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!
Looks like it’s a i226-v nic, which uh, has a reputation for being kinda shit.
It’s not a universal problem, but it’s probably something to keep in mind.
Thanks for the heads up, my Mini’s NIC is totally F’d so I’m using a USB adapter, I’d like to avoid having to do that again, but the WTR Pro does have 2 RJ45 Ethernet ports which is better than the Mini has.
I don’t really think it’s necessarily a deal breaker, but it’s caused a lot of people a lot of nagging little issues and might be worth making sure you’re not going to run into anything.
I’m super stoked at the appearance of the nas appliance form factor with hardware that’s got performance that isn’t rotten potato level.
Next rebuild I do is certainly going to be one of these things, though that’s probably a billion years away since my current nas is hilariously overpowered.
If it is cheap go for it. However, if it is the same cost as building your own then skip it as that’s not even name brand hardware.
You can get a small form factor motherboard and a cheap case for not to much money.
It’s $400 before tax with no SSD or RAM, so I’d need to get SSD, RAM and HDDs. What’s your thoughts on the specs at that cost? As the other comments point out, its an AM4, so it might make more sense to build something instead!
That’s a little steep but not as bad as I was thinking. If you are looking for the best bang for buck go with a old enterprise workstation off of eBay. They have limitations but cost wise that’s the best in my experience.
For building a new system I would go for a cost effective motherboard and CPU and then get (or build) a NAS case. You don’t need a lot of horse power from the sounds of it anyway. Go for more cores and ram but be mindful of ram speeds.
My problem is this is an AM4 system using DDR4 memory… already outdated.
Alternatively: cheap second hand RAM.
That’s actually a good call. Does it make more sense for me to look for a AM5 system and future proof with DDR5?
It does, as DDR5 comes with rudimentary ECC protection builtin.
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:
- Win11 is pre installed (probably baked into the price)
- Drive bays are note hot swappable
- It’s Ryzen 7, so definitely not a low power device
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.
Ryzen 7, so definitely not a low power
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…
- I would go with no RAM and no SSD, install something I buy myself
- Noticed that and it was brought up in a video, is it critical for a home server to have hot swappable drives?
- I’m sure the Mac Mini is probably using over 15W right now, but I don’t know for certain. Any good ways to test outside of buying some hardware?
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.
I have the WTR R7 (N100 model 2 bay) and I can’t really complain. It was fairly cheap and it does what it says it does. Power draw with 2 2.5" SSD’s is about 11W average, but the RYzen one will be more.
I’ve got Intel N100 version and so far it works pretty good with Proxmox and Ubuntu guest with full SATA controller passthru and ZFS. Only using it for few days though.
