in each of the 10gbit and redundant uplink would be a setup I can see, depending on your line.

No overkill there :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

That makes sense.

[–] MonkCanatella 2 points 7 months ago

It could also be your router/firewall/server combo.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

WAN, LAN, management And one to grow on!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'd be curious to see how much cooling a SAS HBA would get in there. Looking at Broadcom's 8 external port offerings, the 9300-8e reports 14.5W typical power consumption, 9400-8e 9.5W, and 9500-8e only 6.1W. If you were considering one of these, definitely seems it'd be worth dropping the money on the newest model of HBA.

I'm definitely curious, would only personally need it to be NAS + Plex server for which either of the CPUs they're offering is a bit overkill, but it's nice that it fits a decent amount of RAM, and you're not forced to choose between adding storage or networking.

[–] MonkCanatella 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Great info thanks. Definitely agree, it'd be worth it for the lower power draw and lower heat output.

I'm a beginner homelabber with just a NAS and a repurposed alienware laptop. I'd be able to offload all containers I'm running onto the ms-01. Also 4k video can be really hard on the CPU so even if it's overkill for just 4k video, that headroom is of course helpful, especially if you're running multiple containers, or even if you have two or more people in the household streaming simultaneously

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
NAS	Network-Attached Storage
Plex	Brand of media server package
SATA	Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage
SSD	Solid State Drive mass storage

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

[Thread #428 for this sub, first seen 13th Jan 2024, 23:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

SFP: Small Factor Pluggable (I had to look it up)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

If I hadn't just recently bought a Minisforum B550 Pro I would probably jump on this.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Ideally I would like a SATA port for putting a small SSD for truenas boot drive, then I could do a raidz with three nvme drives.

But we can't have everything

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

When the site stops 504ing I'll give it a look see.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

I love Minisforum, I own 2 of them and I'm looking to buy a 3rd one. But damn their website is atrocious